National Defence committee  I'll do an advertisement. Late last year, colleagues at my centre produced this little booklet called Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. It's a study of 15 reports of committees of the House, committees of the Senate, academia, and non-governmental organizations on national defence issues. We went to sources for access to information and received 3,500 pages of responses to these studies, responses from inside National Defence Headquarters.

National Defence committee  I will leave this with—

National Defence committee  I'll leave it with the clerk. There's a website where you can download it...or you can't download it, but you can read the whole report. That's my offering to democracy this afternoon.

National Defence committee  Perhaps you want to hire some officials from the defence department to talk to your people in the police department. It's a complex problem, but it's not unusual to police or to business people. People cost a lot of money. We've done studies and we referred to the contest between the present force and the future force--the armed force, obviously.

National Defence committee  Not to be overly dramatic, but when somebody's shooting at you, you don't want to be in an organization that does more with less. In military operations--flying airplanes through the dark, and sailing ships in the Arctic, at sea and so on--the tendency is to try to have as much capability as you possibly can.

National Defence committee  You open up academics to argue with each other, but my friend Joel asked what was in it for Latin Americans if Canada were to take a greater role. I could ask the same question about east Europeans and others if Canada were to take a greater role in NATO. To answer the first question, I have experience with Latin Americans and have worked with the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies in Washington over the last number of years.

National Defence committee  I have read the report and talked to Andy Leslie. I have known him for a long time. He was given a mission by the minister to think outside the box, as people like to say these days, and he did that. He came up with a number of models for reorganizing the defence establishment, and that's where these cuts that could be made here and there and everywhere come from.

National Defence committee  About halfway through the project, as I understand it, the deputy minister of the Department of National Defence decided that his part of the team would leave the process and General Leslie carried on with the remainder of the military team. So it's not surprising in these kinds of things, when you start to suggest big complicated changes to complex organizations, that there's going to be strife.

National Defence committee  Yes. It's an important impediment to rallying Canadian support for so-called NATO missions, and so on, when the other guys refuse to play completely in the program. It's an alliance problem. This stems from--not to lecture too much--article 5 of the treaty that people half-quote a lot of times.

National Defence committee  Mostly, it's at least going to be 5% and probably 10%. We don't know, but that's what's being batted around. Officials I've talked to obviously don't talk about what's going to happen, and maybe they don't know, but that's where their minds are lurking, so to speak. You have to understand, and perhaps do, that 50% of the defence budget goes to wages for military people and for public servants; 20% more goes to the capital program to buy stuff for the future force—ships, airplanes, and all that procurement stuff.

National Defence committee  I'm not sure—maybe I'm out of date—that cyber-defence is a Canadian Forces responsibility. Again, we need to get our definitions straight. There's a thing called national defence policy. There's another thing called national security policy. That's where there is a crossover. I don't think we have an adequately defined national security policy.

National Defence committee  I'll just tidy up a few things. GDP as a measure of defence is not a very useful measure. What it does is suggest to people what the national effort will be. It's a measure of national effort. Out of 100% of our GDP, the effort we're willing to put forward is less than 2%. That's all it means.

National Defence committee  Is there time for a response?

National Defence committee  That's always difficult for me. What we're being forced into is a situation where defence capabilities are falling, the amount of capability you get for a dollar is falling, and some governments eventually are going to have to make a choice whether we're going to be a worldwide nation, we're going to be a continental nation, or we're going to be perhaps an army or a navy or an air force, but not all of them.

National Defence committee  That's absolutely the problem. The population that we draw recruits from now is diminishing, so we're going to need some other model for recruitment. Frankly, I don't know what it is. Maybe somebody does, but I don't.