Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence
Issue 24 - Evidence of September 29, 2003
OTTAWA, Monday, September 29, 2003
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 7:50 p.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: Good evening. I would like to welcome you to the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence.
This evening the committee will hear testimony on the need for a national security policy in Canada. My name is Colin Kenny. I am a senator from Ontario and I chair the committee.
On my far right is Senator Smith, from Ontario. Senator Smith was a councillor in Toronto and then deputy mayor of the city. He was subsequently elected to the House of Commons and served as a minister of state in the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau before being appointed to the Senate in 2002. During his distinguished career, he became a foremost practitioner in municipal, administrative and regulatory law. At the time of his appointment to the Senate, Senator Smith was chairman and partner of Fraser Milner Casgrain. He serves on the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs and the Standing Senate Committee on Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament.
Senator Banks is from Alberta. He is well known to Canadians as one of our most accomplished and versatile musicians and entertainers. He was appointed to the Senate in 2000. He is the recipient of both the Juno and the Gemini awards and the Grand Prix du Disque. Senator Banks is the Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources, and currently that committee is studying nuclear safety and control.
Senator Joe Day is from New Brunswick. He is a successful lawyer and businessman and was appointed to the Senate in 2001. He is a graduate of the Royal Military College. Senator Day had a successful career as a private practice attorney whose legal interests included patent and trademark law and intellectual property issues. 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 Agriculture and Forestry Committee. He was elected earlier this year to the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association.
Senator Wiebe is from Saskatchewan. He served as Lieutenant-Governor of Saskatchewan and as a member of the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly before his appointment to the Senate in 2000. A highly successful farmer in the Main Centre district, he was involved in the cooperative movement and active with the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and the Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association. He is Deputy Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, the Standing Senate Committee on Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament, and our Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs.
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." This study, which was 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. So far we have released three reports on various aspects of national security. First, "Defence of North America: A Canadian Responsibility," tabled in September 2002; second, "For an Extra 130 Bucks...Update on Canada's Military Financial Crisis, A View From the Bottom Up," published in November 2002; and, most recently, "The Myth of Security at Canada's Airports" published in January 2003.
The committee is continuing its long-term evaluation of Canada's ability to contribute to the security and defence of North America, having heard from witnesses regarding coastal defence last week during a fact-finding visit. Tonight we will hear from Dr. Thomas Axworthy, Executive Director of the Historica Foundation of Canada. He is just out of his class this afternoon as an adjunct lecturer at the School of Policy Studies, Queen's University.
Dr. Axworthy, welcome to the committee. We understand you have a short opening statement to make and we look forward to hearing from you whenever you are ready.
Dr. Thomas Axworthy, Chairman, Centre for Study of Democracy, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University: I sent a paper earlier that has been distributed to the committee. Let me just speak to the highlights of that and then I would be delighted to answer questions.
I make a plea to you and, through you, to the Parliament of Canada, Government of Canada and the people of Canada to collectively make preparedness much more of a national priority. It has never been one in Canada. We have always regarded ourselves as a fireproof house. If you look at the history of the various calamities and crises that have come to our country and our continent, we were unprepared for 1914; if we want to go further back, Senator Wiebe, we were unprepared for the 1885 rebellion in the Northwest; we were unprepared for World War II and for Korea. There was one brief interlude during the St. Laurent government, from 1954 to 1964, when Canada at last made an effort commensurate with the dangers of that time. That included not only establishing a Department of National Defence, which had personnel and resources commensurate with these challenges, but also — and people often forget this — under C.D. Howe, a defence production department that looked at how Canada could supply the essential elements of readiness that we required. We were not then totally dependent on foreign suppliers for things critical to our security.
We had then as well, and some made fun of it at the time, a real devotion to emergency measures, which was an integral part of the Prime Minister's Office and reported to Mr. Diefenbaker. It continued thus through Mr. Trudeau's time, until recently, when it was delegated out of the centre.
There was a time in our country when we did take threats seriously. That began to fade in the 1960s. It reached absolutely calamitous proportions in the 1990s, when this country seemed to believe it was immune to the ills of the world. Examples of that include 1993, when, for reasons best known to us, Prime Minister Campbell abolished the cabinet committee on security and intelligence. We went through the 1990s without a cabinet committee, which is the apex of our system — that is, the fulcrum point where ministers, senior bureaucrats and issues can be brought to executive decision. Instead, we replaced that with an annual meeting of ministers and coordinated meetings between deputy ministers. In the 1990s, when threats accelerated, we forgot there was the first attack on the trade towers in 1993, the sarin gas incident in the Tokyo subway, attacks on the USS Cole, and attacks on embassies in both Africa and Kenya. Within Canada, we had our own Air India disaster in the late 1980s. At this crescendo of threats — not just in hindsight but easily understood at the time — a few voices in North America and Europe, but very few here, tried to make the point that world events seemed to be accelerating and that there was very little of a peace dividend at the end of Cold War, as we were entering into a new phase of the privatization of war. Yet, as part of the general deficit reduction measures, and perhaps understandably, CSIS, DND, RCMP, the Solicitor General — all those departments and areas concerned about our security — were cut by rates of one quarter to one third at the same time as the threats were accelerating.
We have a habit of "whistling Dixie" in that regard. My second point is that this acceleration of threats of all kinds will not leave us alone; the threats will only intensify and grow. That is not scaremongering. If we look at the world of globalization, which has so many advantages and spheres, it also has a disadvantage, which is that the ills and problems, the pandemics, and terrorists themselves, can now be on our shores in days or weeks. The great oceans of North America that protected us throughout our history no longer do so. The very integration that brings so much collective benefit makes sure that our people are also subjected to germs, to men of ill will and to a series of disasters that seem to be far away from our shores. Well, they will be here.
Sir Martin Rees, the Royal Astronomer of Great Britain and one of the best astrophysicists in the world, has just written a book called, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century — On Earth and Beyond, looking at a whole series of biological, terrorism and infrastructure threats. This very staid, world-renowned scientist lays a bet of 1,000 pounds in that book that within the next 20 years, by the year 2020, there will be over 1 million deaths from a bio-terrorism incident. This is not a crank; this is one of the world's best-known scientists looking at the rising severity of threat and general lack of preparedness. Most nations are taking up this challenge. They are taking it up slowly because it is new and different. We are always slow to take up new kinds of threats and technologies. In my paper, I refer to famous historian and political philosopher Henry Adams, who, at the turn of the century, in 1900, wrote in his famous, The Education of Henry Adams that in his own lifetime there had been a kind of law of acceleration, that events were coming thick and fast and science and technology were changing so dramatically that he had great fears about the ability of his society to understand what was occurring.
I suggest to you that those laws of acceleration have only intensified.
We have had about 800 lifetimes on this planet and there have been more changes in the last 2 than in the other 798 combined. My grandfather served in the British Navy during the Boer War. He was not physically in the United States, but I remember him telling me about being stunned at the first news of the Wright brothers' flight. He also lived to see men land on the moon. That is the extent of change in the last century, and it is growing faster in ours, in terms of genomes and so on.
We have a conundrum. This is a country that historically thought that the world would leave us alone, that we could defend ourselves. We have this tradition of unpreparedness. Ethelred the Unready should be the patron saint of Canada. At the same time, we have this greatly accelerating rate of threat. As you senators will realize, and as reporters and media people know, if there was any doubt about my thesis about the ever accelerating rates of change and threat, we only have to look at this year of 2003, where a disease in South China in November creates mass hysteria and tremendous economic loss in Toronto by March. We had animal diseases, in particular, mad cow disease, which affected a single cow in this case. That single incident had an absolutely enormous economic impact on the critical industry in my part of the country, the West. In August, the great blackout occurred. These are all natural disasters coming one upon the other. If you want to talk about acceleration of change, you can note that these incidents are not happening every year or every 10 years, but every quarter. That is indicative of what we will be facing in this country for the rest of our lives. It goes with globalization.
I hope that this committee and that the Senate as a whole can begin the process of public education for Canadians as to the nature of the threats and the coordinated strategies that we should follow in order to encompass them. This is a country, interestingly enough, that, in a private way, is one of the more insured countries on earth. I am told that Canadians have more fire and life insurance — in fact, all kinds of insurance — than others, given our cold weather and a variety of other risks across the country. I come from Manitoba, where you can freeze at Portage and Main in February, so we take out a lot of insurance privately, not publicly. We have never taken it out publicly in terms of the defence department or preparedness measures. That is what I am calling for now, namely, a national insurance policy that will cost something in premiums. As with any good insurance policy, the cost of preventing or reducing epidemics, preventing or mitigating terrorist attacks, will be nothing compared to the economic and social costs and burdens of misery that life loss would cause in our country if any of them occurred. In disease, prevention, as we all know, is far better than trying to cure. I am talking about a preventive policy for the inevitable crises that are coming ever quicker and ever thicker.
What does that mean in terms of a program? The Senate will have many different ideas in many different areas. Let me outline some that I think make sense organizationally. If this committee can begin a national debate, I think we need the following steps to make the down payment on the national insurance policy to which I referred. First, we should have a permanent cabinet committee on security, intelligence and preparedness. It was a terrible error to get rid of it. We have had an ad hoc committee since September 11. That should become a permanent part of the decision-making apparatus of Canada. Of that there should be no doubt.
Second, I think this country needs an annual national threat assessment, an audit, if you will, of the major threats facing us, something that can spark public debate. We all know the cathartic effect the Auditor General's report has on government spending, people's expense accounts and all of that. We need a public report verified by experts, parliamentarians and others, who can begin that process of education. I understand well that what I am calling for may seem to make me one lone voice in the wilderness, because it goes against our national traditions. You start with the basis of public education. However useful reports and studies by the Senate are, you need a cumulative impact over time to begin that process of education. I have always thought that major annual reports, audits and scans are critical parts of public policy and public education. We need a process of national threat assessment in this country.
You then need an organization that can carry out the enhanced preparedness role for which I am advocating. There are many elements to that. I do not know whether your committee has looked in detail at the issue of intelligence, the role of CSIS. In this world of security, intelligence is like the blood in our bodies. It is the essential nutrient that keeps the whole body moving. Information is like that blood. Intelligence is like that blood. We need a collection system that continues to pump that intelligence and to put it forward before decision makers, where it should be known.
I have been critiquing some places by referring to the American model, the National Security Council. Instead, we can look at Australia. That country has a foreign intelligence service, a domestic intelligence service and the Office of National Assessment to take that intelligence, reduce it to its critical components and disseminate it around the system. They also have signal intelligence, as we have. Australia is a smaller country than ours and not as rich. Yet they have a security apparatus far more sophisticated than ours. They live, admittedly, in a traditionally much rougher neighbourhood, in the Pacific. Without making any invidious comparisons, there has been much turmoil in Indonesia, for example, with the recent Bali bombing and so on. Australians have an almost instinctively greater cognition about the threats in their area than we do here because we believe the United States can protect us. They have therefore put in place, in my view, a much more spruce and intelligent array of tools to organize oneself for preparedness and intelligence.
We need major investments in our intelligence-gathering and dissemination facilities. If CSIS wants to place agents abroad, where we have our own particular Canadian interest that is different from or more intense than the NATO or the American interest, that can occur. We are a state with interests, too. We have a variety of groups in Canada who are good Canadians, but they are sometimes affected by events abroad. CSIS should have the resources for a foreign component, if that is required.
We need to bring back the functions of intelligence assessment. In Australia, they have the Office of National Assessment, and in Canada, we have the Privy Council Office. We need a major reorganization of the way in which we collect, assess and disseminate intelligence, which is currently done by the Privy Council Office, PCO. The Prime Minister's Office puts the seal of the most senior decision-makers on the issues of the day. Prime Ministers cannot have many priorities — three or five personal ones. If we had a Prime Minister and a Privy Council Office that made emergency preparedness, security and intelligence critical functions by making them the primary focus of the Privy Council machinery, with extensive resources for assessment and some ability to help man operations centres, then there would be a clear signal to the entire system of the importance of security preparedness in the eyes of the senior leadership.
The National Security Council in the United States has a staff of about 200. They have 25 to 30 who man the situation room in the basement of the West Wing, which was put in place by former President Kennedy in 1961-62. We need something similar in Canada. We need a body of that magnitude to collect intelligence daily, prepare intelligence briefings for ministers and for the Prime Minister, disseminate the intelligence throughout the system and participate in joint exercises. I will give you a case in point.
There was a major exercise in May 2003 called Top Off 2 that involved about 18 departments and agencies, including the Government of British Columbia and the Department of Homeland Security. Canada participated in that exercise, but I have been told by several people that it took a great deal of work from Canadian officials involved to persuade the assistant deputy ministers and others that it was real and that they should take a little time off from administrative duties to participate in the exercise. These are busy men and women running big departments but, not to be mean, after September 11, considerable time had to be spent persuading important decision-makers that the exercise was a priority worthy of a day or two. It was one more indication that we still do not get it when it comes to the importance of the security issue. In the United States, someone like Senator Sam Nunn plays the part of the president, former Secretaries of Defense play themselves, and so on. There is an acceptance across their system that the simulated exercises are important. In Canada, we have to beg people to do their job properly.
I almost guarantee that if we had a preparedness council in the Privy Council Office reporting to the Prime Minister or the Deputy Prime Minister, those ADMs would not only be there, they would arrive early. That would make the difference, when the importance is shown at the centre.
Therefore, we need a major increase in our central capability to manage the emergency preparedness file. We need a major political buy-in. We should have the cabinet committee reappointed, and either the Deputy Prime Minister or the Prime Minister to have a major increase in the Privy Council resources. In my paper, I call for a preparedness committee — the National Security Council in the United States and a preparedness council in Canada. Those organizational steps would begin to have a major impact.
Third, I propose all of this because of concern about Canadians and about what the next pan-epidemic could do, after we saw what SARS could do, and what the next animal disease outbreak could do, after we have seen what mad cow disease has done. After all the exercises, we would have a better understanding of the potential loss of life and economic devastation in our country. All of that is a plea for the federal government in Ottawa to take this issue seriously, to protect Canadians.
However, there is a side benefit: Security is easily the primary concern of the current American administration and of any conceivable American administration — Democratic or Republican. The United States was traumatized by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, and even more so by the second surprise attack that occurred September 11. It is now a cliché that bears repeating: In the United States, security trumps almost any other set of issues. That will not change in our lifetime or over the next generation.
Canada is a junior partner, and in my view, that means we have to be the most proactive. It is not the big elephant that needs to act more quickly, but rather the mongoose at its feet. We have not been doing that. In respect of the border initiatives, I give Mr. Manley and officials from Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, CCRA, credit. Canada had a plan and several ideas, many of which have been accepted by the United States.
Americans will react to our initiatives. I think it quite unlikely that they would ever suggest initiatives of their own. Therefore, as the smaller power, we should be the quicker, thinking through a variety of strategies on a host of security issues to put before the Americans, as we have begun to do on the border initiatives. We should think about port security and airport security. I have read some of the reports of this committee on security at ports and airports, and I believe that 1 in 20,000 cargo loads is examined. There is a host of port security issues such that if Canada were to make a major commitment to this area, the creativity of ideas could make up for our lack of size and heft. That has always been the Canadian way — the Pearsonian formula — to think things through and be bolder, which we can afford to do because we are a middle power. In that way, we might be able to get the big players to move. That is the approach that we should take on national security and preparedness.
It is amazing to read and analyze the diaries of the Eisenhower administration, during the St. Laurent era in Canada, and compare them to what Americans say about us today. In those days, Republicans said that Canada was the example to be followed. Former President Eisenhower said that he wished America had a minister like C.D. Howe. I am not sure that the current U.S. President wishes that he had many ministers that he could name, if any.
Whether we like it or not, with the country now so dependent on American trade — for 40 per cent of our GNP — it is an absolute necessity to keep the border open. That is critical to our well-being. The various simulation exercises that I spoke about show that the border closes with a snap within hours of an incident and that the time it takes to re-open it is unknown. Thus, this is the time for us to be proactive, to look at a series of accords, to have the sinews of cooperation in place well before these events occur, so that we have operating procedures in place before the inevitable happens.
This is a case in which Canada must be proactive and not reactive. Also, everything that I have talked about — reorganizing and putting a major emphasis on a preparedness council in the Privy Council Office — could be done without enormous costs, although there would be some. We should have an operational centre as part of this infrastructure investment. Our various departments need not only their own operational centres, but also backups. When there was some suggestion in the agriculture department that they might have an anthrax attack there, their operations centre was in their main office, not surprisingly, but it closed down. What do you do if you do not have a backup? Mr. Giuliani, former Mayor of New York, said in the book he wrote after September 11 that one of his biggest problems was that New York's operations centre was in the World Trade Center. They had to scramble to find a second operations centre. Those are the nuts and bolts of emergency preparation that we should put in place, at some, but not enormous cost.
If we do all those things, if we make a major investment in infrastructure, security preparedness and reorienting our cabinet decision-making system around security and intelligence, as well as conducting a national threat assessment or audit every year, then that process of education can start now. Then, in time, and I hope quickly, we will be able to build a public constituency for larger increases in investment that we need in DND and a variety of other areas. I talk about needing investments of at least an additional $2 billion per year, not just for DND but national security issues writ broadly. This will not happen in 2003-04. However, if we begin the kind of education program, with the kinds of backup and infrastructure I am talking about, in time, we can begin to persuade Canadians of what I think is an ever clear and present danger. Once we do that, we may be able to build a public constituency behind the reallocation of resources that I think we require.
You start with some doable steps, such as changing our decision-making machinery and making preparedness a core function of government. I wrote this in one of my columns, which I have also submitted to the committee along with my paper. I have personal experience of this. In the mid-1970s, federal-provincial relations was an ever accelerating and enormously increased government file. At that point, the PQ had not been elected, but they were a very strong force in Quebec. It did not take a rocket scientist to figure out we would be involved in a continuing dialogue with Quebecers on whether they should stay attached to this country or not.
At that time, the Trudeau government made a major commitment to the kind of organizational overhaul that I am calling for now for preparedness. Gordon Robertson, the then Clerk of the Privy Council, one of our best public servants, if not the best, was made Secretary to the Cabinet for Federal-Provincial Relations. A whole operational unit was created for federal-provincial relations. One of our strongest ministers, Marc Lalonde, became the Minister for Federal-Provincial Relations. That secretariat had links both to the Prime Minister and one of our strongest ministers and quickly became a horizontal agency that was absolutely critical to the Government of Canada's response to a series of events in federal-provincial relations, not the least of which was the election of Mr. Levesque in 1976.
The kinds of organizational changes I am calling for now have occurred in our past, when another government and another Prime Minister realized we were facing not an average threat, but an incredible threat. We are now facing multiple incredible threats, such as epidemics and possible terrorist incidents. We need the same kind of commitment at the centre to have this country be prepared.
I will end with this statement: When John F. Kennedy was a student, he wrote a book called Why England Slept. It was about the 1930s and the lack of attention paid to Hitler and the lack of preparedness in Britain at the time. He said that the 1930s were years in which the locusts ate.
Senators, listen carefully, the locusts are munching.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Dr. Axworthy. It was a compelling and provocative dissertation, and well worth listening to. I far prefer the mongoose-elephant analogy to the mouse-elephant analogy.
Senator Banks: Thank you for being with us, Mr. Axworthy, and for reinforcing in many respects some of the things we have been saying. You mentioned having read some of our reports. You know that in some substance, we agree with you. I want to ask you to spend a little more time than you already have telling us whether you think the locusts can be put off, whether you think in the present circumstance we can successfully urge the government and the people to be prepared.
You have referred to When England Slept. There is an author named John Keegan who wrote a book entitled, The Face of Battle, and who pointed out that the first thing nations that regard themselves as being peace loving forget is that when it comes down to it, there is only one thing that stands between them and the loss of their freedom. That one thing is ability, capacity and willingness, in certain circumstances, to fight.
Successive governments in Canada of all stripes have moved away from that thinking. You talked about a peace dividend, which we regard with some suspicion now, hindsight being 20/20.
Do you think we can actually convince this or any government, and the people from whom that will flow, to make the leap to close that gap and to get after the locusts? Do you think that is doable?
Mr. Axworthy: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Perhaps it begins in the Senate with this committee.
I do, and I am not Pollyannaish about it. I do because of this: In the beginning, governments were created to provide security. Since that time, we have added a whole variety of activities around the welfare state, redistribution, managing economies and everything else. If you go back to when governments were invented, when individuals decided they could not provide security for themselves or their families by their own individual action and that they had to come together to form a collectivity to provide defence against marauders, that was when the whole concept of government or the state originated. It is a core function. If people really think their security is imperilled, they will demand it very quickly. It is a core requirement and need of all of us, if we think we are really threatened. That is what has been missing in Canada. It is not that governments should not provide the core function of security. That is the first thing they were invented to do, above everything else.
I know what you mean when you say that this is a big leap. I began my remarks by saying that we in Canada have never been prepared, except for a brief period after the Korean War.
What I am calling for is not a small thing. What your committee has been working on is not a small thing.
Senator Banks: Even now, our best friends and closest neighbours have had their house knocked down. We have had forest fires the likes of which we have never had before. We have had SARS and mad cow disease. The dangers would seem to be clear and present, yet we still do not have a change in the mood of the public or the government to reflect what you are talking about. I guess I am just bemoaning a fact of life. I am not asking you for a solution. I am heartened that you think there is one.
Mr. Axworthy: I do think there is a tremendous opportunity now for political leadership in the country. I think the people are very receptive to this idea of security. I spend my summers in the Prairies. I was struck by how everyone was talking about mad cow disease. In Toronto, in March, finally Torontonians were discussing something other than real estate. They were discussing SARS.
When we look at the electricity blackout, we see 50 million Americans and Canadians who performed a lot better than the 5 or 10 of their political leaders. How many more blackouts do we need? We are breaking through that consciousness. I think that Canadians are beginning to get it, that there is something odd out there. The weather is not the same as it used to be. There are a lot of changes in their lives that are hard to decipher. Therefore, they begin to feel something is going on and, instinctively, begin to say, "What are my elected representatives doing to protect me from these demons coming across the threshold?"
I have a feeling that, unlike September 11, when Canadians opened their hearts to Americans because America had been attacked, Canadians themselves are now starting to realize that there is something amiss; that they will be personally impacted. It is not generosity toward Americans or threats to Americans that will make us move. It is the fact that we are worried about our own livelihoods, our own safety and our own children.
I think that the iceberg is beginning to melt for the public. We would make a mistake if we began a public education campaign focused on our obligations to our neighbours, which is why I began by talking about obligations to ourselves. I do not think Canadians would say, "Let's do one more thing to help the United States." I am trying to make the case that this is absolutely something we need to help ourselves, and I genuinely think that the public mood is beginning to gel out there. It requires some people here at the centre to recognize that opportunity and begin the massive job of public re-education that I would call for.
I would hope that we will have a new government soon and that that government will make the organizational changes about which I spoke, which can be done without bankrupting the treasury. That becomes a clear signal. I hope that the safety and security of Canada would become one of the major themes of the next campaign and that we can begin to take that felt need of Canadians and channel it into policy-attractive terms.
Senator Day: Dr. Axworthy, I am anxiously making written note of many of the ideas that you have stimulated. You have had a chance to see some of our reports, so, as Senator Banks has indicated, you know that we have been making some of these points. I welcome your comments with respect to public education. We feel that, as the Senate, we have an important role to play in helping develop public policy through education in our various reports. It will be a huge job — as you say, one step at a time — to change government and develop public safety and public preparedness as a core function across all of these silos. It is no longer the Department of Agriculture and no longer the Armed Forces. How do we begin that? Do we start with a report saying that it should be done, or will it begin when the Prime Minister decides that the Deputy Prime Minister has this as his or her core function and role, and then it filters down?
Mr. Axworthy: You go on a variety of tracks. There is no question that the job of this committee and the Senate as a whole is public education. The Senate has not only legislative duties, but it is like an ongoing royal commission on a variety of important areas. Senator Kirby has done it with health. This committee is doing it on defence. It is part of that continuing education.
The problem is that, alas, I do not think many Canadians read Senate reports. I do, because I am on airplanes all the time, and it does not take long to get through Maclean's these days, so the Senate provides me with a handy list of other things I can look at. That is something for the Senate as a whole to think about — presentation. What can you do to bring some real public acclaim to the very good work that is done in this institution?
As to the organizational changes, I do not think I am naive about Ottawa. It should not be that hard to sell. Everyone in Ottawa understands the importance of the border. You would have to be brain dead not to. The Smart Border agreement was an achievement. Mr. Manley personally played an important role in meeting with Tom Ridge, but one thing everyone realizes about government is that policies and institutions have to go beyond a personal friendship that people happen to strike up. We need institutions to build on those sinews. The organizational changes I am calling for — if we had a preparedness council that issued a national audit every year, et cetera — would begin to add to the reports and the activities of the Senate, the House of Commons and others in beginning this job of public education.
I am enough of a realist to know that a new government coming in does not necessarily have $2 billion or $3 billion or $4 billion to spend on the areas I wish we could spend it on. I think we need a major reallocation. That reallocation will not happen, if Senator Banks and I are right, unless Canadians support it and accept it, and even demand it. Therefore, you need to begin channelling your broadly based educational efforts, and one way to do that is to make the organizational changes that we should be making in order to better prepare for the emergencies we know are coming.
Start with the organizations. That is a few million. That is not a tiny amount, but it is a few million, not a few billion. Then, begin a series of proactive steps to lead to a campaign for reinvestment in capability assets that I also think we desperately need. It would be futile for me to be talking about a doubling in our national security budgets, et cetera. That will not happen unless we can turn public opinion around.
My point to Senator Banks is that there is a real opportunity, because now, after this winter, spring and summer, Canadians know there is something amiss. Now is the time for leadership to decide to put organizations and frameworks in place to begin to better prepare us, and in time we can start to build a consensus around the need for a reallocation of resources.
Senator Day: Do Canadians know there is something amiss in the many different areas that we have been dealing with in silos, and that we deal with here at the Senate in various pieces? You referred to Senator Kirby's committee's work, and Senator Oliver is working on global climate change. We could trace back a lot of the information that we received in that committee. It is inevitable there will be major forest fires. We see it in Kelowna. There will be ice storms. There will be flooding. All of that is predicted now, and we talk about that within agriculture and forestry, but no one is bringing these various reports together to talk about the core issue of national preparedness and safety.
Mr. Axworthy: Senator, you are absolutely right. This is a horizontal issue in government. We are divided vertically. My experience in government has been that everything cannot be horizontal; otherwise, you would have a centre and nothing would be done in the line departments. There are one or two or three horizontal issues where you can get the whole system to understand this is a priority, but that takes the muscle of the Prime Minister's Office and the Privy Council Office at the centre.
You said a second thing that is also important, and it is in my paper, and I want to bring it to the attention of senators. My idea for a preparedness council would not just involve the Privy Council Office, because you mentioned, quite correctly, that there are also municipalities and provinces and a whole host of institutions that are connected in the preparedness debate. In my preparedness council, I would also have representatives of the municipalities and the provinces. They are on the council, in the operations centre. It is our provinces and our local hospitals and our municipalities that have to be the first responders. We want to have instantaneous cooperation. The way to do that is to have a seamless organization established well before, so they know each other, they have been seconded and they work well together. If we could create a preparedness council that included members of provincial departments and local municipalities and emergency measures organizations, those sinews of cooperation would begin to grow. We would be able to add municipalities and provinces to the coalition promoting more emergency preparedness.
I would go one step further. We would be talking about the border and so on with the United States. I would have members of the United States National Security Council on our preparedness council, and I would try to persuade either the Department of Homeland Security or their National Security Council to include members of our preparedness council. That would be taking the NORAD idea — which is not a total integration, but we have a wonderful interlocking of officers in NORAD — and trying to make an ad hoc arrangement in a preparedness organization that would do the same, so that the patterns of cooperation with our American allies and colleagues on the border, and with the provinces, municipalities and first responders, would have been predetermined.
The idea of a preparedness council is not just of an Ottawa institution; it is inviting other key decision makers to be there at the centre to help us plan simulation exercises and make things work. This is trying to get a coalition of the willing to look at preparedness as a major issue, and if Ottawa would show that it was interested in and open to preparedness, then we would have a chance of creating a real national coalition.
As you know, the potential for a Fraser River flood, forest fires — these things are happening in every province and region. We need that instantaneous cooperation, beginning with making them part of the picture in Ottawa.
Senator Day: This is a little different area I would like you to comment on. You talk about increasing the Armed Forces, and you point out in one of your papers the role the Armed Forces have played. We saw it recently in the Okanagan, with the forest fires, with the freezing rain, and a number of different areas like that where the Armed Forces have been involved. You recommend training and increasing the forces.
There are some thinkers, and some people within the Armed Forces, who feel the forces should be a hard, battle-ready group, and that this other function does not fit in with the traditional role. Have you done any thinking about a National Guard-type of role for part of the Armed Forces, or perhaps for the reserve?
Mr. Axworthy: Exactly. If I were running DND, or was the Chief of Defence Staff, I would like to build a public constituency for my people. One way of doing that is fighting fires and helping out in ice storms. Yes, you need hard-edge capabilities for war fighting, but support for the civil power is also a traditional use of an efficient organization.
Stop and think about it. How many actual tools and instruments does a decision maker have to say, "Right, I need to put 2,000 people in who can do something right away"? How many organizations within the Government of Canada could we order to move 2,000 people in 10 hours to Swift Current to fight a series of problems? What will we do, move the Department of Transport?
Armed Forces are fungible; they are usable in many different categories. They have to be trained in the terrible specialty of how to kill. They are more than an aid to the civil power, but aid to the civil power is a perfectly legitimate and important function that builds constituencies. In Winnipeg, you never saw such support for the Armed Forces as when they were fighting the floods in 1997. The ice storm crisis in Montreal is another example; people see our troops carrying out dangerous missions, and helping them. I think that is important.
That could also contribute to cost effectiveness. Our forces are stretched right now in terms of trying to carry out dangerous missions in Afghanistan or Bosnia, but that strikes me as a perfectly natural role for the reserve.
Our reserve is much too small. We should have Armed Forces, in my view, of 80,000 to 90,000 and a reserve of about 50,000. Those Canadians should be well trained. The kind of tasks I am talking about can be well understood. It takes a lot of training to learn how to fly a CF-18, a little less to learn how to fly a helicopter — that is, if we had any helicopters to fly — and aid to the civil power functions would be a natural and very useful element of the reserves.
I am in favour not only of a larger complement in our Armed Forces, but of a much greater concentration on the reserves, with a series of these kinds of functions for which they can be trained. That would probably be a more effective use of the reserve, while keeping our best-trained troops for the dangerous missions abroad.
You would want to have some interoperability, but there is a whole host of functions that would provide general support for preparedness. I would think that would be made to order for the reserves, which are sometimes grasping for a role. Defence is so complicated, sophisticated and difficult. However, there is a range of critical but lower-level tasks. Since we have reserve units across the country, they could do their training with the first responders from the hospitals in Surrey, et cetera. It is a natural fit to me, and that is where I would put my emphasis, senator.
Senator Day: Thank you for your comments.
Senator Smith: I should point out that Mr. Axworthy and I go back almost 40 years. We could tell a variety of war stories tonight, but we will not go down that road.
Senator Day has touched on part of the issue that I want to get at. Assuming, hopefully, we can get more dollars for defence and security — and everyone on this committee believes it should be a high priority — I am inviting your comment on how whatever amount of dollars is best spent in a post-Cold War and post-9/11 era. The traditional military apparatus was structured for traditional battlefields, where you have one set of forces going up against another. I am not aware of any scenario around the globe at the moment where that is apt to happen in the traditional sense.
I do think that we will continue to have peacekeeping missions, and I am a big supporter of those. I think it is a great tradition for Canada and a great opportunity for people to get training and be ready for a whole variety of situations.
I recently had lunch with an enlisted man who had gone on six overseas tours — a couple in Bosnia, one in Kosovo, one in the Golan Heights, one in Africa and one relief mission in Honduras. I asked in how many of those would tanks have been useful. He laughed and said none of them, really. He explained it. I am not suggesting all the tanks have to be mothballed, but he was talking about these LAVs, and he loves Hummers and things like that. Sometimes, I hope that our submarines will prove to be useful.
However, how are those dollars best spent when the Cold War challenges that a lot of this apparatus was developed to respond to are gone? I do not know how you anticipate SARS, but I suppose if you are ready to deal with bio-terrorism, which you cannot ignore, that helps. Where should the emphasis be between traditional defence-type apparatus and post-9/11 terrorism? How do you balance these things?
Mr. Axworthy: I think the greatest threats are thepost-9/11 kind, where terrorists can use weapons of mass destruction, bio-terrorism or other strategies. The exercise I talked about, Top Off 2, began with terrorists releasing plague in Chicago, which then spread through the continent. The military has a role in fighting terrorism, but it is not a large one, which is why I have talked about preparedness and national security writ large. That is such things as intelligence and intelligence dissemination; preparation exercises; looking at either stockpiling the medicines we need or having some production facilities to create them — a lot of them cannot be stockpiled because they deteriorate — looking at a variety of production facilities to protect us; having established coordination with our allies; ensuring that the electronic communication establishment has all the facilities it needs to keep up our intelligence sharing, which has been part of an agreement since 1948. All of those, senator, are security issues, but they are also issues around the privatization of war. That is what we are facing now. The Clausewitz view of war between states — the Westphalian view — is receding. It is not gone totally; North Korea still presents a very dangerous situation.
I talked about a national threat assessment. If I were part of that study group, the threat assessment would deal with the post-9/11 world in a host of areas before the possibility of an armed attack on Canada through traditional state means.
There is certainly still a role for traditional Armed Forces, because we use a misnomer in the country, in that the peacekeeping our forces are involved in now is not the peacekeeping that Mr. Pearson invented. The peacekeeping that he invented is where the parties to the dispute agreed that there should be an interposition of forces that would keep them apart while they began the preparations for peace and dialogue. I think that we have done a disservice to our men and women in our Armed Forces by calling operations like Afghanistan "peacekeeping." It is no peacekeeping that I know about. The Taliban are gearing up again. They have mortars and rockets and love to use them. One can argue whether the Taliban is involved in state war, but that is a more traditional Armed Forces conflict. We also had that in Croatia. There are a variety of war-fighting situations to which we may want to contribute our troops, and the image of peacekeeping with a baton in Cyprus is long gone. We have put our forces into very dangerous places. They may not need tanks, but they certainly need Coyotes and all kinds of traditional armoured capability, because we are putting them into quasi-wars.
In a time of scarce resources, what I am saying in this presentation is that if more can be found, I would put them into the infrastructure, CSIS and the communications establishment, to build the case on why we should require more for DND. There is one clear resource we require for peacekeeping, war fighting and emergency preparedness; that is sea and air transport. We cannot do anything in any of those areas if we do not have planes to take the medicine or the troops or ships to unload the supplies.
This committee knows how perilous are our air transport and sea transport capabilities — helicopters, sealift. That is the kind of investment in infrastructure we should make immediately in the defence department, because that is a means that we require for all those threats, whether a flood in the Fraser Valley, a peacekeeping mission or war fighting.
If I had any influence, we would begin with investments in the transport capability, which has an impact on all the threats that we are talking about.
Senator Wiebe: Dr. Axworthy, it was wonderfully refreshing to hear your comments on how important it was to increase the size and effectiveness of our reserve units throughout Canada. I believe they have played and can play a very vital role in the future.
Your comments tonight about the people of Canada feeling that governments would provide them with the necessary security reflect something that has always existed. That feeling was certainly shattered on September 11, when it was proved that governments were not providing that kind of security. One of the best ways, of course, is through prevention rather than reaction. However, prevention requires a very sophisticated and effective intelligence-gathering service. The problem that our committee and politicians will have is convincing the general public of how important intelligence is and yet still maintaining their privacy. How do we address that situation?
Mr. Axworthy: I used a metaphor likening intelligence to arterial blood in our bodies. It is absolutely essential in countering all the threats I have been talking about. It starts with intelligence collection, analysis and then dissemination.
A state like Australia has a foreign intelligence service. I do not think we need a new foreign intelligence service. I think we have to provide more resources to CSIS if they think they need agents abroad.
There are issues, worries and fears. We all see the spy movies. I think part of the public perception is that increased capability in these areas will be used against people's civil liberties, but I think we have to make a case that we have our own interests and have to have our own protection.
I am sure this committee has studied the Ressam case. We were so lucky that the gentleman who was picked up in the state of Washington before the bombing in Los Angeles was not a suicide bomber, and that when the U.S. Customs agents were looking at the kinds of explosives and the nitroglycerine that he had in his trunk, the first one who dived to the floor was Ressam. If he had been a suicide bomber — and some of his accomplices had plans to bomb Jewish sites in Montreal — we could have had a terrible incident. It is only intelligence, not the military. The military is good at satellite technology and others, and we need the communications establishment to help us with that, but you need human intelligence to find out those sources, you need intelligence cooperation. The French were watching Ressam. We did not work efficiently enough to get their information to pick this person up before he almost committed a variety of horrors.
In the world of intelligence, they do not just give it to you; intelligence involves trades. I do not mean it is a barter system, but if we have a particular expertise in and knowledge about one element of security threat or one kind of group, that is regarded as useful for NATO intelligence, for the Americans and British and the others. We cannot just be consumers of everybody else's intelligence. We have to be suppliers of intelligence on these people who may have access to our facilities and people on our shore.
Of all the things I am talking about on preparedness, Canada's active intelligence role is one of the most difficult. I repeat that states like Australia and Sweden have a foreign intelligence service. I think the threats are greatest from activities that could begin abroad and come to our shore.
You find out about that by having the best kind of intelligence cooperation with a host of allies. You have the best kind of intelligence by investing in some assets and abilities in that yourself, so that you can trade and exchange and work cooperatively.
People do not like free riders anywhere and they do not like them in intelligence.
Senator Wiebe: Just as follow-up to that, to see what your thoughts are, going back to September 11, there are indications now that the intelligence people had some wind of this.
Were we afraid to react for fear that we were wrong, or were we thinking that no one would ever do something as silly as that?
Mr. Axworthy: Many Americans have commented on this. The real difficulty around what happened on September 11 is that the signals were going up, but the FBI had information that, if the National Security Council or the CIA had known about it, might have made a big difference. The problem there, and I made this point to Senator Day, is that in the American system consisting of the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Council and others, the two large battalions, the CIA and the FBI, were famous for not cooperating with each other. They were competitive with each other. They used to withhold information from each other. I will not get into why. There is a long pathology, since J. Edgar Hoover, of the FBI not cooperating with the CIA. They do not do it. Interestingly enough, in the Department of Homeland Security, and I do not support creating that in Canada, the two agencies that should be there and are not are the FBI and the CIA. They have everyone else and the kitchen sink in the Department of Homeland Security, except the two agencies that did not cooperate on September 11. You have a real issue there, which is sharing information. That is why, for Canada, I am calling for a preparedness council, where we would be sharing information between a variety of departments: CSIS, the RCMP, Solicitor General, CCRA and so on.
They had a problem there with a lack of coordination and lack of sharing. Because of that lack of sharing, they were not alerted quickly enough to the immediacy of the bin Laden plot. The contours of the bin Laden plot, including using airliners as missiles, was well known as a possible scenario. The key factor is when a potential terrorist who had flight training was picked up in Minnesota. Had the right people known, they would have said, "God, it will come soon." However, it was not passed on. In that case, it was not so much an intelligence failure; it was a dissemination failure. That was not our issue.
Senator Wiebe: How great a problem do we have here in Canada in regard to sharing information? "Fractured" is the wrong term to use, but we seem to have a very diverse group of police forces across the country: port police, provincial police, city police, county police, RCMP, CSIS and so on. Have we diluted things so much that we have to start looking at consolidating, or can we accomplish this by sharing?
Mr. Axworthy: We can accomplish a lot by sharing, particularly through an organization. Sharing is not having meetings of deputy ministers once a month to talk about things, or police chiefs meeting once a year at an annual convention. Sharing is when you are part of a team whose members talk daily to one another, think through things daily, have operating procedures to meet a variety of crises and so on. That is where we are missing the boat in Canada.
After the ice storm in Quebec, we found that more than half the municipalities did not have an emergency preparedness plan. I wonder how many municipalities in Canada today have an up-to-date emergency preparedness plan for their ice crisis or their fire or whatever. Who is asking them? Who has brought them together in one organization so it is a regular routine to determine what various cities have in place? You need a continuous stream of requests, responses, agreed-upon protocols and procedures, as well as the human factor — getting to know a variety of people, including the police forces. In the kind of structure I am talking about, we would be seconding the best from a variety of places and jurisdictions to learn how best to work together.
At least in Canada, it makes more sense to me to try to create coordination and dissemination at the top of an organization, the way I have talked about it, rather than going through the organizational changes of amalgamation. Often in Ottawa, when there is really no idea of what to do and no money, we have a structural reorganization. It keeps people busy, but you lose so much in transaction costs through people changing job allocations and so on. I am not sure that a series of amalgamations is required. I am sure that we need a systematic, coordinating body that shares information, shares planning, has operational plans, begins teamwork and has pre-established protocols at home and internationally, and with our provinces. That is where I would start, as opposed to the amalgamation route.
The Chairman: Dr. Axworthy, it is not hard to buy into your proposal about how to deal with the Americans. The "cap in hand, how can we help you" approach does not cut it with Canadian voters, and the Americans look on it with contempt. We have to lead the way and set Canadian standards that suit Canadians and will probably exceed American standards. We can then say to the Americans, "Are you matching our standards?" I think that is the right way to go to the bargaining table with those people.
Mr. Axworthy: I would like to be a first mover on preparedness.
The Chairman: Hear, hear. In the proposal you have put before the committee, is the U.S. file included in the PCO and under the Deputy Prime Minister in the structure you are contemplating?
Mr. Axworthy: I would have the border issue and all of its arrangements there, yes.
The Chairman: That was the only missing point that I saw in your presentation, which I thought was very compelling.
You have given us a very comprehensive set of answers and a very useful commentary. You asked who has been asking the municipalities. This committee has asked over 100 municipalities about their problems and capabilities, and we have had answers back from over 50. In due course, we will be coming forward with them.
Mr. Axworthy: Of the many things I am talking about, one would be, for example, a closed federal-provincial meeting where the issue was preparedness. The Prime Minister would be asking the premiers to give a report on what the preparedness situation was in their provinces, towns and communities. One of the advantages of this kind of meeting is that it forces everyone to work at it. I am talking about real attention from the top. What a difference it would make to a variety of those municipalities if they knew that their premier was asking for what they were doing on this file, where was the generator and what were they doing about electricity, because he had to be prepared in case the Prime Minister was talking about it at a closed session at 24 Sussex Drive.
The Chairman: While some provinces seem to have close cooperation with municipalities, in others there is a major disconnect. The municipalities are making it known to us, and eventually we will be making it known to anyone who asks.
I thank you very much for appearing before us. Your presentation was helpful. The paper is useful. We would like to have the opportunity, as we reflect on what you have had to say, to ask you more questions. We would also like to indicate to you that we would like to have you appear before us again at some future time to assist us in the course of our studies.
I should tell you that some members of the committee tried very hard to be here, but they found themselves victims of the hurricane on the East Coast, which is another emergency that just came up. We had an opportunity to review the emergency preparedness in Halifax last Tuesday with both the municipality and the province. We did not know about the weather conditions that were coming up, but we were impressed with the quality of their presentations.
Mr. Axworthy: Thank you for the opportunity.
The Chairman: If you have any questions or comments, please visit our Web site at 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.
Senators, I do not want to tie up Dr. Axworthy unnecessarily. Some of us would love to talk to him briefly after the meeting. First, however, there is a motion I need to put before the committee. It is a motion we will be putting, in part, again to our colleagues who could not be here, and it is to refer the study to the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs. They want to put it to the Senate tomorrow. To enable them to do that, we need to authorize it this evening. Could I have a motion? Senator Banks and Senator Smith both move the motion. This motion will be conditional on us getting someone from the other side to also support the motion before it goes forward in the chamber, which the clerk will do in writing. Those in favour?
Ms. Barbara Reynolds, Clerk of the Committee: Mr. Chair, if I could explain: The chamber has already sent this to the full committee. This is simply a motion to delegate it to the subcommittee so that they can undertake it and look at their budget proposal on Wednesday.
The Chairman: I am relieved that someone has this straight, and we understand why the clerk is sitting to my left. Thank you, that is helpful. Having had that clarification, those in favour?
Senator Day: In favour of delegating this to the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs?
The Chairman: Yes.
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chairman: The motion is carried, and this meeting is now adjourned.
The committee adjourned.