National Defence committee  The ultimate threat is that the industrial control systems that help operate the electric power system will be physically damaged. We saw examples of how this can happen in the Aurora test conducted at the Idaho National Laboratory. It is possible that physical effects can be created by computer attacks.

National Defence committee  The opportunities to diversify sources of energy and do so in a way that strengthens national security are very important. The challenge, as you know, with some forms of renewable energy—solar, for example—is that it's difficult to store electricity. It's very inefficient, very expensive to do so on a large scale.

National Defence committee  Public Safety Canada and the Department of Homeland Security have very strong collaboration under way on this issue. Bringing in industry, understanding what kinds of requests for assistance might come from industry to government, these kinds of issues now are the focus of intense dialogue today.

National Defence committee  To me a NORAD after Next and the strategic review that's going to go forward needs to address what deeper collaboration is possible in the maritime realm, building on the maritime warning mission. What kind of collaboration is going to be possible to build on the foundations that now exist already in the civil assistance plan?

National Defence committee  Canadian Coast Guard can make very important contributions. There is the shiprider program, with which you may be familiar, where U.S. personnel are stationed on Canadian Coast Guard ships and Canadian Coast Guard personnel are stationed on U.S. Coast Guard ships. We can have a binational law enforcement effort on the high seas, on the maritime approaches to the United States.

National Defence committee  Yes, absolutely. Defence collaboration with Mexico is already improving and needs to be sustained. Let me be clear: the U.S. defence relationship with Canada is unique in the world and uniquely valuable to the United States. Bringing Mexico into North American security, beginning to develop a perimeter approach to North American security, is going to be a work in progress, but very much labour that's worthwhile.

National Defence committee  I'll be candid. I do believe there is a risk that we'll take for granted the extraordinary defence collaboration between the United States and Canada. I believe that we need to continue to highlight the value to both nations of this collaboration. Each nation is sovereign. Each nation is going to make its own decisions in terms of what it needs in order to secure its own nation.

National Defence committee  The risk is significant. Let me add that the risk of insider threats is growing. I had the honour of co-chairing the Independent Review of the Washington Navy Yard Shooting. Both for kinetic attack and cyber-attack, there's a risk that as we build our perimeter security more effectively, as we defend our networks on the outside, adversaries are going to have stronger incentives to attack from within.

National Defence committee  There is a missing piece wherein Canadian leadership is going to be very important. Based on the harsh lessons learned from disaster response in Haiti, the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas launched an initiative, with Canada playing a vital role, to apply the lessons learned, so that the next time a catastrophe strikes in the western hemisphere we have arrangements in place to already know which nations can provide specific kinds of capabilities; so that instead of making things up under duress, instead of all rushing to the site in an uncoordinated fashion, we can know in advance which nation can provide the most important capabilities.

National Defence committee  It's not fixed yet. In November, the next meeting of the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas will occur in Peru. Canada has played an extremely valuable role in the CDMA discussions, and it is going to be absolutely vital for Canada to continue to provide this kind of leadership going forward.

National Defence committee  The Department of Defense is building much more detailed plans for catastrophes than it has had in the past. One of the lessons from Sandy is that planning for specific scenarios, catastrophic natural or man-made hazards, hasn't been adequate in the past. We were good in Sandy, but we need to scale that kind of planning up, always with the Department of Defense being in support of civil authorities.

National Defence committee  The Army Corps of Engineers is especially valuable for supporting civil authorities for emergency construction operations, but especially in our system in providing those backup power generators that proved so important, and in dewatering tunnels—a whole range of challenging operations that we saw in hurricane Sandy.

National Defence committee  The expectation now is that every U.S. defence installation commander has immediate response authority. That is the ability to immediately deploy forces at the request of civilian authorities right out of the gate to immediately save lives.

National Defence committee  Threats in the Arctic are not primarily military. Maintaining the Arctic as a zone of peace is very important and an opportunity for collaboration between the United States and Canada. There are threats in the Arctic, but they're not military. My personal view is that the most severe, the most imminent threat is that a ship loaded with petroleum products is going to hit an unmarked shoal off the coast of Canada or Alaska and that we are going to very quickly discover that our nations are not fully prepared to conduct the kinds of disaster response operations or conduct the environmental cleanup operations that will be absolutely essential to limit damage in such a scenario.

National Defence committee  Thank you. I don't know enough about the ice storms in order to make a judgment of whether or not there could have been opportunities to respond more effectively. Let me say that in Halifax today that is one of the scenarios that's being addressed, the rise of severe weather hazards and what can be done to invest against them to strengthen good resilience.