National Defence committee  What it does is it probably restricts governments into the future to join missions of which we have no advance notice or whatever. It ties the hands of government. If you say we should only prepare for peacekeeping missions--if you can get somebody to define what that means--an

National Defence committee  I would return to what I said earlier, that we need to understand what our national interest is and then relate the deployment to our national interest, not to something that a so-called international community decides, unless what they decide is in our national interest, which i

National Defence committee  I think, again, a strategic review should look at two aspects. First, we need an assessment of what kind of world we will live in, what Canada's going to be like, and what Canada's place in the world will be. My political science colleagues do that when they say the world is roun

National Defence committee  Okay. My response is that, first, there is no such thing as the international community. There are lots of nations. When they go to the United Nations, it's a bizarre marketplace where nations trade information or whatever back and forth to suit their national interests. The Uni

National Defence committee  I missed part of that; this is if we're relegated only to peacekeeping, to blue helmets?

National Defence committee  Or fight floods in my hometown of Winnipeg, or find lost kids, or fight forest fires; they could serve the national interest in all sorts of ways. You can hire civil servants to do all of those things--to fill sandbags--but when push comes to shove, you need an armed forces whose

National Defence committee  If you don't do that, just hire diplomats, maybe.

National Defence committee  Can I perhaps respond?

National Defence committee  I would piggyback on what Jocelyn has just said. The first thing is that the nation's political leaders would decide that going there would be something that was in Canada's national interest. Then they would provide the resources commensurate with the mission, as decided by th

National Defence committee  Partly to answer your first question, you need to have, and we always do have in fact, continuous planning for military missions. Every morning the commanding officers get up and have a meeting, an orders group, on what went on last night, how it's going, and how to adjust. That'

National Defence committee  I will. In Canadian foreign policy history, Wilfrid Laurier, in 1910, talked about Canadian defence policy. What he said, in essence, was that there was no threat, and if there were one, the Americans would save us, so we didn't need any armed forces. That was changed by Paul

National Defence committee  Can we say no?

National Defence committee  That was my question, Chair; sorry.

National Defence committee  Yes, Monsieur Coulon.

National Defence committee  I think it's a deep, and in some respects worrying, question, or at least the answer is. It's not just “our side”, if we can say it that way, that's learning lessons from these operations; so is the other side, or the many other sides. One of the lessons they may be learning is