National Defence committee  That's very good. There are a lot of benefits there.

National Defence committee  To follow your political point, Admiral, when I went down to look at the Irving shipyard and saw the coastal yard, I thought it was amazing. They are looking almost like the Hyundai yard, which I saw in Korea. It is very modern. I'm sure they will be capable of doing surface ships when the time comes, and the thing about it that I think Canadians don't understand—and they showed me the graphs of the x billions—is that more money is being spent in Ontario on that ship than in Halifax, but nobody in Ontario knows that.

National Defence committee  I'm sorry, I can't give you a magic bullet on the procurement thing. It's the weakest link in the chain of the whole of our defence posture, because as the admiral has said, if we don't have the equipment, we don't have the capacity to deliver anything. When we were doing the review, I don't know if you've spoken to Admiral Murray, but he heads up a committee and he's pretty strong on saying that the procurement on the average side has been much improved and much streamlined.

National Defence committee  The facts are what missile defence can do. It can stop one or two missiles, and I'm not even convinced that the Israeli Iron Dome was as successful as they said it was. Nobody really knows. This is still at a highly developmental stage which is one of the reasons, maybe going back to the original question about why we didn't go in at the time, was that nobody was sure it was going to work.

National Defence committee  That's quite possible but frankly I think it would be very naive to think that the Russians and the Chinese aren't themselves working on a ballistic defence missile system at this particular time. I imagine they're into this big time. We might wake up one day and discover they're the ones with the perfect ballistic missile defence, and we've been sitting here twiddling our thumbs.

National Defence committee  I appreciate that. I'm not in favour of an arms race. I do think this is discrete enough at this particular time with an actual threat that we can see in the Korean issue. It is one that we should be conscious of. That's what I would urge you to consider.

National Defence committee  Yes, absolutely.

National Defence committee  Foreign policy, like national defence, has a greater capacity to have non-partisan, all-party support for it. When I was chairman of the foreign affairs committee, we had all-party support for every single report we produced, and there's a better opportunity for that in defence and security and foreign affairs.

National Defence committee  Thank you.

National Defence committee  Don't take too much, Viktor Orbán may not want to be your model.

National Defence committee  This was much used against me in my life.

National Defence committee  Well, the rationale was very much political. There was not a lot of support for BMD. I'll be very frank, when President Bush came to Ottawa, and made a public statement saying we should get on board or else, Canadians got their backs up and any chance of us getting it through at that time was...I told President Bush at the time, when I saw him in Halifax, “Well, thanks a lot for burying me and BMD”, because I was the one who was carrying the missile flag, if you like, in the Liberal caucus, on behalf of the Prime Minister.

National Defence committee  It is a big challenge. To go back to what Admiral Davidson said, Canadians tend to be security takers rather than providers. That is, to some extent, a natural feature of the fact we live beside the largest single military power in the history of the world which has provided our security for us.

National Defence committee  You've done it at the Canadian.... The CIC that you have in Victoria has had several debates on it, but it tends to be amongst the cognoscenti. It's all the folks who are already in agreement who come. The admirals and retired diplomats come and they say this is a problem. Nobody else is listening.

National Defence committee  I think, it was Talleyrand who said, “Geography determines diplomacy.” Geography determines diplomacy, and Turkey is in the place where it is. Turkey is adjacent to Iran. Is it any wonder that the Turks and the Iranians were doing business and doing things that the Americans didn't like?