National Defence committee  If I may, this is fundamentally a question of intelligence, right? It's the ability to plug into a global information architecture—signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, human intelligence—to queue those assets, to be where they need to be to find the specific thing we're lo

National Defence committee  Sure. Very quickly, I can assure you that Russia is at the top of our list in terms of countries we watch carefully and monitor closely. They're certainly taking any number of actions within the Arctic sphere. Of course, they are an Arctic nation, so some of those are to secure

National Defence committee  I'd like to specify that that is also true of intelligence. Several of the people assigned to defence intelligence are in Washington. A large number of Canadians, also on the intelligence side, work at NORAD for the American general who commands the J2, that is to say the intelli

National Defence committee  The number is not the same.

National Defence committee  At National Defence, we have a specific mandate regarding the protection of our personnel and infrastructure. Their safety is our responsibility. In Canada, obviously we cannot be in charge of all of these issues on our own. We work primarily with the RCMP and CSIS. In a case suc

National Defence committee  For the primary threat, the integrated terrorism assessment centre, out of CSIS, is the lead for this. We feed them staff to help them work on these things, but for these issues, they're really our centre of excellence for the government. Speaking generally, the terrorism threat

National Defence committee  Sure, I can comment on that from an intelligence perspective. When we look at the Arctic, we can see that there are certainly multiple actors in the Arctic—Russia is the primary example—and there are people who do things in the Arctic who we watch closely and occasionally find

National Defence committee  It comes down to what I was saying previously about intent and capability. No one at the present time has an intent to threaten us in the Arctic or anywhere. Intent can change, obviously, and it can change quite quickly.

National Defence committee  That would be Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Those are the areas that—it's not my mandate—the people who are in that business spend most of their time and energy on.

National Defence committee  I would add, as well, that from an intelligence perspective, we do spend a lot of time—I didn't touch on it in my remarks—focusing on maritime naval developments in other nations where we think there's the potential they will affect us, whether that's close to home or in places l

National Defence committee  Absolutely. Without getting into a lot details about what we do and how we do it, the developments, particularly in Asia-Pacific.... I wouldn't say they're troubling, but certainly it's what appears to be a more classic sort of military arms race dynamic among a number of count

National Defence committee  The top five threats, all types...? That's what you said?

National Defence committee  In terms of the top five threats, the most urgent one, the one that takes up most of the time and energy at the moment, is terrorism. I think what I said in my statement is that we see no state actors that are currently threatening North America militarily, which is a statement t

National Defence committee  That's immediate.

National Defence committee  Right.