National Defence committee  Thank you very much, Chair. Thank you to the committee for the invitation to address you. Thank you also, Chair, for promoting both Adam and me to the status of doctor. I think we must be honest and admit we are both actually mere misters.

National Defence committee  I would like to focus my remarks on three issues, building on Adam's statement. I will look at the strategic effect of current UN peace operations, peacekeeping's place in Canada's broader strategic relationships and the need for strategic innovation in UN operations. To turn fi

National Defence committee  I do not think that Canada suffers from a shortage of researchers focusing on peacekeeping. You generate quite a lot of them. However, I think it is true to say that the Pearson centre, like other centres in Sweden and Germany, played an important role in linking research to poli

National Defence committee  I would merely point out that although the U.S. has attempted to impose very severe cuts on the peacekeeping budget in the last two years, in fact, American officials have been willing to compromise on this issue. Despite the overall anti-multilateral rhetoric of this administrat

National Defence committee  It's worth being honest that the Security Council often throws peacekeeping missions at crises without a completely clear strategy, and it is often incumbent on UN officials on the ground to work out what is possible once they are deployed. In the Central African Republic, or ind

National Defence committee  Yes.

National Defence committee  Artificial intelligence also presents a problem to me because I am a deeply untechnical person, so this is a generalist's comment. We are seeing developments in terms of artificial intelligence, in terms of cyberwarfare, that the UN and other multinational institutions do not h

National Defence committee  I think the UN is the natural framework for multilateral agreements around artificial intelligence and other forms of technology. What is interesting is that my colleagues who work on this here say that companies in Silicon Valley, companies developing new forms of technology, ar

National Defence committee  I believe it does. Although MINUSMA has many challenges, it is worth saying that it is a singular improvement over the African force that was briefly there beforehand. That is also true in the Central African Republic, if you compare the UN and African force. I think it is worth

National Defence committee  The challenges vary case by case, but in Mali, clearly the primary threats to the peacekeeping force come from asymmetric attacks carried out by non-state armed groups, including al Qaeda in the Maghreb. What we have seen in fact is that the western nations in Mali have been able

National Defence committee  On your question concerning adaptation, I think the UN is a more adaptive organization than we often recognize. Especially on the issue of intelligence, which five years ago was really a taboo subject, we've seen huge progress. A wide range of states are now strongly supporting U

National Defence committee  I wish I didn't write stuff that people then read.

National Defence committee  That was not in the context of peacekeeping. What I was arguing was that you have a lot of very fancy talk about the evolution of global governance today. I was emphasizing that the core of the UN remains the Security Council, and the core task of the Security Council is in fact

National Defence committee  There is a very real risk that if relations with Russia deteriorate further, the Security Council will become more blocked. However, it is worth noting that, for Russia, the seat on the Security Council is a standing source of prestige and Moscow does not want the organization to

National Defence committee  The first thing I would say is that, clearly, there is a difference between comparing NATO and UN missions for Canada, but we're also talking about comparing UN and African Union missions, for example, in Africa. I think the development of the African Union peace and security ar