National Defence committee  I would quickly add that Sweden and Finland are irrelevant to the Arctic question—entirely irrelevant. Sweden is about the Baltics. Finland is about neighbouring Russia on the land. Neither of them has territory on the Arctic Ocean. That's where their interests lie, not with the

National Defence committee  I never said Norway.

National Defence committee  I'll be very brief. Do I have time or not?

National Defence committee  I basically agree with my colleague Andrea. The outcome of the Russian-Ukrainian war remains to be seen. We tend to forget. We have this very benign view of ourselves, and we discount Russian and Chinese views of us, but if you look at American military capability and American st

National Defence committee  I would add only a few things. First, and I don't mean to be flippant, hope that the economy goes down and the labour market shrinks dramatically. That's always a correlation to increasing recruitment in the forces. As I said, I'm not trying to be flippant. There are things tha

National Defence committee  Shut me up.

National Defence committee  I would only add that if you look at the projections about transportation in the Arctic, in the United States, for example, their Coast Guard, the policing arm, is also under title 10 and can be transferred to the Department of Defense—they are military vessels. I think it's si

National Defence committee  I think it's a really important thing. Remember, it is a binational arrangement, but you have Greenland and Iceland, and, as I mentioned in my opening comments, part of the track now—which didn't exist in the Cold War—because of technology, brings the direct threat down the easte

National Defence committee  My apologies. I'm not getting the English translation.

National Defence committee  Okay. I think I have it.

National Defence committee  I think NORAD is taken seriously. I can't speak to the perceptions of the Russians, but if I look at the world, the answer is that we're not very persuasive at all. We don't have the capacity with the current North Warning System to track cruise missiles. We have a limited capaci

National Defence committee  That's the million-dollar question, and it refers to understanding the Canadian policy in terms of what participating means for Canada and what we have to do. Generally in the threat environment today, which is technologically based—in which the United States is integrating air

National Defence committee  The pro side is that it enables us to integrate, to be interoperable and to have a centralized command and control system to deal with threats to the Arctic. The con side specifically is that NATO's interest in the Arctic is not Canada's interest in the Arctic. To put it in blu

National Defence committee  The simple answer, in my mind, is to restore the Arctic Council to deal with the non-military side of it and to begin lower-level discussions with Russian military officials, because that is a key issue here, to avoid the miscommunication or misunderstanding that can lead to acci

National Defence committee  I don't think it's an issue of encroachment by the Russians in the far north. As I was trying to point out—but I talk too much and go on too long—we have common interests with the Russians in the Arctic, and we need to look at developing positive relations, what used to be called