Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence
Issue 16 - Evidence (Morning meeting)
OTTAWA, Monday, May 5, 2003
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 11:00 a.m. to examine and report on the need for a national security policy for Canada.
Senator Colin Kenny (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: I call the meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence to order. Good morning and welcome. Today, we will hear testimony on Canadian coastal defence.
I am a senator from Ontario and I chair the committee.
Also present is the distinguished senator from Nova Scotia, Senator Michael Forrestall. Senator Forrestall has served the constituents of Dartmouth for the past 37 years, first as their member of the House of Commons and then as their senator. Throughout his parliamentary career, he has followed defence matters and served on various defence- related committees, including the 1993 special joint committee on the future of the Canadian Forces.
Let me introduce the other senators here today. Senator Norm Atkins, from Ontario, came to the Senate in 1986 with a strong background in the field of communications and with experience as an adviser to former Premier Davis of Ontario. Senator Atkins is a member of our Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs and of the Standing Senate Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration. He also serves as the chair of the Senate conservative caucus.
Senator Jane Cordy, from Nova Scotia, is an accomplished educator with an extensive background in community involvement before coming to the Senate in 2000. In addition to serving on our committee, she has been a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology that recently released a landmark report on health care and is now studying mental health. Senator Cordy was recently elected vice-chair of the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association.
Senator Joe Day, from New Brunswick, is a successful lawyer and businessman, and he was appointed to the Senate in 2001. Senator Day is the deputy chair of both the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs and the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance. He also sits on the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications and the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. He was recently elected to the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association as one of its councillors.
Our committee is the first permanent Senate committee mandated to examine security and defence. Over the past 18 months, we have completed a number of reports, beginning with ``Canadian Security and Military Preparedness.'' That study, tabled in February 2002, examined the major defence and security issues facing Canada.
The Senate then asked our committee to examine the need for a national security policy. Thus far, we have released three reports on various aspects of national security. The first report, ``Defence of North America: A Canadian Responsibility,'' was published in September 2002. The second report, ``For an Extra 130 Bucks....Update On Canada's Military Crisis: A View From the Bottom Up,'' was published in November 2002. The third, and most recent, report, ``The Myth of Security at Canada's Airports,'' was published in January 2003.
The committee is continuing its long-term evaluation of Canada's ability to contribute to security and defence in North America. As part of this work, the committee has been holding hearings on the federal government's support to men and women across the country that respond first to emergencies and disasters. However, the committee has decided to give priority to an ongoing evaluation of Canada's ability to defend its territorial waters and help police the continental coastline.
These hearings update an earlier committee report, ``Defence of North America: A Canadian Responsibility,'' published in September 2002, which found Canadian coastal defence efforts to be largely ad hoc and fragmentary.
Our witness this morning will be Dr. Wesley K. Wark, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. Professor Wark, welcome back to the committee. We appreciated hearing your candid viewpoint on the last occasion and we look forward to hearing from you again.
Professor Wesley K. Wark, Associate Professor, Department of History, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto: I am grateful to all members of this committee for the invitation to appear before the committee. I am a fan of the committee's work, which is addressing important issues. In some cases, it is the only parliamentary committee addressing these issues in particular ways.
I will make some general, broad remarks about the role of intelligence in maritime security. I will then move on to more specific issues that I think are important. It seems to be a timely moment to discuss maritime security and intelligence issues, for a couple of reasons. Last week, as I am sure Senator Forrestall is aware, there was a report in the press about an Egyptian freighter that is currently under quarantine by Health Canada. The suspicion is that this freighter may have been carrying a cargo of anthrax from Brazil to Canada. There is great deal of mystery surrounding this, but the report suggests that the fear of bioterrorism cannot be dismissed entirely from our minds in the aftermath of September 11.
As well, as many of you know, in Halifax recently there was a celebration commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic. This has some pertinence to the remarks that I will make in terms of one of the successful experiments that Canada created during World War II to deal with maritime security issues.
First, I have general remarks that will not come as particularly surprising to any member of the committee, but they will set the context for other more specific comments that I will present. Some lip service is given, but perhaps not enough serious thought, to the notion that any security policy and activity has to be intelligence driven in the post- September-11 world. We often hear this phrase, but I am not sure we spend enough time translating it into action and trying to think about it in terms of our contemporary capabilities and institutions. Security must be intelligence driven.
Intelligence must have a capacity to deal with current threats, which is very often the focus of concerns and of proposals for change, but it also must have capacity, which we should not forget. It must have the capacity to engage in analysis to consider likely threats that have not yet appeared but may appear in the future. The interface among intelligence warnings, threat assessment and long-term military strategy and procurement policies is important. These items, as you know, stretch over many years, often decades.
Successful intelligence requires three things. Most of this is common sense, backed by historical experience and study. It requires sufficient collection capability. It requires good analytical skills. It requires the capacity to deliver credible intelligence to receptive policy-making ears.
For those who study intelligence deeply, this will be familiar as the so-called ``intelligence cycle.'' Intelligence consists essentially of three component parts: collection, analysis, and dissemination. Any intelligence system that is striving to get things right has to have capacity in all three areas and has to be constantly making adjustments in those areas.
Every intelligence agency everywhere in the world struggles to achieve the capabilities of good collection, good assessment and good dissemination. Canada is no different in that regard from other states our size, larger or smaller than us. However, we have some unique problems in this country to overcome.
What are these unique problems? Historically, we suffer from decades of a lack of resources having been devoted to the intelligence function. That lack of resources continues to persist as a problem even in the aftermath of September 11 and the kinds of budgetary increases that were provided in the months after September 11 in then Finance Minister Paul Martin's so-called security budget in December 2001.
Second, we suffer in this country from what could be charitably described as very minimal assessment capabilities. In essence, we do not have a strong capacity to think through the very complex and immense stream of intelligence data that comes into various agencies in Canada and make sense of it in order to decide what is important and what needs to be assessed and acted on.
Third, we face in this country a real organizational dysfunction with regard to the intelligence system, the so-called intelligence community. We also suffer from a political culture in Ottawa that pays far little attention to intelligence. Again, it is partly a historical problem.
Regarding the intelligence cycle and its component parts, we suffer from problems in all three critical domains, collection, analysis and dissemination. That is a general picture. It is not very cheery.
Let me turn to some specifics with regard to maritime security. I want to reflect on some of the findings of this committee's September 2002 report on the defence of North America, which Senator Kenny mentioned in his opening remarks.
I will do this by following the schema that I set out for intelligence work. I want to address intelligence-collection capabilities. What do we have? Where are the problems? How might they be fixed? What is the situation with regard to assessment? What is the situation with regard to dissemination? I will run through these very briefly and will be happy to discuss them in more detail in the question and answer time.
First, I will discuss intelligence collection with regard to the maritime security problem. The picture here is certainly not pretty. The committee understands this fully. It is laid out in stark details in the September 2002 report. We have no standing naval patrols on either coast that are capable of keeping a watch over our maritime littoral. The Coast Guard is a vastly overstretched agency. Maritime security is only one of many of its functions.
The Canadian Air Force lacks the resources for aerial reconnaissance over any of our major ocean or sea-going areas. When they conduct occasional patrols, they are forced to use antiquated aircraft, the Aurora patrol aircraft. Those antiquated aircraft are functioning with obsolete censor systems and without the latest technology.
Canada has no dedicated satellite intelligence capacity. We have no unmanned aerial vehicle program or drone program available to us, either in a major or minor way. This is something that certainly needs to be examined. We lack the military hardware. We have no system in place to provide for any kind of systematic surveillance of our maritime area, not on the East coast, the West coast, the Arctic, Great Lakes or St. Lawrence Seaway.
These problems sound like military hardware issues, and expensive ones to boot. To some extent, that is true. These kinds of issues and military shopping list are part of the more general problem of what direction our Canadian Armed Forces are heading and where their budget takes them.
The issues concerning maritime security intelligence-collection capabilities pose a broader issue. We should ask ourselves the question of the extent to which any future armed forces in this country will have its resources devoted to informational capacity as opposed to purely war-fighting skills.
I would argue that one of the more profound changes we need to think about in terms of military policy and force structure is precisely that shift from a pure war fighting capability to a far greater emphasis on informational capacity. One of the things we could talk about in that context — I will not dwell on it here — is our submarine program. There is a military hardware issue.
Let me go to the more practical issue of what we might be able to do with existing resources. We should recognize that we face a scarcity of maritime security intelligence and need to plug some of these holes with existing resources while we think about adding various kinds of resources for intelligence collection. We need to think about instituting a kind of port watch system. We need port watchers of a sort that existed during the Second World War period and played an important role. Into this port watching capacity we could pour many different kinds of Canadian government employees overseas. Foreign affairs consuls, trade commissioners, immigration personnel and CSIS liaison officers, among others, are located in relevant geographic areas of the world. They should be tasked with maintaining a watch on potentially dangerous maritime transport from ports of origin.
Second, we need to pursue the idea of an open, on-line international watch list of all maritime shipping and movement. From time to time, in the past, there have been private-sector companies that, in fact, have provided this sort of information. It now needs to be coordinated on a government level, and it needs to be brought into the information age. There is no reason in technological practice why such an on-line international watch list of all maritime shipping could not be created. It is perhaps time to do that. It would give us an opportunity to distinguish among shipping movement on the seas that poses no threat, may pose a threat and does pose a threat, ``rogue shipping'' to use contemporary parlance.
Third, for any increased Canadian effort in the maritime security field to work on the intelligence-collection side, we need to integrate our efforts from the beginning with those of the United States and perhaps Mexico, although I know less about Mexican efforts in this regard, to ensure an effective exchange of intelligence and a maximum use of available resources. Certainly, in this case the Canadian-U.S. connection is very important and needs to be maintained and expanded.
We face the necessity in this country of increasing the quantity and quality of intelligence collected on maritime security. We need to try to get as much of that intelligence collected offshore, the further offshore the better, to provide for advance warning and response.
Collection is only one part of the puzzle. You could spend money on increased collection, and it will be no use if you cannot analyze it properly nor use it in political decision making and operational decision making.
The next stage of the problem is the question of what you do with intelligence that you collect. This comes to the function of intelligence analysis. All of this raw intelligence data that might be collected by existing or increased means in the future, by new and existing activities, has to be integrated and analyzed promptly and thoughtfully. Otherwise, it is just bits of pieces of information in a vast information flow.
I was very struck, in the September 2002 report by this committee, by its call for the creation of two operational centres — which I will call operational intelligence centres, because there is a reason for giving them that label — one to be created on each coast. I think this is an excellent idea, but I would suggest a modification to it in one important way.
If there will be some kind of proposal and change in this area to create operational intelligence centres, rather than to split them on the two coasts it would be important to centralize that function and place it at the heart of government operations in Ottawa. One operational intelligence centre in Ottawa would be the way to go.
In doing so, we would be following the footsteps of perhaps a long-forgotten innovation and very successful experiment that Canada conducted during the Second World War. We created an operational intelligence centre at NDHQ in Ottawa, in the early days of the Battle of the Atlantic, which emerged as one of the most successful intelligence-handling centres in the Western world. It was vital to Canada's contribution to the Battle of Atlantic, that battle we are commemorating 60 years on over the weekend.
Obviously, what the operational intelligence centre did during the Second World War was to provide maritime intelligence, particularly to handle the convoy and antisubmarine operations of Canadian, American and British navies in the North Atlantic. It did it very well. It liked to boast during the Second World War that it was the best such operation in the world.
Perhaps that was just Canada boasting, but I have no doubt from the historical record that we did it very well and it proved to be a successful experiment. It could be, and perhaps should be, recreated presently to deal with a new range of maritime security threats. They would, of course, have to encompass terrorist threats, but might also encompass a variety of other threats that are in the background of our minds these days but continue to persist. These include threats of illegal immigration, international criminal activity, drug trafficking and a whole range of things that fall under the umbrella of national security.
What would an Ottawa operational intelligence centre have to look like to be successful? I think it would have to have a number of characteristics. It would have to have an interdepartmental staff of high quality. It could not be run by a single department, based on a single department's expertise or staff. It would have to be interdepartmental, as was the Second World War operational intelligence centre. It would have to have the technological capacity to handle both open-source information searches and classified data streams. It should not have to have intelligence officers in it who have to run three different computer systems at the same time to pick out different streams of intelligence data, which is currently the practice in Ottawa, as you may know.
It would have to have a very clear reporting structure in order to allow for its information to be of any use; and it would have to have the capacity to be integrated with counterpart agencies in the United States and abroad. During the Second World War, the Ottawa operational intelligence centre had integrated staff from the United Kingdom and the United States serving on it, and we had staff in other allied centres learning the practices and witnessing the day-to- day activities there.
On the analytical front, I would say that probably the most important reform to be made would be to centralize this function of information gathering and assessment and to put it in Ottawa and give it a high priority. We should make it a kind of watch centre, a warning centre of a sort that exists in fragments in Ottawa in the intelligence community at the moment. It would be important to do this, not only on the maritime security front, but it would give a lead to help in the integration and coherence of the intelligence community in a wide range of other areas. If you could prove it could work for maritime security, this would be an important step forward to prove to a government that likes to do things in departmental silos that that is not the only way to go.
The third thing that would have to be changed in order to make maritime security more effective, particularly in terms of the handling of intelligence, would be to configure a system that would work better to provide for the operational and policy use of whatever information is collected by existing or future means. To do this would mean not only an operational intelligence centre, but also some kind of lead agency, clearly identified in Ottawa, responsible for acting on the intelligence that such an operational intelligence centre would provide.
The obvious lead agency for this task would be the Department of National Defence. It already has some of the resources for maritime security in the navy and air force, and other resources in this field. CSIS, RCMP, Coast Guard, Transport Canada, even conceivably Immigration, would have to have a knowledge that DND was the lead agency and a willingness and experience of working with DND as the lead agency in this field. That would be the operational use. You connect an operational intelligence centre to the Department of National Defence and a command structure, which already exists, for operations in action.
The policy use of maritime security intelligence, I think, requires something that does not currently exist. It would require the ability to disseminate important intelligence at the highest levels of government in Ottawa, both to the senior levels of the bureaucracy, the civil service and, in fact, to the cabinet.
In order to achieve a system in which important intelligence circulates on a regular and systematic basis, we would have to revitalize the intelligence community's system, which currently is based on, at least in theory, a practice of interdepartmental committees run out of the security intelligence secretariat at the Privy Council Office.
I think that committee system has grown long in the teeth. It does need re-energizing and a greater sense that it is at the heart of decision making and power in the intelligence community in Ottawa. In other words, we need to give the security and intelligence coordinator at the Privy Council Office a real coordinator's function and capacity.
I think also that steps need to be taken to make permanent, before it ceases to exist at all, the ad hoc cabinet committee, PSAT, which was created in the aftermath of September 11. To make that cabinet committee permanent would be to signal its importance. It would also, I think, probably solidify whatever support system it requires, and send a signal that the government does not regard security measures as a transient phenomenon in the aftermath of September 11.
We need to provide senior leadership in government, both at the senior levels of the bureaucracy and at the cabinet level, with a regular systematic diet of intelligence briefs. As I am sure you know, the President of the United States receives a daily briefing from both the Central Intelligence Agency, representing the intelligence community as a whole, and from the FBI. The Central Intelligence Agency has systematized this process in the president's daily brief.
The Canadian government is unique in not having some kind of document that tries to fulfil the same function, to provide a kind of informational digest of the most significant pieces of intelligence available across the government to the Prime Minister, cabinet and senior leaders to alert them to current and anticipated security threats.
Therefore, the third cornerstone of any effort to increase maritime security on the intelligence side would be a new thinking about the system of disseminating intelligence. That third cornerstone would be added to the second cornerstone, which is a better analytical capacity, and the first cornerstone, which is a better collection capability. Until we get those three things right, and unless we think about them as a whole rather than in piecemeal fashion, I think we are always in danger of failing to recognize the principle that I alluded to at the beginning, which is that any useful security policy or action has to be intelligence driven, in an age of global terrorism and other global threats.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Wark.
One of the first calls we received after the publication of our report — Defence of North America: A Canadian Responsibility — was from Professor Wark, who highlighted the lack of comment about intelligence in the report, and that accounts for his attendance here today.
I have to say that I am nervous about our security, because we have just completed an in camera meeting and you have just repeated 60 per cent of what we were talking about.
Mr. Wark: That is a high per cent, for a professor.
The Chairman: We are worried about what you are doing with the rest of our conversation.
Before we get into senators' questions, I want to clarify that, amongst many other proposals, you were proposing that Canada should lead or propose the establishment of an international agency to provide a port and sea watch that presumably other countries would subscribe to by treaty or protocol and that the information would come to Canada for collection and then be available to all subscribing members without analysis. It would be up to the subscribing members to perform their own analysis on the data, but Canada would take on this role and volunteer to do it, and maybe even have the headquarters somewhere here in Canada as well, undoubtedly in Halifax guarded by the Halifax Rifles.
Have I correctly characterized what you were suggesting?
Mr. Wark: I had not made the distinction between a distinctly Canadian led and run operation as opposed to an international effort. To get this off the ground, Canada could and perhaps should take the lead, but it could be run through the United Nations or a more ad hoc international organization.
The Chairman: I assumed it was an international exercise that essentially had a role of creating a common picture for like-minded nations to have and they could then use that information as they chose.
Mr. Wark: Absolutely.
Senator Day: Mr. Wark, as the chairman said, you touched on many of the points that we wanted to get into and you have answered many of the questions that I had. There are a few points I want clarification on. In talking about the analysis, you said that, as we are probably aware, the people who are performing the analysis at the present time have a number of different sources of computers. Could you elaborate on that? We are perhaps not as aware as you may have thought.
Mr. Wark: I can elaborate on it briefly.
In the intelligence community, there are different computer platforms that exist, depending on the degree of sensitivity and compartmentalization via code word of the intelligence that is being circulated. The practical effect of this is that any intelligence analyst wishing to ensure that he or she has the most complete picture possible from a range of intelligence, from essentially open-source material that might come in through the press or through Web searches of various kinds to the most highly classified intelligence from a signals intelligence source, has to move back and forth across three different technological platforms, essentially three different computers with different degrees of IT protection built into them.
That is not an ideal situation for any hard-pressed analyst trying to quickly formulate the best possible picture and synthesize it. To have to work back and forth constantly through this unintegrated computer system is not ideal. That speaks to a larger issue, that is, just trying to keep pace technologically, in terms of information resources with the ongoing intelligence and information revolution.
What we face, on the one hand, is the explosion of open-source information, as it is called, all the information that is out there circulating and, at the same time, particularly, in the aftermath of September 11, increased concerns about protecting sensitive intelligence.
There is a phenomenon that you have to try to, on the one hand, protect secrets and information and, on the other hand, deal with this explosion of information. The solution so far has been to design different information streams. That seems technologically neither efficient nor sound in terms of how the work is being done to pull it all together.
I have no doubt that intelligence analysts in the government have learned to cope with this. The problem is that the intelligence community, in my experience, is great at learning to cope with lack of resources, with inadequate technology and inadequate political attention. They have made it into an art form. However, there exists the specific problem of the computer foundation of intelligence work and the broader foundation of technological interfaces that go beyond this issue and obviously embrace things such as how do you get someone from one department with one computer system talking to another with a different computer system.
Senator Day: That clarifies that point.
From the point of view of intelligence collecting, you have had a chance to see our reports. We agree with you or you agree with us that much more work must be done. However, we can also acknowledge that, since September 11, there has been some improvement. You obviously do not think there has been enough, and neither do we, but there has been some.
In terms of some of the information that will now be gathered, the Coast Guard, it appears, will be involved. There will be electronic signalling devices put on ships, the result of which is that information that will be picked up. As well, information will be provided as to port of origin of ships that will be coming into our waters, 24 hours beforehand, and when they are leaving, that kind of information. The Department of National Defence has recently announced the expansion of the short-wave radar that would pick up vessels beyond the horizon. In terms all of that information that comes from various departments and is picked up by various departments, would it all come to this one central location that you have described in Ottawa?
Mr. Wark: That is what I envisage. The historical experience we have suggests that the only way to make the best use of information collected from different platforms is to ensure that, very quickly and comprehensively, it arrives at one central place for analysis, and for subsequent dissemination. If it remains scattered through different departments, the Coast Guard is handling some pieces of information coming in, the DND others, the air force and RCMP others, what you inevitably get is a fragmented and confused picture.
One of the great lessons in the whole history of the 20th century evolution of intelligence services as a function of government is that centralization is absolutely vital to efficiency and that the less centralization there is the more problems that are created.
The second thing that would have to happen is that you will obviously never create one sole intelligence-gathering agency. You will not give the job solely over to any of the different departments that will have some mandate in this field. In place of that, what you will have to create is a kind of intelligence culture in departments and agencies that do not have much familiarity with the idea or practice of intelligence. The Coast Guard is not an intelligence-gathering agency.
Until they begin to be familiar with what intelligence is, what its problems are and how significant it is, there will be difficulties in making the most effective use of their resources and you will create many opportunities and scope for interdepartmental squabbling and pulling of rank.
Departments such as DND will say that they know about intelligence. The Coast Guard can send the information, but DND will not think that the Coast Guard will understand the problem and will not take it seriously. That is one thing that keeps the so-called intelligence community permanently divided. Until you can spread that sense that maritime security intelligence is a vital function among all the agencies that will be responsible for it, which I think is a cultural task, until you can do that, even increased resources, more money and greater attention to the problem will not be successful. This includes training, experience and interdepartmental work.
Also, we learn from scares and threats, such as the Egyptian freighter rocking at anchor off the coast of Nova Scotia. Much of what Canada has done post-September 11 has been a response to a scare of a kind that we never expected. My concern about that response, while admitting that we now spend more money on intelligence and pay more attention to it, is that ultimately it will evaporate or be eroded and we will not see permanent and institutionalized changes.
Senator Day: From the analysis point of view, would you see an interdepartmental analysis approach to things? Looking at intelligence from the point of view of DND would be quite different than looking at it from the point of view of Immigration, for example. Is that one of the ways you would see that we could build this culture of dealing with intelligence?
Mr. Wark: One of the reasons we have an intelligence community in name only is that each department will tell you that they have a very special expertise and very special knowledge of a particular field of operations or activity. This is one of the great myths that continues to dog intelligence work.
In an operational intelligence centre, be it in Ottawa as a centralized function or on both coasts as a slightly decentralized function, we would require something run by a dedicated and professional civilian staff with military officers and other specialists on secondment from relevant departments. There would have to be a core civilian staff running it, people trained in the particular problems of maritime security who do not come at it from any particular departmental background but rather from a broader perspective.
During the Second World War, the best operational intelligence centre in the world was the British one run by a lawyer named Jeffrey Wynn and a host of other people recruited from all across the United Kingdom, including a former circus director. They were very good. A very broad range of great talent is needed to make such a thing work properly. For that reason, I would say dedicated civilian staff and seconded officers from departments to ensure that the work circulates back into the departments as they rotate through.
Senator Day: We received some background material from the Canadian Coast Guard, and they say that they are an efficient and effective collector and collator of maritime traffic information and that their main role is to observe, record and report, submitting vessel contacts to the Canadian forces and to the RCMP.
The Coast Guard has said what you said they would, that they are very good at collecting information, but we are wondering whether that is a role that the Coast Guard should have. Should we be expanding that role or should we be recommending that the government go elsewhere?
Mr. Wark: We should imagine maritime security, and perhaps maritime defence in the security sense, as having three different zones. There should first be a very distant zone, which would reach out right to the point of origin of maritime shipping and maritime activity. This calls attention to the idea that we need a port-watching system and an international system for maritime shipping and reporting. The second and closer zone should be operated by the Canadian navy. This would involve offshore patrols and offshore reconnaissance of shipping. The third zone should be a close-in surveillance and reconnaissance one by the Coast Guard. To make that three-zone system work, it would have to be centrally coordinated, and the information would have to be centrally collected and assessed.
The Coast Guard has given you a perfectly reasonable mission statement, but also one that underlines the point I would make, that at the moment the Coast Guard does not really see itself in the business of intelligence. I would hate to think what the Coast Guard knows about terrorism, for example, or what certain agencies in the Canadian government would be prepared to tell the Coast Guard about terrorism.
Until we can break down that sense that Canadian government operations consist of separate compartments that link, for better or worse, with others, and have a coherent system of cooperation, clearly defined roles and a broadly spread sense of the value of intelligence, I do not think we will get very far.
Senator Day: Can we break that departmentalization down by having that close-in coastal watch that you spoke of done not by the Coast Guard but rather by the navy?
Mr. Wark: You could. I suppose the difficulties with any proposal for change is to draw the line, to focus on the important changes and not step too far and try to change too much at one time.
We have a Coast Guard with a long history of operational experience and practice, with a collection of vessels that it knows how to operate and which it can operate effectively in coastal waters. I would argue that we should use that experience but ensure that it is refocused more than it is at the moment on maritime intelligence-gathering activities and ensure that it is truly coordinated with what the navy can do.
At the end of the day, it may become a budget issue. If there are X number of new naval platforms needed for maritime security purposes and it makes less sense to divvy those platforms up between new construction for the Coast Guard and new construction for the navy, then maybe budgetary-driven pressures would tell us that the best thing to do would be to have one service responsible for both functions.
However, I would hesitate to go that far because it does not seem necessary and I cannot think of many other systems in the world that have tried to amalgamate the Coast Guard and the navy into one function. Looking at it internationally and historically, the suggestion would be to keep both operations intact but to refocus them and give them more tools to do the job.
The Chairman: The three tiers you are talking about seem to run counter to some information we have been receiving about the problems integrating the U.S. Coast Guard with the U.S. navy, that it is not a seamless operation.
Second, our understanding is that the Netherlands, Chile, Australia and various other countries do not have coast guards, that the navy performs all of those functions.
Third, on the question of coasts, it being a building block to a further national security policy, we would hope that the central coordination of intelligence and perhaps other matters that we would see coming forward from a coastal policy might also apply with the various intelligence agencies, but we see that as subject matter for another study.
Mr. Wark: I take the latter point. I did remark in my notes that I think changes to maritime security intelligence practice might be a driver for other bigger changes to the way in which intelligence is dealt with in Ottawa.
I do not have really strong views on the question of whether coast guard duties versus naval duties need to be separated or could be combined. If there is international experience that suggests they can be combined, perhaps that should be looked at in some detail.
With regard to the American case, the Coast Guard has been brought into the Department of Homeland Security, among other departments, and one of the reasons for that was a concern that the kinds of operations that were being conducted by agencies like the Coast Guard, Immigration, Customs and so on were not being integrated. The American response was to create the Department of Homeland security, to force that integration. I cannot see that kind of wholesale departmental reorganization taking place in Canada.
My feeling is that one of the ways in which you could achieve it in part at least is to focus on the informational handling side of things. There are good prospects for centralizing and coordinating the intelligence function, which may not exist in other areas of operations. It might be a start for a longer-term process of reform in which you would create new institutions of government and new central agencies. For the moment, the crucial need is to concentrate on the coordination aspect using the existing resources and to think about what new kinds of collection and analytical capacities are needed. You could spend much time trying to reorganize departmental responsibilities in ways that would meet a lot of resistance. On the intelligence side it might be easier.
Senator Forrestall: We are trying. I do not know whether we will succeed or not. Our hearts are pure. We are heading in what we believe to be a better direction.
On these areas opened up by Senator Day and the chair and with respect to analysis of information collected, I am curious as to the cultural value to us. I know there must be one. There must be an historic value. There must be a sufficient justification to warrant, for example, long-term storage and methods of retrieval for everything from intelligence application and planning purposes to teaching purposes.
I want you to comment on that in terms of the capacity of Canada to bring together relatively quickly analysts, both the very good and those who plod away at the raw data. What are the resources available to Canada for those purposes? I do not think there is any disagreement as to the need.
Mr. Wark: That is a tough question, Senator Forrestall.
Senator Forrestall: This is the second time I have attended your lectures.
Mr. Wark: Analysis is at the heart of all good intelligence work. Unless you can get the analytical picture straight, all the money and time you spend on collection can be for nothing. You will not have anything to pass on of value to senior decision makers. If you do not have anything of value to pass on to them, then these senior decision makers come to believe that intelligence is an exotic thing that lives in basements and they do not need to pay much attention to it or pay much money for it.
What are our resources for doing this? In the broadest sense, we have remarkable resources. We have a well- educated public and a broad university system that has the capacity to give people some basic training in analytical skills. The real question is this: What happens in the transmission of those basic skills from a broader societal setting into government practice, with a specific focus on intelligence?
I think it is traditional of intelligence communities — it is one of the great legacies of the Cold War — that they like to spend money on collection systems, and the powers that could afford the biggest and best collection systems spent the most on them. This is how the U.S. got to a $32-billion annual budget on intelligence.
It is always the case that analysis comes out second best in terms of spending and attention. The assumption is that you really need just fancy technological systems for signals intelligence, spy satellites, and so on, and you will have the problem beaten. It became clear in the post-September-11 period that that technological expensive response to the intelligence problem was not enough. Other methods had to be tried.
You need an analytical capacity, broadly defined in government, that can draw on the broader societal strengths and training experience of Canadian citizens in this field. We are not only a well-educated society but we are technologically competent and cosmopolitan and internationally focused. We travel. We like international institutions. We only go to war when international institutions say we can.
At the moment, the problem in Ottawa is that the analytical function has been traditionally underresourced and has not been seen as a top priority compared with collection. The analytical resource that exists has been developed within departmental silos, on the assumption, again, that departmental expertise is supreme. Thus, you have to have analytical units in each department taking a specific slice of the information available and deciding on its significance, whether from a military, foreign affairs or transport perspective.
We have small analytical units spread throughout the government. Sometimes, those analytical units are of high quality in terms of the people who serve in them. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they have permanent staff. Sometimes they are entirely reliant on rotational staff. It is a variegated picture. The truth of the matter is that however good, mediocre or bad such analytical units are, they all suffer under the same problem, which is that their work is not highly regarded. They are seen as something of a backwater for career purposes. That all has to change if we are to reform the intelligence function in the Canadian government.
Analysis has to be seen as far more important. It has to be seen as a significant profession within the community and dealt with on an interdepartmental basis.
In fact, we have gone backward on this. For much of the Cold War period, we tried to have a significant analytical capacity at the centre of government, run out of the Privy Council Office, staffed and reporting interdepartmentally. We have retreated from that situation since the end of the Cold War. We still have the institutions and the practices, but they are not invested with the same prestige, power and resources that I think they need to be.
To properly achieve an analytical capacity in Ottawa, this job will have to be centralized, and centralized in the only place it probably can be, which is the Privy Council Office. It can build on existing resources there. There is an intelligence assessment secretariat and committee that runs out of the Privy Council Office; it does good work but it could be bigger, more powerful, and could provide the focus for a government-wide analytical capability.
However, to do this, some rethinking of the role of the Privy Council Office role in this regard would be required. It would require a reinvention so that the Privy Council Office was not seen as becoming too large, overstepping its bounds or treading on departmental mandates. It would require a reinvention of a committee system that used to exist during the Cold War in which there was great effort taken to ensure that senior and, in some cases, middle-level civil servants with intelligence functions and responsibilities were meeting regularly and exchanging information in important ways. The committees still exist and continue to meet. However, they do not have the punch they once had.
One problem, among others, that exists in the government analytical intelligence community is that it has grown used to finding its talent purely from within. Partly for reasons of convenience, that analytical community in terms of its staff is simply drawn from existing resources of different government departments as best it can.
Even in the aftermath of September 11, and with new money available to it, it does not really have a process in place for recruiting from outside the government. It has no process in place. This is in some ways grievous because it is easier to fix. It has no process in place for essentially drawing on the widespread talent and expertise that exists in the country, in the universities and in the private sector, on specific issues. It continues to exist within its walls, within its closed borders, but it is drawing on diminishing resources. In order to reinvent analysis as part of a broader process, that analytical community will have to lower its walls and think seriously about new ways of recruitment and ways of tapping into expertise across the country.
In summary, Senator Forrestall, we have an analytical system that is too diffuse and dispersed, it exists in silos, it is too small, too uncoordinated and too haphazardly constructed in terms of the talent that is distributed throughout. I do not think it has really had the opportunity, or perhaps even the will, to stop and think about what the new requirements for intelligence analysis really are post-September 11. Partly, I do not blame it for that, because of all the different sectors of government since September 11. I believe that small analytical community was probably one of the most over-stretched and over-stressed resources in government. I know that many of those people worked months with virtually no break after September 11 to try and stay on top of threats, and feared threats and new operations and so on. It is time to give it the tools it needs and to rethink its function from the bottom up.
Senator Forrestall: Do you see any enhanced role for the universities to play in this regard?
Is there an obligation or responsibility on the part of the universities to pick up some of the weight of this? Perhaps inertia brought about by pressures, other demands, maybe getting it free-standing, might loosen it up in a way that would not hurt. Do you see anything there?
Mr. Wark: There are two possibilities here, neither of which have been met at the moment. One is that the universities could play a much more significant role in the intelligence business than they do at the moment in this country. The situation is different in the United States and, in a slightly more hush-hush way, quite different in the United Kingdom. In both of those countries there is a long tradition of tapping academic expertise on intelligence matters and drawing academics in on a contract basis or in some ways more permanently into the intelligence community to insist in what they do.
That link, that sort of flow of ideas and people from the university community into the government and out on intelligence issues, simply does not exist. Despite some efforts that have been made since the early 1990s, it really does not exist. Again, I think we have gone backwards to a certain degree. Much could be done in that field with a willingness to play on the part of government and a willingness to play, which already exists, on the part of the university community.
The second thing the universities might have a responsibility toward is to increase the amount of teaching and research they do in critical areas of security policy and practice. There are now only two or three courses in the entire country on intelligence issues. There are maybe one or two courses in the entire country on terrorism. There are few courses on Canadian-American relations. There is probably no course that deals with NATO or NORAD in a systematic way. The universities have turned, for complex reasons, a blind eye to these issues, despite the fact that they are very popular with student audiences because student audiences have a bit of a feel that these things matter. The universities therefore have a responsibility that they have not met, particularly in the aftermath of September 11, to invest new resources in these areas.
However, to give them their due, this is not easy for universities. Universities are anarchic institutions. They have presidents, but presidents do not dictate policies. It is we individual professors who get to decide what we do or what we do not do. It is a wonderful anarchy, I would not give it up for a moment, but it has its downside.
The other difficulty is that it is always hard to direct universities in new paths. For all the talk, there has not been much new investment in universities, particularly on the professorial side, in recent years. Now, of course, in Ontario we are facing the double cohort situation and I simply cannot imagine how that will be handled in the trenches.
Finally, we have been let down by our funding agencies. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council responded to an initiative in November 2001 by the secretary of state responsible for the SSHRC who asked it to put together a policy on improving the study of security matters in Canada. To my knowledge, that went absolutely nowhere. There is not an additional penny of money available for research for graduate students or for academics that would direct them into this field. That is just a terrible failure.
There are many things that the universities could do, many things that the government could do, and many things that the intelligence community could do to increase our capacity in this area.
Senator Forrestall: Is there a parallel responsibility for the private sector to look at funding in this regard?
Mr. Wark: That is an interesting question. The private sector is interested really in two things. From my experience it is interested in information security on the IT side, for good reasons, and part of it is interested in what they call risk assessment or risk analysis, which tends to be a function concentrated mostly in the major banks in Canada and in a few of the accountancy and specialized risk-assessment firms.
I would have thought that at least in those sectors, which were concerned about specific issues to do with risk analysis and information technology, they might step back and take a broader look, and realize they need to invest some resources in thinking about this picture more broadly, thinking about Canadian national capabilities, lending a hand in terms of a dialogue between the private sector and the government sector on this issue and perhaps lending a hand in terms of creating funding opportunities for research in this area.
There is a significant divide, however, between private-sector thinking about intelligence and national governmental thinking. They have one definition of it and we have another, and so far the twain has not really met.
Senator Cordy: You gave us your maritime security wish list in terms of resources and I think we would all agree wholeheartedly with you. However, we do not have it, unless a great abundance of money comes from somewhere.
You talked about a port-watcher capacity. Could you expand on that a bit as something we could do with existing resources?
Mr. Wark: In the intelligence jargon, this is called ``human intelligence.'' In fact, port-watcher systems go way back. They were probably instituted during the Napoleonic wars by both the British and French, where when they sent usually retired naval officers to each others' ports, undercover, to keep a watch on naval movements, shipping, transportation of troops and so on.
What I mean by a port-watching system is really to utilize the availability of Canadian officials posted overseas in embassies and missions and consulates and drawing on these people, particularly when they are operating in a country with important maritime capacity and major port facilities. We have a variety of officials in those embassies and consulates, whether they are CSIS liaison officers or trade commissioners or immigration officers or RCMP liaison officers, whoever they are. We could get them individually and collectively working on one task among many, which is to say one of your duties is port watching. One of your duties will be creating a system whereby you can provide an information flow to us in Canada, to an operational intelligence centre or whatever else is created, which will tell us about what is going on in the maritime ports of significance in that country, what kind of shipping is leaving, what kind of shipping is coming in.
This would be both an open information-gathering function to perhaps facilitate an international effort to create a watch list, and conceivably also a slightly clandestine function on the part of some of these officers whose job it would be to try to keep a watch on illicit shipments of various kinds of goods, people and dangerous materials. You would have a capacity that would be out in the open and could also have a secret intelligence component, because terrorists will not advertise the nature of their shipments. People smugglers and drug smugglers and those involved in environmental despoliation will not be doing that either. You must have some kind of capacity to collect information secretly as well as openly.
We have the people on the ground. We have people with a variety of functions who are already out there in some of the major shipping worlds, and the task would be to redefine some of their activities and ensure that they are working together in some of these foreign ports and countries. We could say, ''Port watching generally will be, from now on, an important function for you.''
The truth of the matter is that some of these officers are not underemployed in terms of their day-to-day tasks but underemployed in terms of the significance of the work they could be doing. I put trade commissioners in that capacity, and some of the RCMP and CSIS liaison officers, certainly. We could turn them into port watchers without needing to greatly increase their number, and they could play an important role and could of course, as part of that function, stimulate greater levels of day-to-day contact with relevant authorities in foreign countries who are also going on watch for those kind of activities. It is that kind of system in general I am talking about, defining a new mission on the basis of existing people in existing places.
Senator Cordy: This leads into the term you used, developing an intelligence culture. How do you go about doing that? You mentioned training and experience and scares, and hopefully we do not have to rely too much on scares. Where does it come from? It is one thing to say that we have to develop an intelligence culture, and the example you gave is one where we have people who have experience. If you have worked along the maritime scene for a while, you know what is natural and what is not natural and what perhaps might be vessels of interest. How do you develop that culture among — call them all government employees, whether they are with Defence or Immigration or whatever — that little bits of information that they have that they are probably telling their families about at the dinner table are indeed intelligence information that should be given to somebody?
Mr. Wark: It is a good question. The answer is not as difficult it might appear. Part is just training, and even brief training. A two- or three-day or week-long training program could introduce new officials to the different kinds of maritime security threats envisaged, as well as reporting practices to these institutions to which they would be responding, to counterpart agencies overseas. Training would be an important part.
As to overcoming the cultural problem in the sense of where is the intelligence in the scope of day-to-day activities and why should it matter to me as an officer in a particular department or position overseas, I think overcoming that is partly training and partly reward, to make it understood that this is an important activity and that people are listening to it and people want in Canada. Some of that would be solved by the creation of an operational intelligence centre that will be engaged in a constant discussion or dialogue with these people, saying, ``What about this report we had from that source? Can you verify it, or do you think it is important? What can you tell us about it, and what can the government of the country you are posted in tell us about it?'' Simply involving these people in an information flow would be part of the way to go.
We need training and exposure of that kind, and a sense that they are working not just for their department, but also for something interdepartmental and broadly national in scope. It is not difficult to instil in people a sense that this is vital work, but that can get eroded on a day-to-day basis when people, faced with 10 memos on their desk, say, ``I am being paid by a department and working for a department, so I better go to those departmental memos first,'' and the other ones get a lower priority.
In this regard, let me tell you an anecdote that always stuck in my mind. I visited Australia in a semi-official capacity a few years ago and had a chance to speak to intelligence officials there, and Canadian government officials in our embassy, the high commission in Canberra. The senior official in the Canadian embassy was in charge of intelligence tasks. I wanted to get a sense of the system and how it worked. He told me that he himself was personally very interested in intelligence issues and intelligence liaison with the Australian government counterpart agencies. However, he was never asked to do anything in that regard. When he did do occasional things, it did not seem that they got much response in Ottawa, so he set them aside.
This is a fundamental problem we face. While we recognize that, for example, it might be important to maintain close contact with the Australian intelligence community, given their geographic and geopolitical ambit, in practice, we just do not do it. It falls between the cracks because it is not regarded as anyone's important mission. There is a disconnect between what happens overseas and what happens at home, partly because we do not have a foreign secret service. I am sure Senator Kenny does not want to hear this, but if we had a foreign secret service, that would be something that would energize many of these other activities.
The Chairman: Why are you sure I do not want to hear that?
Mr. Wark: Perhaps you do want to hear it. I was joking, just to be sure I had everyone's attention.
Senator Cordy: You are saying that the intelligence culture cannot just be on the ground. The information that people give has to be seen to be valued, because that is human nature. If somebody gives, gives and gives, and feels nothing is done, then why bother.
Mr. Wark: It is training, it is being tasked, it is being rewarded, and it is being seen as being part of an important process. That could be done, but it is not done often with many of the kinds of officers we have posted abroad. Those officers that we do have posted abroad and who have essentially intelligence functions operate distinctly in their own compartments within the embassies. The CSIS liaison officers have relatively little to do with other embassy employees in whatever country you might like to name, such as Singapore.
Senator Cordy: To get back to the Coast Guard for a moment, and I know that you answered questions on this already, the Coast Guard is under the Department of Fisheries and Ocean. Does it matter which department it is in, or would it be a better fit in another department?
Mr. Wark: If I could remake the world, I would pull it out of there and put it in DND. It is an unfortunate joke, but there is not that much in the way of fish out there any more, so perhaps they have other vital duties.
I think it would help to connect it to DND and pull it out of the ambit of Fisheries and Oceans, where, in terms of the maritime security function, it will not get the departmental attention or resources it needs. Maybe it would get that in the Department of National Defence. It would also facilitate new construction, sharing of platforms with naval platforms and sensitive platforms and joint training and joint exercises.
Senator Cordy: And a new role.
Mr. Wark: I do not claim to be an expert on the Coast Guard. I suspect we are talking about a reconfigured Coast Guard that will have a more significant role as a security force than it had as an enforcement and policing and fisheries protection force in the past. We are moving it in a paramilitary direction. Perhaps it is best to recognize that that is the direction in which threats are taking us and to reconfigure its place in the government system as a result.
Senator Cordy: Should the Coast Guard have a paramilitary aspect to it? Should they be able to board a ship when they sense that something is not right.
Mr. Wark: Yes, they should, but it is does necessarily mean that they should have a law enforcement function. However, they should have a paramilitary function in terms of capacity, et cetera. The Coast Guard would need to have the ships, the sensors, the teams and the helicopters to do that, in combination with the navy.
The matter of kinds of ships, equipment and sensors could best be determined by making zonal distinctions between how far out the Coast Guard has to operate, as opposed to the navy. We could keep the Coast Guard closer to land and responsible for coastal protection for the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes. Also, we should think about the Arctic, as things warm up in that area. That may overtake us before we have the capacity to keep a watch on it and protect it.
The Chairman: To clarify part of your testimony, professor, when you first talked about the port watch, I thought that you were talking about other countries sharing information about who was in their ports and who was leaving. The next time port watch came up, I thought you were talking about a foreign intelligence service of people in embassies overseas and simply doing the cocktail circuit and not doing any work. We all know that staff in our embassies are overworked and do not have extra capacity. If an embassy officer is seen hanging around the docks, it is not to count boats but rather because he is misbehaving. You are not suggesting that these people be double-hatted or triple-hatted but you are suggesting a completely new capacity for extra people sent overseas to spy.
Mr. Wark: I am not quite —
The Chairman: You could not have an international agency that leads off as part of our intelligence service but you could have an international protocol that created an agency that pooled shipping information. Which way are you going on this?
Mr. Wark: I am trying to go in both of those directions. We could have an international agency or system to maintain an openly available watch list of maritime shipping worldwide, and Canada would have the standing to take the lead in that kind of operation.
When I mentioned port watchers, I was talking about two possibilities: The more likely one, simply put, would be to double-hat people by tasking existing officials in Canadian embassies and missions overseas with a port-watching duty, to the extent that it could be fitted into the schedule of existing duties or that existing duties could be rearranged. There is an untapped capacity to increase our ability to use Canadian government officials in overseas postings that collect this kind of information and to liaise with government agencies in those countries to tell them what we know.
The Chairman: For example, if you wanted to keep a 24/ 7 watch on the Port of Rotterdam, how many dozens of people would it take?
Mr. Wark: It would take a great number of people. Much of that information could be available from open sources. There is probably a newspaper published that tells you about daily sailings from that port. I am not talking about an army of port watchers but about people whose job it would be to collect that information. Some of them who already have that existing intelligence function could collect it on a more clandestine basis.
If the Canadian government moved for other reasons, one of the functions of that clandestine service could be port watching, in which case there could be a case officer operating out of an embassy who would pay for higher informants in ports to keep an eye on shipments.
There could be, which we do not have now, a foreign intelligence capacity to work clandestinely. We have diplomatic representations of various kinds who could be tasked with the job of reporting on port activities and liaising with governments in ways that do not currently happen on a systemic basis. We could have that other kind of activity, which would be an open international effort to track and monitor international shipping and share it internationally, not trying to verify it but to put it out for states to use and verify themselves.
Senator Atkins: Additional to the port watching issue, what was the model during the war and who did it report to? Under whose authority did it operate?
Mr. Wark: The Canadians did not have port watches. We benefitted from the system that was run variously by the British, the Americans, the Australians and others in which they usually placed naval officers undercover in neutral ports, in ports of the axis powers during World War II, on both the Pacific and the Atlantic, to report on military and commercial shipping. It was a military system run by the navies of those coastal countries and reported through their naval intelligence channels. We were the ultimate beneficiaries in the sense that, when it was relevant to Canadian interests, that kind of information would come to our navy and our operational intelligence centre.
It would be a system best run for technical and specialist reasons by people with considerable naval training but it would not need to employ purely naval officers. There are many people out there with experience in maritime shipping issues that are not purely naval.
Senator Atkins: You commented that we had a proposal for two operational centres, one on each coast. You suggested that it might be better to have the one in Ottawa. I always worry about centralization. Is there any value in having it both ways?
Mr. Wark: There is a value to it and we confess that. I thought about it before I hammered away at the centralized recommendation. The advantage of having it both ways — facilities on both coasts — is that you bring those operational centres close to the action, I suppose. You set them alongside the naval command structures on both coasts. That would be an advantage because the personal working environment of intelligence officers, or operating analysts, would be right alongside naval staff.
The disadvantages outweigh the advantages in this regard. You could still retain some of the advantages by ensuring that you had, and indeed you do have, an existing system of intelligence officers on both coasts who could report directly to the Ottawa-based operational intelligence centre, while staying close to the action on both coasts. The main disadvantages are two-fold: First, if you divide the function between the East and West Coasts, then you divide a finite resource, especially in terms of the talent pool for high-quality intelligence work in this country, which is still quite small. It will take some time to change that. There is a potential for dilution if you try to create two institutions where one could suffice.
Second, if you were to create these two operational intelligence centres — one on each coast — then you would distance them from another kind of action — intelligence in Ottawa, the opportunity to engage in a potentially interdepartmental environment and have access to a broader range of information conceivably either through information flows or by knocking on someone's door or by telephoning someone in a relevant department.
They have thought about the dividing this intelligence responsibility in the just the way the committee had suggested with one unit on the Pacific coast and one on the Atlantic and decided that was not a good idea. We did that in the Second World War, and the U.K. and the United States have done that.
The historical record suggests that it worked better that way, although they did not try it the other way. On balance, I would say that it is worth heeding the historical lesson.
Senator Atkins: During the war, you had a wartime environment. You are not talking about a wartime environment now. During wartime, everyone is on the same screen, whereas now it is more fragmented. It seems to me that the combination of the two probably would be more effective and provide even greater intelligence.
Mr. Wark: I am not convinced of that. You are suggesting that there would be a greater sense of immediacy by ensuring that it is close to the command structures and operations on each coast. That begs the question of what happens if a security threat emerges in the St. Lawrence Seaway or the Great Lakes, which are distant from either of those centres. What about the Arctic?
Halifax or Esquimalt will not be able to tell you much about what is happening in the Arctic. Do you develop a third centre there, a fourth centre for the Great Lakes and a fifth centre for the St. Lawrence Seaway, or do you bite that bullet and say that it is best to centralize and draw on information flows from all those areas and keep that centralized function as close to the operational activities on every front as need be?
Senator Atkins: It depends on what other resources we have.
Mr. Wark: It is less expensive to create one than to create two.
Senator Atkins: In your comments, you said that we might have to move from a war-fighting capacity to a more security type of capacity. Can you explain that a little more?
Mr. Wark: We can try to imagine what a 21st century armed forces should look like in Canada, which will be profoundly different than the armed forces we have currently. We need to give more emphasis in imagining that future armed forces to ``force transformation,'' which is a great phrase that Donald Rumsfeld and others in the Pentagon currently use. We will have to place greater emphasis on informational capability; that is, emphasis should be placed on knowledge rather than guns and bullets.
We need to do that for a number of reasons. We will need to do that if we want to maintain our capacity for peacekeeping. We will need to do that if we want to maintain any genuine role in North American security, where our war-fighting contribution will to be marginal as compared to a potentially very significant informational capability.
Canada could be good at that niche capability. It would help Canada re-stamp itself as a valuable military partner in coalition or allied operations of various kinds.
It is also the first line of defence in the 21st century. It will be more important to know about threats than to have a big military equipment capability to deal with threats.
Finally, there will be budgetary pressures. It may be more important to buy a spy satellite than to buy 10 new fighter aircraft. It might be more important to buy sensor systems for maritime security or increase the number of submarines to use as information-gathering platforms than to invest in other things.
In my view, part of the 21st century force transformation in Canada should be driven by a sense of getting the maximum informational bang for our buck, based partly on existing resources and partly on new kinds of capabilities. That fits with the role we can play in North American defence and the role that we can play as a peacekeeping power. It fits into the reality of the world that is dominated by one military superpower.
That is a general comment.
Senator Atkins: You are suggesting that it would also affect the decisions of what kind of military equipment we would be thinking about in the future and whether we need as many ships or airplanes.
Mr. Wark: The question of what intelligence capacity or informational capacity does that military platform have should be part of the consideration in making those decisions. If platform A does not have as much capacity as platform B, then perhaps we should have platform B.
It is a scandal that we have no drone program in the Canadian Armed Forces. This is one of the great technological waves of the future. If you want to operate in a military environment in the future, you will have to have a capacity to launch and use drones for information collection and other things. We are way behind the powers in this regard.
Senator Atkins: That raises a question: Should we be having a new white paper?
Mr. Wark: It is vital. We have been fooling around with this for years. It is been promised. The vision of having a combined foreign policy and a defence white paper is the way to go. We need to have both things.
They are never perfect documents, but their most important effect is to stimulate debate. We need debate on both of these issues badly, especially in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
Senator Atkins: Senator Forrestall asked you about the private sector, and you mentioned the banks. How does money laundering connect to intelligence?
Mr. Wark: That is a good question, which I hope this committee will pursue. We have a peculiar organization called FINTRAC, financial information tracking and analysis coordination, I believe. It was established before September 11, to deal principally with criminal money-laundering activities. In Bill C-36, FINTRAC was given an additional mandate to be the central agency responsible for tracking terrorist fund-raising and financing.
When Bill C-36 came about, I wondered about giving an institution created with a certain kind of mission another mission, which took it way outside its initial expertise. FINTRAC, in my experience, is surrounded by mystery. I do not know how good it is, how big it is, how it fits into the intelligence community or if it fits at all. It is something worth exploring.
The entire issue of a dual mandate in which you combine criminal activities and counter-terrorism intelligence activities needs to be looked at carefully because it can be a recipe for disaster. Expertise on money laundering is good and important but it may have nothing to do with expertise on terrorism financing. You have a mindset that argues that criminal activity and terrorist activity are the same thing, which is one of the problems with the RCMP, but that is another issue.
Senator Atkins: Is there any mechanism if the banks tips them off that something is going on in that area?
Mr. Wark: I am not an expert, but the banks have a requirement under law to report all financial transactions above a certain financial level. The assumption is that the more money, the more suspicious it becomes.
As I say, I have often wondered how FINTRAC works. How it works with the private sector, and how the private sector works, are matters that the private sector does not like to talk about and that the government does not particularly publicize.
The Chairman: Thank you, Professor Wark. It has been provocative and useful to the committee to hear your perspectives. We will be pursuing this topic for the next period and hope to issue another interim report on it, building on our previous one. I can assure you that this one will not neglect the intelligence component. We may not get it right, but we will not neglect it.
To those of you who are following our work, John Adams, a former military officer and engineer who is now the Commissioner of the Canadian Coast Guard, will be appearing today. He will be followed by Mr. Elliott, who is the ADM, Safety and Security Group, Transport Canada. Mr. Elliott will deal with many of the recommendations of the committee's report entitled ``The Myth of Security at Canada's Airports,'' published in January, 2003. We expect to hear from both these gentlemen later on this afternoon in separate panels.
If you have any questions or comments, please visit our Web site by going to www.sen-sec.ca. We post witness testimony as well as confirmed hearing schedules. Otherwise, you may contact the Clerk of the Committee by calling 1- 800-267-7362 for further information or assistance in contacting the members of the committee.
This portion of the committee's meeting is adjourned.
We will continue immediately in camera in the room adjacent.
The committee continued in camera.