Foreign Affairs committee  I would entirely endorse what the ambassador just said. While Nero fiddles in Washington, the global architecture is shifting in an unattractive way for us. It's desperately important that we pull together in the west. We're far too absorbed with individual concerns, because a ne

Foreign Affairs committee  The points I was trying to make were, first, that by Canadian standards militaries play a disproportionate role in politics in many of the Asian states we interact with. You can see this in Thailand, for example. You can certainly see it in China and elsewhere. Second, I would su

Foreign Affairs committee  My apologies, Mr. Chair.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. That's an extremely important issue. I think what many Canadians fail to appreciate is that in the last third of a century, a navy that is numerically as large as the United States Navy has suddenly appeared on the global scene. Just think about that. As I've said to t

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. I would opine editorially that we're about 30 years late. We should have been having this discussion back in 1990. It's astonishing to me that the profundity of the transition from the Atlantic to the Pacific is only n

National Defence committee  I would agree with David. If we look at the history of the Collins class submarine, just for example, that was ill-fated and so forth. Nevertheless, I think that when Australia does defence reviews, they're broad, they're deep, and they're comprehensive. There's a lot of document

National Defence committee  That's a good question indeed. Let me talk about Russia for half a minute. I think we are all genetically coded to think of Russia as a superpower and a superpower that is re-emerging, but if you look at the Russian GDP, it's about the equivalent to that of Italy or Australia. I

National Defence committee  No.

National Defence committee  Joel, do you want to go with that?

National Defence committee  Someone has to hang by their thumbs if they don't deliver. Now when the thing goes down the tubes, everyone looks around for who's responsible. No one's responsible; it's “he said, they did”. We have to have much clearer lines of responsibility, in my assessment, in terms of deli

National Defence committee  I think the navy has put a lot of time and effort into what it wants. That said, I think the navy is understaffed in terms of its technical staff that can provide the expertise to say this is what the warship needs and so forth. The navy is operating under severe constraints. Po

National Defence committee  I think the navy has to make a firm decision: this is what we want—point final. The problem with defence technology is that it's moving so fast. We're on the brink of Star Wars, literally, with a whole world of drones in the sky, in the sea, on the surface, and so forth fast co

National Defence committee  Yes, we will be, but currently we're certainly not.

National Defence committee  One of the points made by my colleague Dr. Sokolsky was that in the Pacific region we already have major navies—Japanese, Australian, Indian, and so forth. As I suggest in my brief set of notes, what's beginning to emerge is a containment strategy, although all the players will p

National Defence committee  I would certainly come back to my original assertion, and it keys on what has already been said, that there's a need for dramatic urgency, in my estimation. I also think there's a need for more money. As Michael has quite rightly pointed out, defence inflation is probably 4% or 5