National Defence committee  The biggest problem with being on the ground in a mission is the fact that everything—military and civilian—is controlled by the civilian side through the UN headquarters and answers to the UN. In one of my favourite stories—and I can't even tell you what mission it was—a milit

National Defence committee  First and foremost, the thing that has changed is that we're not in the mid-nineties as far as the UN situation goes. The UN headquarters is far more advanced than it was back then. Even since I last worked for them, in 2006, when I was working to develop a new mission start-up g

National Defence committee  Without wanting to dabble in the political realm or the summit, other than when I look at it from a military perspective, the announcements were essentially for enablers, as was mentioned. Helicopters, communications, and intelligence are things that are enablers and that the UN

National Defence committee  To go back to your initial question—why we lost leadership and how we lost it—we got involved in Afghanistan, and we were there for a lot of years doing counter-insurgency, and both the military and the government of the day were focused on a very difficult mission for a long tim

National Defence committee  Financially, it's not a huge thing, but it does take a financial commitment over a number of years. It does take a commitment from each of the departments and it should be a multi-departmental. I believe it should be a governmental agency of some form, as opposed to a separate ci

National Defence committee  Money. For many years, after it was initially set up, it received government support, but that was gradually cut back by government over several years and it was told to make it on its own, the sort of business case. However, the customers are generally countries that can't affor

National Defence committee  PSTC is essentially training observers, individuals, to go out and do their business on various missions as individuals. It doesn't do a huge amount of research. It doesn't do a lot of international capacity-building, although individuals would come from different countries. It's

National Defence committee  Ethiopia and Eritrea was touted at the time as being very successful—probably more along the lines of classic peacekeeping, the separation of two state parties. That's why, but also because of the strong leadership and the strong forces that were sent in. I want to make one comm

National Defence committee  I'll knock off a couple of those that I was going to mention about [Inaudible--Editor] and so forth. We have no hidden agenda. Canadians bring strong values and military values. If I could refer back to my alma mater and Ms. Alleslev's alma mater from our military college, it's t

National Defence committee  That's an interesting one. Thank you. If I may, I will answer in English. On Canadian values, first of all, I believe that's well above our pay grade. We are not politicians or diplomats by any means. We're only observing from a certain level within missions sometimes. Simply

National Defence committee  Good morning, honourable members of the committee. It is indeed a pleasure and a privilege to be asked to testify before you today. I thank you for the opportunity to offer some observations and proposals on behalf of the organization I represent, the Canadian Peacekeeping Vete