National Defence committee  I don't have any personal problems with privatization—it has been done in other places in the world—but it has to be under an overall government authority, in the sense that doctors work for themselves, but they're also part of a medicare system in this country. I think the pro

National Defence committee  If the committee has the requisite security clearance, I don't see any reason why not. But then the problem would be to keep the information you receive in closed session, separate from the information that you receive at open session.

National Defence committee  I think it's a lot easier to develop the military capabilities than it is to figure out politically how you, as a coalition partner, are going to have your voice heard in the overall determination of the policy, whether it's political policy, the political objective of the operat

National Defence committee  I think we should be strengthening the civil institutions in the north as much as anything else. We have to have a military presence in the north because the military is a signpost to everybody else that they're approaching our borders, and once they get to our Canadian borders t

National Defence committee  There are limits to what you can do with policy, because all governments react to public opinion. They react to the spur of the moment, and so on and so forth. Also, I think academics tend to overplay policies, because academics think they can have a role in making policy, so obv

National Defence committee  Obviously the technologies that began to develop in the seventies and eighties have reached a point now where there is a new element. My Beta VCR flashes 12, so I really don't understand any of this stuff. But what I do understand is the capability, because we're seeing stories i

National Defence committee  I'm not an expert in Russian affairs, but it worries me because we talk about the potential of China, but for Russia, it's not potential. They have thousands of nuclear weapons, they have nuclear delivery capabilities, and they have expeditionary capabilities. It may be that he's

National Defence committee  We've been an Atlantic country since our founding as colonies, French and British. What we need to understand is that the largest source of immigration to this country today is Asia. When you combine that with the new trading patterns that are emerging and our attempts to get int

National Defence committee  I'm not sure what that means. We spent different amounts at different times on the Cold War. There were times in the Cold War when we were spending 7% of our GNP—as we called it at the time—on military, in 1955, 1956, and 1957. We were spending 40% of the budget on national defen

National Defence committee  I honestly can't remember what the spending limits were. I've always been leery about saying that we need to set our limit as a given percentage of the GDP. I don't believe that either. I think our spending has to be determined by what our political requirements are, and you have

National Defence committee  It reminds me of somebody who said, way back when NATO was being formed, that the whole point of it was to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. That's certainly not the case anymore. It's an anomalous situation because they do have extraordinary econom

National Defence committee  I think the lesson for Canada is that the ability to project our military power abroad has always been very important to Canada politically, and to a certain extent, economically. I could go right back to how we won our independence as a nation in the First World War. I could kee

National Defence committee  We didn't have to do a lot of thinking between 1945 and 1990. We knew where the bad guys were. We knew what they we're going to do, more or less. We knew what we had to do to respond to them, and we knew what all our allies were going to do. The rules were all written. We didn't

National Defence committee  First of all, I probably didn't write that part of the report.

National Defence committee  Seven people, I think, contributed to it. As a historian, I adhere to something called “Bercuson's iron law of history”, which is that nothing much ever happens until it does, and when it does, it usually happens very quickly, and it is never predictable. I think when you're