National Defence committee  We would be vulnerable anyway, because their system doesn't work that great either.

National Defence committee  I can do better on the first than on the second. The reality is that the CAF is spending more of its time dealing with floods, fires, ice storms and pandemics because climate change is making a dent on our climate. There are no two ways around it. It means that the CAF has less

National Defence committee  The first thing is to keep in mind that we ought to have leadership within DND that is not retired military people. We need to have a distinct perspective for military people. That wasn't just a minister of defence problem; it was also potentially a DND challenge about how many p

National Defence committee  I'm of mixed minds on this. I understand that it makes sense to have more independence for whoever is doing the reporting on the military, whether it's an ombudsman or an inspector general. The challenge is that in the past, Parliament has not been the best place to put these pe

National Defence committee  I would just jump in here and say that we also have to think a little more about how we do our procurement, because it's often seen as a jobs program for electoral political benefit, as opposed to what is best for what we need. For instance, we're seeing in Ukraine a variety of

National Defence committee  I've had experts who work in the military and elsewhere tell me that the problem with Russia seizing a few of our islands would not be so much that we would have to reclaim those islands as it would that the Russians who are there would have to be rescued. With the distances they

National Defence committee  That's a terrific question and I don't really have the expertise to answer it. I think you should call Whitney Lackenbauer to talk about that. He has a much better understanding of the work between the Canadian Armed Forces and the people of the north [Technical difficulty—Editor

National Defence committee  It's okay.

National Defence committee  In my first 10 years in Canada, I lived in Montreal, but my French never really got that good. Thank you for this opportunity to speak. It may sound strange at this time, when the focus of much of the world, including Canadian leadership, is on the war between Russia and Ukrai

National Defence committee  Thank you for the opportunity to [Technical difficulty—Editor] It may sound strange at a time when much of the focus of the world, including Canadian leadership, is on the war between Russia and Ukraine, but the most important threats facing Canada and the CAF are climate change

National Defence committee  The classic example of this, and it's one that doesn't play well, is that Canada currently has four submarines that are semi-operable. Someone said, “We had a good year; we had 250 sea days.” That's four ships, meaning that on average one ship was able to operate for some portion

National Defence committee  I think that institutions are hard to build from scratch. The reason why NATO is still around is because it's better than all the other possible alliances. NORAD is a good framework to build upon because it has a record of success, a record of cooperation. It's a pretty useful in

National Defence committee  I think that's one of the challenges of having all these ships—the frigates, the support ships, the icebreakers—being built all at once. We can't really do it all at once, and that's a challenge right now, right? So it does seem to me that building icebreakers is a priority. Buil

National Defence committee  Absolutely. I'm not saying that Canada should not build a next-generation plane. One of the next-generation plane's day jobs is going to be encountering Russian planes that come close, no doubt about it, so we're continuing to invest in that. As I said, we should invest in some s

National Defence committee  In terms of the first question, I think that as we look out we have to think about the defensive systems that are flexible. For instance, the navy has had these frigates that have done many different things over the course of the past 20 or 30 years. We don't know exactly what na