National Defence committee  First, on the same level of deployability, we focus on making sure the individual civilians who can be deployed are ready. When we're dealing with training exercises like the one at Wainwright, we can't always field folks for the integrated training; we have to choose, because th

National Defence committee  I think your question on readiness should be taken in a broad manner, because readiness to respond to Syria has to include a range of things. Are we ready on sanctions? Yes. We imposed a fifth round of sanctions on the Assad regime on January 25. Are we ready on humanitarian ass

National Defence committee  It's part of an overall approach that we have been taking, but there are always mistakes—and we'll continue to take cultural sensitivity training—when you deploy missions to a region and there are cultural gaps from the people deployed to the country into which you're deploying.

National Defence committee  Within ISAF in Brussels—a bit at NATO headquarters, but more importantly in the field—there has been intense discussion through the chain of command, but with the civilian side as well, about the appropriate response to the Koran burning incident. They are assessing if there were

National Defence committee  I'll start on that, but Jill will likely have more details to add. She was doing this, and at the time I was not directly on the file. I'll give you an example. The Arctic search and rescue agreement is a good example of the close cooperation between our two departments on Arct

National Defence committee  If I may add, I know there's a lot of talk about a strategic pivot to Asia. We've always been a Pacific nation as well as an Atlantic nation. There's no one NATO for Asia, but we do have a number of things—not just the ASEAN Regional Forum—but a whole array of political-military

National Defence committee  I don't have the full details on our programming on this specific issue. I think it would be useful, Mr. Chair, if you agree, if we could return to you with a little more clarity, which we can get from CIDA and from some of our programming, about how this has been addressed by Ca

National Defence committee  Across Africa we've participated in a number of UN peace support operations.

National Defence committee  There are not to our knowledge, but there are Canadians in Libya doing a lot of programming in coordination with the UN and guided by the UN.

National Defence committee  There are different sources for sanctions. I believe—firmly believe—that if you add the panoply of UN sanctions that can be implemented pursuant to chapter VII, plus sanctions done in coordination with like-minded states, then you can address some of the security concerns you hav

National Defence committee  This has been an issue for a long time, not just in northern Uganda but over into southern Sudan, and well before we had the referendum and the splitting of Sudan and the creation of a new country. It's been a serious problem that the international community has tried to address

National Defence committee  When we work with international partners on building civilian capacity of states in conflict and security sector reform, we're very conscious of the need not just to ensure that there is an understanding by judges and police of how to prosecute and how to investigate crimes again

National Defence committee  The position of women in Afghanistan has always been a challenge, particularly so under the Taliban, of course. It's a society and culture that has a long, long history of women occupying a smaller space and a closed, private space. In the eighties, or more the seventies, there w

National Defence committee  As to lessons we learned in Afghanistan, there are a lot of them. But in terms of how we work together, I said in my introductory remarks that in terms of our policy priorities, which map out into our programming priorities, that was whole of government. It was developed to whole

National Defence committee  We're currently participating in 8 of 16 active UN-led missions. I won't use the word “peacekeeping” necessarily. Peacekeeping and peace support operations are different versions of UN operations, with different focuses, from robust military action to more comprehensive UN operat