National Defence committee  I didn't use to worry particularly about the cyber threat from al-Qaeda's affiliates or from rogue nations such as North Korea. But over the last few years a very important development has occurred in the cyber realm, and that is the growth in black market sales of zero day exploits and other kinds of cyber-weapons that enable potential adversaries who never would have had the resources on their own to develop sophisticated cyber-weapons to buy them, no questions asked.

National Defence committee  Attribution for these attacks is notoriously difficult. Hackers operating on behalf of states, grey areas in terms of difficulty in figuring out attribution as to who exactly has launched an attack, is a problem that characterizes the cyber realm. I'm all about understanding that the threat is going to become more severe and that we need to build protections against these threats.

National Defence committee  I do not. I think maritime collaboration is very strong. The recent exercise of the marine event response protocol—we had a big binational exercise, a potential terrorist threat coming from the maritime realm—shows how deep this collaboration already is. Clearly, Canada and the United States are going to make their respective decisions on rules for the use of force, the degree to which armaments and other capabilities are going to be provided to their coast guard, but as each nation makes its own sovereign decision, a terrific foundation for collaboration exists, and it's getting stronger every day.

National Defence committee  The United States is a little short of icebreakers; we have our own capability gaps. This is precisely why, on both a formal and an informal basis, I recommend that dialogue continue on how we can be in mutual support. In areas in which one nation lacks capabilities and another has strengths in that regard, let's figure out who can support whom and build a system that works better for both of us.

National Defence committee  I always start with NORAD, that being the crown jewel of U.S.-Canadian defence collaboration and indeed the gold standard for defence collaboration around the world. There are opportunities in the maritime awareness and warning realm to tackle this question of understanding which ships of interest are transiting the Arctic in order to better share information and to sustain dialogue again on how we're going to invest at a time of terrific pressures on our respective defence budgets in building capability where it is short today.

National Defence committee  Yes.

National Defence committee  Exactly. That would be a very sensible approach. Let's agree on the nature of the challenge and what it's really going to take to build preparedness for the risk that an oil spill will occur.

National Defence committee  I think the institutional framework that we need is exactly what we have today. I'm not advocating for the creation of new organizations, but the repurposing of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence towards these emerging challenges has been enormously helpful. I would say that's also true of the mutual assistance agreements that already exist between utilities in Canada and the United States.

National Defence committee  As General Jacoby may have told you when you went to NORTHCOM, the United States has plans in place to strengthen our own ballistic missile defence against the emerging threat from North Korea and potentially from other nations as well. So the United States has a plan in place that it's executing.

National Defence committee  Yes, and there is now an agreement in the Arctic Council on how to respond to a disaster of the sort we've been discussing. But building the actual response capabilities so we can remediate the spill when it happens, that's the challenge that remains.

National Defence committee  I think that sharing needs to increase. And let me say also that an important step occurred a couple of weeks ago when the Minister of National Defence of Canada, Secretary Hagel, the minister of defence of Mexico, and the head of the Mexican navy got together and agreed to collaborate on cyber-security.

National Defence committee  Yes, it would be a pleasure. Again, the Department of Defense was in support of the Department of Homeland Security, which had primary responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon response, and the Department of Energy, and other federal departments. But only the Department of the Navy had the large-scale assets for the skimmer boats, for example, to suck up the water off the surface of the ocean.

National Defence committee  The governments of Canada and the United States are not waiting. They're engaging in intensive dialogue about how to meet these challenges today. I wanted to feature them with you also because it's such an important opportunity for this collaborative approach to investment that we were discussing before.

National Defence committee  Precisely.

National Defence committee  There are areas of vulnerability, but also enormous advantages. Let me speak about the advantages first. We saw in hurricane Sandy very strong evidence that the kind of connectivity that you're describing between meters and the grid operators can help speed the restoration of power in very important ways, because all of a sudden the grid operators have a map of which households are missing power and which are up and running.