National Defence committee  Mr. Chair, members of the committee, I want to thank you, as well as the clerk, for the opportunity to appear before you. The issues before your committee are very important to the Canadian Forces and to Canada's international policy. The governments of Paul Martin and Stephen Harper have invested several billion dollars in national defence and in our Canadian Forces.

National Defence committee  In theory, yes, the government should come out with a foreign policy before it announces its defence policy. That said, I would like to make two points. First, a defence policy is not solely the by-product of a foreign policy. More importantly, it is also the reflection of a country's national security policy.

National Defence committee  I believe that's actually part of the problem. I believe that should the Canadian Forces be deployed after 2011 in a major international operation, and simultaneously a major internal crisis erupts, whether it be environmental consequence management or some other situation where a major Canadian Forces commitment was required instantaneously, and the Canadian Forces were not capable of responding to that in a manner that Canadians expected, the government would be very hard-pressed to explain why that is.

National Defence committee  I would agree with you that a contribution for defence is important. On the other hand, again, stressing the point, what kind of answer would a government give to Canadians if a major crisis or a natural disaster...? We can imagine, for instance, just looking at what's happening off the gulf coast currently in the United States, that if the forces were not in a position to assist coastal communities in Canada in a sufficient manner, and the government's response was that we have international obligations elsewhere, that would not ring very well with Canadians.

National Defence committee  No, that's not what I'm suggesting. What I'm suggesting is--

National Defence committee  --that we realize that a certain level of our forces are required to be kept in Canada for these types of operations. If we take your government's “Canada First” policy seriously, and if that is going to be the real priority of this government, and if we are to take it at its word, then that should be what the policy actually enacts.

National Defence committee  It wouldn't be very high. I would be very loath to deploy the forces without a significant commitment from the international community, and in particular from our larger allies, to those types of missions. Getting back to this point, I think it's fair to say that we may not have had a crystal ball in 2005 when deciding to go to Kandahar.

National Defence committee  I think you're skewing a little bit what I'm trying to get at here. To be frank, I'm not saying that we have to have 100% of the country behind a mission. What I'm simply arguing, on the last point, is that when it comes to national unity, we should not engage in missions that divide the country deeply, either along linguistic lines or regional lines.

National Defence committee  I believe the two major national interests of Canada are our way of life both in terms of values and in terms of our economic prosperity. Can we show a direct link between many of the international operations we've engaged in, in the past, and those values and interests? Yes, we can.

National Defence committee  Yes. I am suggesting that this is one lesson we can learn from Kandahar in particular; that we did not take full account of the regional dynamic when initially committing to Kandahar. We did not consider whether our largest partner in that mission was fully committed to the mission in 2005, given that it was also deployed to another major conflict in the region.

National Defence committee  I would propose that even a peacekeeping deployment to certain areas of the Middle East—namely, around Israel or Lebanon or any of these other countries, should that come up—might sow some significant divisions in our society about where our commitments lie, and particularly if we don't maintain strict neutrality, which has been something we've abandoned over a certain number of years.

National Defence committee  I would reiterate these basic points: natural disasters and consequence management; critical infrastructure protection as well, which needs to be addressed far more effectively; cyber-security; and search and rescue, which is something that keeps getting delayed and delayed. It has now been delayed by two subsequent governments.

National Defence committee  First let me provide a little bit of context, and I'll be quick about this. This is certainly not a new idea. In the United States, prior to 2001, they had something called the Weinberger doctrine, and it later became the Powell doctrine, which was that you had to go in with a certain amount of capability and a certain amount of size and you had to know what your objectives were before going in.

National Defence committee  I'm not enthusiastic about that. Simply put, unless we know going into an operation that our ABCA allies--Americans, British, or Australians--are willing to put in a significant amount of force, then I think it's a mission that Canada should look at with a great deal of hesitation.

National Defence committee  It is going to become extremely difficult to mount even these types of operations in the future, as we're seeing--and as you are all living--with the current detainee issue. The fact remains that the options Canada had going into Afghanistan and dealing with those detainees were very limited.