Government Operations committee  We jettisoned systematic air defence in Canada as part of our strategic downsizing, so this is actually a broader conversation about rebuilding air defence for the Canadian Armed Forces. We currently cannot provide for our own systematic air defence for our troops in Latvia. Ce

Government Operations committee  Aside from the outcomes that we might get in a market situation, there is an important component of legitimacy to a proper competitive process. I think my colleagues alluded to the fact that considerable damage has been done to the credibility of the procurement process and the c

Government Operations committee  As I've remarked repeatedly in recent weeks, we can talk about deterrence, but that actually involves, for instance, having a fighter jet that can defeat Russian air defences. The F-35 is the one plane that can actually perform on that particular metric. In terms of military dete

Government Operations committee  As my defence economics colleague Ugurhan Berkok would likely tell you, there's no methodology to actually measure these particular benefits that is broadly accepted by defence economists. The benefits are whatever we say they are. I would say that the investment in the benefits

Government Operations committee  In any procurement, you have three objectives. You want to make sure that you get what you are buying on time, on budget and with the capabilities you need. It seems that in this country, we have great difficulties doing any of those three with the procurements that we ask for,

Government Operations committee  We live in a democracy, so inherently transparency and accountability of governance are critical components of the legitimacy of the institutions that we have. Whether you can get the answers you're looking for out of departments is a very different conversation than the rules

Government Operations committee  The more Parliament and government focus, as central agencies, on having careful, very super-onerous transparency and accountability mechanisms, the more it also discourages decision-making at lower levels within the department, because nobody wants to take a risk, so they push u

Government Operations committee  Good afternoon. Thank you for your invitation. I will speak in both official languages. My remarks will be in English. My opening remarks on defence procurement highlight the myriad needlessly onerous rules that err exceedingly on the side of transparency and accountability i

National Defence committee  We live in a globalized world where, ultimately, this is a space we cannot play defence; we have to play offence. We have to know what the adversary is up to, what its capabilities are and what its intent is before it is ever able to go after us. The biggest challenge that we hav

National Defence committee  I'll make three quick points. One is that the CAF has done a pretty good job on families, on, for instance, parental leave and the way members are evaluated when they return from parental leave. There's been considerable progress made. There's still a lot of change that needs to

National Defence committee  That assumes that we have a disproportionate attrition problem among equity-seeking groups. It turns out that was the case in the 1990s, but in the 2000s the Canadian Armed Forces remedied that attrition problem. The latest number I'm familiar with—and you can ask for those numb

National Defence committee  Mr. Robinson will have something to say here too, so I will try to keep it brief. I think the three domains that are going to be the most important and the most contentious, and in which there's the most competition and the most transformation, are maritime, space and aerospace,

National Defence committee  There's a process and a substance question. In terms of the process, I'm quite enamoured by what the U.K. did with the integrated review of foreign policy, defence, security and international development, which we treat as silos. There's an understanding that all of these are in

National Defence committee  If I may, Ms. Normandin, I will answer in English, because the answer is a bit complicated. The Canadian Armed Forces now has an NCM military cyber-operations trade. We need the same thing on the civilian side. We need a classification we don't currently have, because it's easie

National Defence committee  Mrs. Gallant, it's a fantastic question that we already wrote about 20 years ago, when we went to Afghanistan. Under the Employment Equity Act, federal institutions have a mandate to proactively hire persons with disabilities. This has always been interpreted as hiring from the