National Defence committee  What has changed in peacekeeping since traditional peacekeeping is the expansion of mandates, which means that you need all kinds of people who have skills in those areas. If you're dealing with nation-building or security sector reform, you not only need to reform the military and the police but to deal with the courts.

National Defence committee  We need to strengthen the United Nations in New York. It expanded fivefold from the heady days of the early 1990s with DPKO, now the Department of Field Support, but there is a need for much more support. I view New York as being understaffed, under-resourced, underfinanced. I worked there for the last year, and there are so many initiatives that people would love to do, but they just don't have the resources and personnel to do them.

National Defence committee  The Canadian government has been taking so much time thinking about how it might contribute and not acting, not doing it. My view is that if you started acting in small steps, you'd be able to find new openings to do larger ones. We have to apply for some of the military posts in New York as well.

National Defence committee  I think that the UN also needs Canadian leaders, like Ms. McAskie. With regard to reforms, there is a lack of capacity in a number of areas. I work in technology in peacekeeping, and I hope that Canada will be able to help. There is a conference coming up in Berlin in three weeks, and I hope that Canada will send a representative.

National Defence committee  Mali is not Afghanistan. It's not a war zone. MINUSMA is not a counterterrorism mission. There is some peace to keep. There is a peace process that should be upheld. There are child soldiers who need to be rescued. What we need are the types of skills we saw from the Toronto police officer on Friday, whereby we can go into situations and de-escalate them.

National Defence committee  It is.

National Defence committee  Thank you. I'm very happy to be part of this majority-women panel. Thank you very much for allowing me to share my thoughts on UN peacekeeping or, using the term I prefer, UN peace operations, of which peacekeeping is a part. Peace operations are of importance to me as an operational academic because they are of great importance to Canada, to the people in the conflict areas, and to the United Nations, our world organization.

National Defence committee  Well, I think the Bush administration had to swallow its words when it had to do major nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. It just goes to show how you can't take military action without some building afterwards in the continuum that you mentioned. This is a role in which the U.S. has not proven particularly effective.

National Defence committee  We need more peacekeeping training centres. There have been so many since the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre was founded, but there needs to be specialization, for instance, in nation-building. How exactly do you do that? The Security Council is now thinking about sequenced mandates.

National Defence committee  I think that NATO has a history of being a macho organization that prides itself on the ability to use force and on being capable of using force. It takes a cultural shift from that to see that integrating women will still keep you an effective fighting force and actually increase your capacity to do many other things, including nation-building.

National Defence committee  Yes, but I think we should be very judicious in the choice of armaments. We don't want them to fall into the wrong hands; they have to be provided in a very professional fashion, with proper command and control. I am in favour, though, of starting to provide some weapons to Ukraine.

National Defence committee  Speaking about drones, it's an excellent area in which the western countries can help Ukraine get better situational awareness of what's happening. The OSCE has flown drones as part of its mission in Ukraine but has found that they've been hijacked or been shot at and that sort of thing.

National Defence committee  It was in Tallinn in 2008, a few years ago.

National Defence committee  We could always do more, because the cyber domain is an emerging domain. It's hard to catch up with the challenges, and each piece of breaking news about what the Russians have been doing relating to the U.S. election means that we all the more have to put a huge effort into trying to prevent such activities; it's a form of self-defence.

National Defence committee  Do you mean threats besides cyber and—