Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I will give my presentation in English, but feel free to ask me questions in the official language of your choice. Scholarly thinking on environmental security and the role of the military in the American and Canadian Arctic has identified vulnerab

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  My friend and colleague, Robert Huebert, who you probably know, will be able to provide you with a much more detailed breakdown than I'll be able to, but certainly I would say one of the challenges in the north is that Russia, as an adversary, currently has the initiative. We nee

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Russia has made significant investments in the north. It appears that for now Russia is done with the investments they have provided, in particular in resuscitating significant numbers of Soviet capabilities and installations, as well as a more significant forward deployment of r

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  There is considerable concern about China's resource exploitation—fishing resource exploitation and other potential natural resource exploitation—in international waters in the north. As we know, these Arctic and Antarctic ecosystems are extremely fragile. If you disturb them..

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We have already seen China aggressively attempting to invest in mining capacity in northern Canada, in ways that triggered national security concerns in the federal government. We have concrete evidence that China is not just actively eyeing but also trying to find mechanisms to

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Certainly, any investment we can make in the north is significant. What we need to keep in mind and what is often forgotten—my colleagues here can speak to this—is that it's about 10 times more expensive to do anything in the north than in the south, because of the challenges a

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  When the Canadian Armed Forces go on domestic operations, there are three demands that tend to show up: general labour, expert capacity—we saw this during the pandemic health serve—and lift capacity, so air force. This is why, on the military side, the air force needs to be heavi

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think what we heard here is that the tabletop exercise can allow us, for instance.... This is also stakeholder and community engagement. It allows us to identify what the items are that are missing locally. Yes, we can't provide all the equipment in one go, but we can actually

National Defence committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will make my statement in English. However, I will be happy to answer your questions in English or French. The statement was distributed to you beforehand, so I will skip some parts of it. Harvard University’s Belfer Center's cyber-power index ranks Can

National Defence committee  The premise of smart cities is their interconnectedness and the ability to track both the content and the connections of people within that city. This is similar to the problem, that, for instance, TikTok poses on a micro level: that an adversarial actor can learn a lot about pe

National Defence committee  Well, Mrs. Gallant, I don't know what car you drive. I drive a minivan. It's about a dozen years old. Think about much of what's happening in terms of our networks within the Government of Canada as driving an old car. We're driving on old infrastructure where the government has

National Defence committee  That is a very good question, Mrs. Gallant, because you can imagine that a hostile [Technical difficulty—Editor] social credit system for its 1.4 billion people would have the capabilities of building out that system for the rest of the global population. If I were a betting man,

National Defence committee  It's a great question. We've tried for 20 years to build norms and consensus around this, and we've made very little progress within the UN and within other bodies. What you need to understand is that there are people who believe in the liberal rules-based international order—t

National Defence committee  It's not about strengthening the bill. It's about making sure that we use effectively the capabilities we have. The U.S. has vast capabilities that it uses on a regular basis, in part to prevent a change in the international balance of power. That is not primarily Canada's object

National Defence committee  It is a fantastic question, and it hits the nail on the head. The problem with current political decision-making processes—not with respect to any particular government in this country—for years has been that we dither too long in making key decisions where we need to provide po