National Defence committee  Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Chairman. I will do my utmost to be as succinct as James was. I would like to talk about the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, because it's a dimension of NATO membership that has, obviously, from the name, a very specific benefit to parliamentarians,

National Defence committee  You've been reading my bio. I actually started my professional life, my academic life, in physics, so I love the technology stuff, basically. The fundamental shift, of course, is that since NATO was founded, there has been the rise of the IT revolution, which has utterly transf

National Defence committee  Okay.

National Defence committee  I wish I knew the answer. It's staggering, for example, that the B-52 will have gone from the drawing board to being out of service in 80 years. It's absolutely astonishing, with some weapons systems, how long they're in service. Of course, when you have a rate of innovation in I

National Defence committee  I don't know about the Canadian officers. One of the things that has changed the threat environment is the unexpected rate of progress in North Korea, where they seem to have acquired probably some Russian design work that has really enabled them to make huge progress with miss

National Defence committee  Historically, we have followed disarmament negotiations very closely. That includes everything from agreements to ban land mines to regulation of certain non-lethal weapons, for example, blinding weapons. We have also looked at conventional forces limitations, and we followed all

National Defence committee  Arms control isn't necessarily the best way of dealing with it. Right now, I'm afraid it's all about enhanced deterrence and responding to perceived threats. Arms control, is not, if you like, the first tool in the box right now for dealing with that.

National Defence committee  I agree. For example, you're looking at the Russian view—certainly newspeak—of de-escalating conflict through the use of nuclear weapons. When you're dealing with somebody who's talking in those terms, arms control is frankly a bit more distant than we would all like it to be. Ev

National Defence committee  Yes. The NATO Parliamentary Assembly was the first international organization to formally sanction the Russians for their actions in Crimea and then, subsequently, Donbass. It took us all a bit by surprise, because although we expected sanctions to be imposed, Russia, which was t

National Defence committee  Yes, very much so. We had three bilateral groups, if you like: one with Russia, one with Ukraine—which was founded at the same time—and one with Georgia, which was founded, of course, after Russia occupied Abkhazia and South Ossetia. We also have a group that is multilateral, whi

National Defence committee  Are we on the record?

National Defence committee  If we went out for a beer....

National Defence committee  Gabor Iklódy was excellent. He's now with the EU, incidentally. I think he voiced a sense of it, something that is still voiced frequently. Discussions within NATO itself do tend to be focused, for all sorts of reasons, on the very specific security agenda. It's getting much bett

National Defence committee  I think there was big concern about NATO enlargement. It was, of course, how much more difficult it would be to achieve consensus. Simply, the more people you add, the more difficult consensus is to achieve. People on the inside tell me that has not been the case. They still fin

National Defence committee  Thank you very much. We do co-operate as much as we possibly can with other inter-parliamentary organizations. We find that, simply because our agenda is so heavy, more of them come to us than we can possibly go to. We have regular participation from the Parliamentary Assembly o