Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence
Issue 3 - Evidence - Meeting of February 24, 2014
OTTAWA, Monday, February 24, 2014
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 1 p.m. to study the policies, practices and collaborative efforts of Canada Border Services Agency in determining admissibility to Canada and removal of inadmissible individuals; and the status of Canada's international security and defence relations, including but not limited to relations with the United States, NATO and NORAD (topic: ballistic missile defence).
Senator Daniel Lang (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence for Monday, February 24, 2014. Before we welcome our witnesses, I would like to begin by introducing the people around the table. My name is Dan Lang, senator for Yukon. On my immediate left is the clerk of the committee, Josée Thérien. On my right is the Library of Parliament analyst assigned to the committee, Holly Porteous. I would like to go around the table and invite the senators to introduce themselves and state the region they represent, starting with the deputy chair, Senator Dallaire.
[Translation]
Senator Dallaire: Roméo Dallaire, Gulf of the St. Lawrence.
[English]
Senator Mitchell: Grant Mitchell, Alberta.
Senator Day: Liberal senator from New Brunswick, Joseph Day.
Senator Ngo: Senator Ngo from Ontario.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Jean-Guy Dagenais, a senator from Quebec, the Montreal region.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you, colleagues. On December 12, 2013, the Senate adopted our two study references, which we will be covering today. The first two panels will cover the Canada Border Services Agency, and in our third panel we will continue our examination of ballistic missile defence.
Today we're pleased to welcome a man who is not unfamiliar to senators these days, Mr. Michael Ferguson, Auditor General of Canada, along with his associates, Mr. Nicholas Swales and Ms. Joanne Butler.
In his fall 2013 report, the Auditor General looked at preventing illegal entry into Canada, a report that helped motivate this Senate study. In his report, the Auditor General said the following: Some people who pose a risk to Canadian safety and security have succeeded in entering the country illegally. Further, the Canada Border Services Agency has made little progress since 2007 in monitoring the results of all lookouts on known high-risk travellers, and it still does not monitor all missed lookouts, nor does it enter examination results on all intercepted lookouts. The report indicated that 15 per cent of lookouts were missed.
Furthermore, the Auditor General stated that the agency does not have the information it needs to know whether it's securing the border by decreasing the number of people who enter illegally. The report goes on to note the RCMP does not have the information it needs to assess the effectiveness of its interception activities.
Before we go further into the report, I understand Mr. Ferguson has an opening statement. I invite you to begin. We have one hour for this panel.
[Translation]
Michael Ferguson, Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada: Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity today to appear before the committee to discuss Chapter 5 of our fall 2013 report, Preventing Illegal Entry into Canada.
With me today are Nicholas Swales, Principal, and Joanne Butler, Director, who were responsible for this audit.
The Canada Border Services Agency and the RCMP share responsibility for preventing people from entering Canada illegally. The agency manages our ports of entry, where people are supposed to cross into Canada. But when they do not use those ports of entry, it is up to the RCMP to know about it and apprehend them.
Managing who crosses Canada's vast border is certainly a challenge — about 270,000 people cross into Canada every day. But it is an essential task that helps protect the safety and security of Canadians and the integrity of our immigration program. It is, therefore, very important that border controls work as they are supposed to. We raised concerns in our audit about how well these controls are working.
[English]
Mr. Chair, let me talk first about controls at the ports of entry and highlight three main challenges: getting information in advance in order to assess risks and identify high-risk travellers, taking appropriate action on lookouts and targets to identify high-risk individuals when they show up, and having good performance measures to know how well efforts are working and where to focus attention.
We found that the Canada Border Services Agency often does not get all the advance information it needs to identify and target high-risk travellers en route to Canada by air. In our sample, we found that the agency was missing some data for about 95 per cent of air passengers. This is concerning because without good air passenger data, targeting controls cannot operate as effectively as intended.
Nevertheless, we found that the agency has made significant progress in some of its efforts to detect high-risk travellers. The new national targeting program has good practices, but some targets are still missed. Our review showed that 8 per cent of targets were not examined as required. These are people whom the agency had identified as high-risk from the advance information it did have. These findings are important because targets are intended to intercept individuals who may pose a threat to the security and safety of Canadians.
The agency has also made little progress since 2007 in monitoring the results of lookouts. Lookouts are notices designed to intercept known high-risk individuals connected to organized crime, terrorism or irregular migration who may attempt to enter Canada. We found that 15 per cent of lookouts were missed, which means people who should have been further examined were not examined before they entered Canada. We found that the agency still does not monitor information about all missed lookouts, nor does it record information on examination results for all people who have been intercepted as a result of lookouts.
[Translation]
Border services officers rely on the agency's information systems to tell them which travellers must be sent to secondary inspection. However, these systems go down from time to time. Although the agency reviews the impact of system outages, it could not tell us what availability level it needs before operations are affected.
Mr. Chair, between the ports of entry, we found that the RCMP does not have information on its success in intercepting people trying to enter the country illegally. This finding is important because, without systematic performance information, the RCMP does not know whether resources are placed where they can be most effective.
We reviewed data in the information systems of both the RCMP and the agency and found that the RCMP's Integrated Border Enforcement Teams intercepted just over half of known illegal entries. The Marine Security Enforcement Teams intercepted known illegal entries more often. However, without consistent measurement, it is not possible to determine what rate of interception is acceptable, or whether the RCMP's ability to prevent illegal entry is improving or declining. The RCMP needs a framework to measure and monitor how well its border enforcement activities are doing.
[English]
The Canada Border Services Agency and the RCMP have agreed with our recommendations and they made several commitments in their responses. Both organizations have also tabled action plans with the Standing Committee on Public Accounts in order to address our recommendations.
The committee may also be interested to know that in 2011, we published a chapter on issuing visas and, in 2008, a chapter on the detention and removal of individuals. However, we have not audited actions taken in these two areas since then.
Mr. Chair, this concludes my opening remarks. We would be happy to answer any questions the committee may have. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Your report and presentation have certainly gotten our attention.
I'd like to start off with a question, if I may, colleagues. In my review of the issue of determining admissibility and inadmissibility, I observed that one of the weakest areas we have is at the points prior to reaching the port of entry, in other words, from the country that they originate from. I'm just wondering whether your office is looking at or is planning to look at the screening procedures in place in our foreign consulates and embassies in determining admissibility and inadmissibility to Canada, especially when you look at the numbers that are coming into this country on an annual basis, which is almost at the point of exceeding 100 million per year. Has any thought been given to that?
Mr. Ferguson: I'll ask Mr. Swales to provide a bit more detail, but certainly it wasn't the focus of this audit. We may have touched on some aspects of that perhaps in some past audits, but I'll ask Mr. Swales if he can provide any further detail.
Nicholas Swales, Principal, Office of the Auditor General of Canada: There are two aspects here. One is the piece we touched on here, which is the screening at the point of boarding. The other piece is the issuing of visas and other travel documents by embassies and consulates abroad, which I think is what you may have been specifically referring to. That was the subject matter of our 2011 audit. As Mr. Ferguson said, we haven't done any work on that since, but it did make a number of significant recommendations, and we are giving serious consideration to revisiting that question.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Swales.
Senator Dallaire: With respect to the comments raised by Mr. Ferguson about the CBSA and the RCMP apparently being willing to implement the recommendations in your policy of going back a year and looking at how they have actually done, that will certainly be most useful in this case. I hope we will return within a year and bring them forward and see how they're doing at implementing the recommendations they promised they would do.
My question is more about the structure. I looked at the areas where there seemed to be gaps in information flow and actions taken between those on the front lines and the headquarters, the ability of the systems to actually talk to each other and interface, and levels of breakdown. With CBSA still being relatively young in its new structure, if it's sort of a paramilitary outfit, particularly now that a bunch of them are armed, do you see an ethos in there of being structured where intelligence gathering is a very deliberate function, command and control of information and the field capabilities are a very deliberate function, and the operations day-to-day are a deliberate oversight with a headquarters type of concept? Is such an ethos being created there to run it in a paramilitary way, or is it more managerial in construct? I don't want to be pejorative here.
Mr. Ferguson: Certainly, I can't go into much detail on that. I would ask Mr. Swales to provide more elaboration.
One thing I would say, with whatever organizational structure they have, I think we have pointed out that there are some lapses in information. They have some information that's available to them that they're not always able to act on at the exact moment. Essentially, we feel, regardless of organizational structure, that it's possible for them to improve the results of the work that they are doing. They have information and resources available to them in order to do a better job of monitoring some of these things at the border.
Again, I'll ask Mr. Swales if he has anything further to add on the organizational structure.
Mr. Swales: I think the thing I could add, and I think you can see this in the parliamentary accountability documents that CBSA produces every year, is that they have been working on their organizational structure over the course of those 10 years. They have changed it a number of times. Certainly, you can see it's an organization that has been working to find a way of organizing itself that is most effective.
Senator Dallaire: I'm looking for whether you have been able to sense within that entity that they are a very operationally focused capability in our security, that there is a sense of urgency in meeting the operational requirements of not only acting on intelligence but also making sure they're getting intelligence and whether or not they are perceived as seriously as they should be by the other security agencies that the country has, such as the RCMP and others. Is there a maturing process yet to happen there? I'm trying to figure out whether this is really an outfit that's in the field doing its full-time operational task or whether it still has a holdback type of managerial concept to it.
Mr. Ferguson: Thank you. We wouldn't question in any way the dedication of the organization to what it's intending to do. It does have a complex and difficult task, but again, I think there are places where it can improve its performance, even just through good management approaches, such as making sure it has the information it needs and making sure it's using that information in a way to tell it what's going on.
I can't explain how far down that maturity road they are. I think it's fair to say that, obviously, based on this audit, they still have some room for improvement, but I think again they're very dedicated to their mission. I would ask Mr. Swales if he would like to add anything.
Mr. Swales: Something we talk about in our latest reports, in paragraphs 562 to 564, that shows progress is indeed the work they have been doing on implementing an integrated risk management framework, which I know has a managerial sound to it. At the same time, it's critical to their doing their business effectively and efficiently, so they have made significant progress in putting that in place, which I think is an important piece of progress.
Within that context, we also looked at whether their linkages with their partners in doing that level of work were in place, and they were. I certainly think that some important progress has been made.
Senator Dallaire: Thank you. Second round for me.
Senator Segal: Always glad to welcome the Auditor General to the Senate of Canada; delighted to have you here and thank you for making time on this important issue.
Whenever we have the actual agencies such as CBSA and others that appear before us, usually one of our number asks them this question: Do you have, based on what you have been tasked to do and the nature of the threat as you see it, sufficient resources, both people and finance, to actually get the job done? The response we usually get is ``If we have difficulties, it's not for lack of resources or people.'' They very rarely have had, at least on the record before this committee, the history of saying, ``We don't have enough; we need more.''
Can I ask you the question, based on the audit you've done, whether you think the CBSA, in terms of the screening function in particular, has sufficient resources, assuming it takes time to configure it properly, and it takes experience, systems are always developing — accepting all of that, where I think your report is very thoughtful, do you think they have the resources necessary to deal with the onslaught of new pressures and legislative burdens they have been given?
Mr. Ferguson: Assessing the level of resources available to the agency wasn't the focus of the audit. I would say in a lot of ways we were looking at what they were doing within what they're trying to accomplish right now with the level of resources. Really what the audit focuses on is that there are a number of things they can do to improve their performance, even within, let's call it, the constraint of the resources that are available to them.
We feel that they can improve the compliance of the air carriers, for example, in providing information about passengers. We feel also that they can do a better job of identifying, whether it be their lookouts or targets, when those people show up at the border, and of processing them appropriately.
I really can't give a judgment about whether their resources are sufficient or not. In this type of business, you can always put more resources towards it. Even with the resources that they have, it's fair to say that they can improve their performance, and improve their performance in ways that would significantly impact their ability to identify people at the border.
Senator Segal: Just a follow-up, if I could. My assessment of the review that your office did of the CBSA's efforts seemed to suggest that there was a struggle relative to providing intelligence on the part of the agency and information to its front-line officers on a timely basis, that they weren't doing it quite as well as they might, and there are things they could do to improve that.
When I visited with our forces in Afghanistan, it was clear that over time, the Department of National Defence developed a real-time intelligence capacity from various sources, allied and others, so that connecting with the helmet cam of our armed combat folks, they could provide real-time information in a way that enhanced the effectiveness of combat operations and protected the safety of Canadians in uniform.
Clearly, from the point of view of how we all are dealt with when we come through the border, the ability of that computer screen on the Border Service Agency's desk to read the magnetic strip on the passport or come up with other data is fundamental to getting a higher level of intercept than I think your own report suggests they've been successful at achieving.
Do you have any specific views about whether that is a systematic problem? Is it about software that isn't sufficiently well developed? Is it about procedures that need more work? Is it about some barriers to the rapid movement of real-time intelligence, so that our border agents, whether it's in the drive through or the airports, have the data available?
Clearly, they've missed some people, and your report points to that statistic, but you don't make an unfair judgment about it. You just say there are some missing folks who get through, and it is a concern that needs to be addressed.
I would be interested in your advice as to whether there is something this committee can constructively recommend to assist the Border Services people to get that job done in a more efficient and effective way.
Mr. Ferguson: I will ask Mr. Swales to elaborate more, but I think, again, in this type of business, as many people around this table would be more aware than I am, being able to get information from its source to the people who need to act on it in a way that it is complete and timely is one of the fundamental challenges they face.
Again, as we indicate, the passenger information that they get from airlines is, I would say, usually incomplete. You're starting from that point. The point in time at which the information is gathered and can get transferred would be another issue. We also identified that sometimes, even though the information was there, some people were missed.
I think it's two things: It's making sure the information can be acted on, but it's also making sure the information is received.
If there's one thing the committee can encourage the department to do, it would really be in terms of some of the performance information. I think we indicated in the chapter, for example, that the department was reporting — in paragraph 25, we say: ``Despite the problems with incomplete advance information, the Agency reported an average 99 per cent rate of compliance by airlines for the 2011-12 fiscal year.'' In fact, the agency considered airlines to be in compliance if they supplied any advance passenger information on a flight.
I think a lot of what we have in here is that they can do a better job with the information they have, understanding what that information is and assessing their own performance with that information.
I'll ask Mr. Swales if he has anything else he would like to add.
Mr. Swales: Mr. Chair, the only specific observation I would add is that we didn't find any specific problems with the timeliness of information. It wasn't the ability to get information to the front lines once it was known. It was really having that information in the first place and then having some understanding of what happened in cases where that information wasn't acted on in the way that it should have been.
We did make a comment, of course, about the information systems that they have and the fact that there is some work for them to do, again along the same lines of understanding what they know and using it, about how often those systems go down. Obviously, if those systems are not there, then the ability of their screening functions to work is substantially reduced, so we thought it was important they have a better understanding of how often that was happening overall.
Senator Mitchell: Thanks for being here, all of you. I notice the official title of this chapter is ``Preventing Illegal Entry Into Canada.'' My question isn't only about people who enter illegally, but it concerns people who enter legally and then don't leave. There are two features of that, and my first question will address the first feature.
This is perhaps no more than rumour, but the suggestion is that temporary foreign workers arrive legally and then they are not tracked, so at the end of their term, which I think is about two years, some, many, maybe none, stay.
Was that within the scope of your audit? If so, what did you find out? What kind of record was there?
Mr. Ferguson: Certainly it was not the focus of the audit. I'll ask Mr. Swales if there were any specifics where we dealt with it.
Again, we were looking at entry and illegal entry. We were looking at how that is operating at the border to identify people who are trying to enter illegally. By definition, therefore, we were not looking at the people who entered legally.
Mr. Swales: I would say two things. One, you're touching on a very important point to bear in mind on this whole area, which is that the population people who are in the country illegally is not the same as the population of people who entered illegally. There are many circumstances — you described one — in which people entered legally and became illegal subsequently.
We didn't look at any of those inland enforcement functions or the question of overstays at all. I would say that we did mention in paragraph 26 of the report that the CBSA is working on an entry-exit system, or specifically the exit component, which will start to put them in a position to know whether people have left. This would also start to put them in a position to be able to look for the kinds of things you are talking about.
Senator Mitchell: So they don't actually have that.
It's so important at a human level, too, because so many people's relatives are not permitted to enter to visit a new grandchild or to come to a wedding or to visit because of this fear that they won't return. We deal with these kinds of problems all the time.
I wonder if that is an inflated concern. If they are not even measuring it, how do we know these people don't return? Yet it has such an impact on policy with respect to allowing people in the country.
My second question is really about — it's topical now — Mexican visas. How does that visa process work to inhibit illegal entry? Does it just make it more difficult for everybody so it's less likely that somebody who is illegal is going to get into Canada, or what's the actual mechanism? Do you feel it's working, and is it worth it?
Mr. Swales: The point about the visa is that it ensures screening can be accomplished before the person begins their travel. When you have a system where they're visa-exempt, then an individual with a passport can get on a plane and arrive in Canada, and then it is the job of the border services officer to identify whether there are some issues with that person. They have a very short period of time, often, to do that, and they don't necessarily have access to all of the information that would be available to a visa officer in a mission, for example. So it allows that opportunity to gather information in advance and act on it.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Thank you to our witnesses. My question is for Mr. Ferguson.
[English]
Mr. Ferguson, based on your report, are there legislative gaps that need to be addressed, and if so, where?
Mr. Ferguson: We didn't identify any particular issues with the legislation. Again, we were looking at the environment they are working in, the constraints they have in that and whether they can improve what they're doing. I think I've explained some places where they can do that.
Remember as well that in our role we don't question government policy. We accept government policy as the framework the organization is working under and has to deliver their program under.
In this particular audit, I don't think there were any places where we were specifically concerned about legislative components.
Senator Dagenais: In your report you indicated an increased number of fraudulent passports used to enter Canada. Can you elaborate on the best means of implementing entry and exit controls?
Mr. Ferguson: I think what you are referring to is a reference probably in paragraph 20 where essentially the airlines are sometimes held responsible if certain people are able to show up in Canada, that the airlines should have noticed it and have the appropriate documentation in the first place.
Then there are other cases where the airlines are not held responsible, and essentially that's because the individual perhaps did have documentation. But what we said was that in terms of the number of cases where the airline was not held responsible, we noticed that increase — 239 to 324 — so it was a 36 per cent increase over two years.
We felt that indicated that there was increased use by some people of more significant fraud to be able to get onto airlines and show up in Canada, and you wouldn't expect the airlines to be able to find that.
Really we were raising just those statistics. When you look at those statistics they seem, for us at least, to indicate that there is a potential there, that more sophisticated fraud is going on of people attempting to enter the country.
The Chair: Could I maybe pursue that question? I think it's very important.
Mr. Swales, in respect to the entry through the various airlines and their responsibility if they make a mistake, I understand there's an administrative charge to them for not ensuring that documentation is done properly. Did you find that that charge was actually levied very often? If so, how much?
I think one of the key aspects of the program we're facing is that if the airlines are charged with it, if they're doing their due diligence, then we should not be in a position where ``illegal'' entry is a problem at our airports. Perhaps you would want to comment on that, Mr. Swales.
Mr. Swales: Specifically we were looking to make sure that the agency had a proper understanding of what was happening at that particular point of control and was able, therefore, to use that information to change or think about how it was doing its business.
The concern for us was that if you looked strictly only at what the airlines were held responsible for, you might get the sense that everything was essentially a steady state, but there was other information at play. I will look to Ms. Butler for this, but we didn't look at the question of how exactly the fines were levied. We know that there is a process for doing that. There is a process for graduating the fines as well. We didn't look into that in this piece of work.
Joanne Butler, Director, Office of the Auditor General of Canada: That's correct; we didn't get into that part.
The Chair: Could I just follow this through, colleagues?
I think it's important because this is the point of entry. This is prior to coming to the country. What I don't quite understand is, if the airline is in charge of ensuring documentation is in place, why is someone getting on the airplane if the documentation is not acceptable?
Wouldn't logic follow that that's an area where we would recommend further scrutiny and due diligence? Perhaps we wouldn't be having these hearings.
Mr. Ferguson: I will start and then ask my two colleagues if they want to add any more to it. I think that's essentially what we are recommending to the agency. This is an important part of this process — getting the information they're supposed to get, but also making sure that the airlines are doing what they're supposed to be doing.
Remember of course that we're dealing with people coming to Canada from all over the world, so it's multiple airlines coming from multiple countries. It is not a simple task, but again we feel that there is more they can do to make sure that the airlines are doing what they're supposed to be doing and, if they're not, that the fines are being levied, and then that the information being collected is being turned over.
I will ask Mr. Swales if he would like to add anything.
Mr. Swales: The only thing I would add is that it has essentially been a policy decision, on the part of the agency, as to whether there are certain kinds of documentation that they don't think they should expect the airlines to be able to identify.
One of the expectations I think we would have is from looking at the information about what's happening there more closely, they might need to think about whether that policy is targeting exactly the right thing.
Senator Day: I would like to make a short comment, if I may, first of all, and then I will get into specific questions.
Mr. Auditor General, you indicated that you don't question government policy, but surely when you're doing value- for-money auditing and performance audits, you are skirting on policy. We, as a committee, certainly question government policy and make recommendations where changes should be made. We rely on you and your office of 550 or so employees to help us with understanding the information so we can challenge, where challenge is necessary, policy issues.
Did you have any comment? That is just a comment. If you would like to reply, I would be pleased to hear from you.
Mr. Ferguson: Again, the way we conduct performance audits is that we do not question policy. Government policy is the framework we work under. We do our audit based on the policy that exists.
What we will do, though, is look at how policy has been implemented. Often what will happen is that if we find problems with the way the policy has been implemented, sometimes it will lead people to say, ``The best way to fix those problems is to change the policy.''
We don't go in with an audit objective of trying to determine whether a certain policy is the best policy, a reasonable policy, any of that type of thing. What we do is say, ``What is the policy? What's the legislative framework?'' Then we determine whether the departments are doing what they're supposed to be doing within that policy. Again, often we will point out that there are some weaknesses, some things that need to be improved, and there may be various different ways of improving those.
In this particular case, for example, I think all of the things we have identified are things that can be fixed within the existing policy framework.
Senator Day: Thank you for that. I just thought it would clarify it. I hope it gave us a chance to think about the comment you made earlier.
I have a lot of different questions, but a lot have arisen from your presentation and your report, which I thank you for very much. Regarding the 72 hours for airlines, this committee normally would handle any regulatory or statutory changes, and I do recall having looked at the change. Previously, border security was getting information as the plane was in the air coming to Canada. I can understand why 95 per cent of the report is incomplete, because a lot of people will book within 72 hours.
With regard to this new national targeting program that you made reference to in your presentation, I'm not sure how that works and the relationship between Canada Border Services, the RCMP and CSIS with respect to these names that are coming in.
We were required long ago to give those names to the U.S. for any flights going to the U.S., and so we know who is exiting Canada on planes going to the U.S. or planes overflying.
What happens in order to target? You used the term ``lookouts.'' Some people have little exclamation marks, or marks, or the passenger's name is printed in bold, but that's when they're arriving, and you say we even miss some of those.
Can you explain the role between the Canada Border Services Agency and the RCMP and CSIS, and anybody else who might get involved in identifying who should be on the targeted list or who should be on the lookout list?
Mr. Ferguson: Thank you, Mr. Chair. In terms of the 72 hours, for example, that is the type of thing that the organization needs to work within. It is important to get this information so that when people show up at the border, Canada Border Services have information that can help them identify whether these are people who need to be looked at. What the right time frame is to get that information and when you can expect to get that information from the airlines would need to be pursued further with the agency.
I will ask Mr. Swales if there's any more he would like to add in terms of how the targeting process is working.
Mr. Swales: I want to start with where Mr. Ferguson finished off. As you said, the current requirement is that the information be provided at wheels up. That means that the aircraft is in the air and is loaded; and in principle, at least, all the information about all the passengers who are on board that aircraft has been collected and can be transmitted.
The new system that they're in the process of designing with the 72-hour opportunity to provide that information in advance is still being developed, so the agency would have to explain exactly how that 72 hours is going to be used and their direction on that.
I was thinking I might ask Ms. Butler to describe the distinction between targets and lookouts. She has spent more time in the National Targeting Centre than I have.
Ms. Butler: I was just going to point out, as Mr. Swales did, that the 72-hour time frame is due to be implemented in 2015, so they are working on that. You will find that in paragraph 5.26 of our report.
With respect to the differences and the relationship and where the RCMP and CSIS information comes in, targets are essentially information that is based on the advance passenger information provided by the airlines. Once again, as soon as the airlines receive that information, if they collect it, they are to provide that information to the CBSA's National Targeting Centre.
At the NTC, the agents receive the information. There's a risk assessment process that goes on and the ones doing the targeting then make decisions about whether certain individuals need to be issued a target. In other words, when certain individuals arrive at the port of entry, they would then be referred for further examination.
That is a separate process and a more immediate process than lookouts, which are based on a longer-term process of gathering information, which could involve information from the RCMP, CSIS, or even CIC. It could be immigration- related enforcement actions and that type of thing.
The one area our audit highlights where the two come together, lookouts and targets, is when a targeter has decided to review information in the system for an individual who has been identified as on a flight, wheels up, coming to Canada; and in their system, as they're determining whether to issue the target or they're issuing the target, they see there is also a lookout on that person.
This is where the two will come together. It creates what is called an advance notification, where that lookout is then essentially delivered by the NTC to the port of entry to say, ``This person is coming; we know they're coming, and you will need to refer them for further examination at the port of entry.''
I know it is confusing. If you want me to clarify further, I can. It is the point where lookouts and targets will come together. Just keep in mind that targets are based on advance passenger information only; lookouts tend to be more long-term and can involve other sources of intelligence.
Senator Day: Ms. Butler, who is responsible for the operation at the National Targeting Centre?
Ms. Butler: That's the CBSA.
Senator Day: They have RCMP and CSIS presumably involved there?
Ms. Butler: They do have co-located representatives from other agencies at the National Targeting Centre. Right now I'm aware that CSIS is co-located, but I'm not sure about the RCMP.
Senator Day: We can find out from them.
Senator White: I apologize for being late. Thank you for being here today. My question is going to talk about timeliness. When we talk about timeliness now we're talking about the information getting from the airline to CBSA and their ability to act on it. However, as we all know, when you walk up to the employee at Air Canada or any other airline they take your passport. You have to have a passport to actually travel into the country and they scan it into their system immediately. That information sits in their system only for a long period of time, at least two hours, in some cases even longer, rather than being pushed individually on to Canada.
When you looked at this, were there any discussions around best practices that would have pushed that passport information to Canada immediately and would have at least run it against our Canadian Police Information Centre systems? The vast majority of targets or lookouts will be ``subject interest police,'' which would have immediately notified the jurisdictional police service that someone is going to be arriving in Ottawa at 5:30 tomorrow morning from London, England.
From a timeliness perspective, there could at least be a discussion. I suspect some other countries probably do this now. Israel, for example, certainly has the best system out there for tracking the information before people land at their local airports.
To suggest longer periods of time, I think it's almost impossible for us to suggest we could get to timeliness unless we actually pursue a moment of time when the information is gathered to getting it into the hands of Canadians.
Mr. Fergusson: Fundamentally we are pointing out that right now there are gaps in the incoming information. In terms of the completeness and the timeliness of that information, it's something that we feel the agency needs to really look at and determine how they can improve that process, whether it's on the completeness side or whether it's on the timeliness side. The starting point is getting this information.
In terms of the way the agency has been reporting when it reports a significant percentage of the airlines complying — 99 per cent rate of compliance — the agency is not really measuring the right thing. They need to have the information themselves so that they are actually aware that this isn't working the way it's supposed to be working, and then they need to improve on that.
Mr. Swales: I would add two points. The Interactive Advanced Passenger Information initiative that we referred to in paragraph 26 is aiming at exactly that idea of getting the information earlier. However, the point that we make in paragraph 27, immediately afterwards, is that if you don't attack the quality issue, you're not getting much improvement by just getting it earlier. It needs to be better.
Senator White: What probably concerned me most about the previous presentation we had from CBSA is the fact that I expect that when my information is gathered it is shared in real time, but it's not. It actually goes into the local airline system, which then correlates it in some way and puts it together and sends it on over the next 72 hours. To me, that's not even a timeliness issue. It's inappropriate.
From my perspective, when it comes to protecting this country, I have to say it's shocking that that information isn't immediately pushed into a system that at least generates interest because ``subject interest police'' is probably one of the most successful systems in the world when it comes to identifying potential targets to Canadian authorities — even pushing that information without any feedback to the airlines, which I wouldn't want anyway, but allowing the agencies to get that information more clearly. I agree that I'm always concerned about what's on the passport and whether or not it's credible, but right now that's the information we're sending 72 hours later in some cases.
I understand your concern, and I'm sure we will have further discussions about recommendations, but sitting there with this information and not pushing it to Canadian authorities until well after people are in the air is just as concerning for me as having them on the ground when we consider terrorist entities. The fact that they're on a plane scares the heck out of me.
Mr. Ferguson: This is exactly the conversation that needs to happen because, again, we're identifying that the information isn't complete, that there are problems with the information that is coming forward and that the whole process needs to be examined. The agency needs to be able to explain what they can and can't do to improve both the completeness of the information and the timeliness of that information coming forward.
I can't tell you specifically whether they can and can't do that while sitting here thinking about people boarding planes all around the world and multiple different airlines. How do you do that with all those airlines? That is exactly the type of question that CBSA needs to be able to deal with in terms of whether they make those types of improvements.
Senator Dallaire: In your 2007 report, Keeping the Border Open and Secure, you speak to border management. You were verifying whether it was based on threat and risk assessments, not to the desired levels of border openness but of security. I'm looking at the results that you've been pulling out and I'm going back to whether the institution has taken on a mantra of being a front-line security element of the nation like other security agencies have since 9/11; and, in fact, this outfit is the son of 9/11. A lot of this stuff seems to be standard operating procedures and ensuring you have the equipment to meet these requirements.
Was there not the same sense that they've got to go far more to achieve effectiveness with the potential targets that are a security threat to the nation and take action accordingly, or is there still some checking whether someone is coming in with two or three bottles of booze or something?
I'm wondering how far they've gone down that security ethos in the organization.
Mr. Ferguson: That's a difficult question for us to respond to as auditors. Obviously it's a conversation to have with the organization.
Again, in terms of targets, we found that they have made improvements since our 2007 audit. The way they're handling lookouts, we said that they've made little progress in improving their results monitoring on lookouts.
They made some progress. This audit was six years after, so they made some progress. There are some areas where they need to make more progress, and we feel that the weaknesses or the areas of improvement that we have identified are things that can be improved. They're not things that we feel require a whole change in how they operate. They are things that can be improved within how they operate now.
Again, though, I would reiterate that I feel certainly in my conversations with CBSA that they understand that their role is very important but that this is something that people expect them to do well and they take that seriously. However, it is something that they're still working on and they need to make more progress on.
Senator Segal: Sometimes, when people who shouldn't be let into the country are let into the country, there can be reasons that the system didn't catch them and there was some lack of efficacy. Sometimes there are good intelligence- gathering reasons for letting some people into the country. While I respect the duty and confidentiality that you have in the work you do, especially in agencies that address national security in this way, I'm going to ask this question in a general way so you have the option of answering it should you choose to in a general way.
Can you indicate generally whether there would be a mix of reasons why normally inadmissible people might be admitted and we should not assume as a committee that all the reasons that they might be admitted are reasons that relate to some lack of efficacy in the system?
Mr. Ferguson: It's certainly not something that we can really give any specifics on. Again, we looked at their database of people who were known to be in the country illegally, and we looked at how those people entered into the country.
The issue for us was that we had to go in and do that analysis. They didn't have that analysis done themselves about all of these people in the country illegally and how they got there. That's all I can say. That's what we were looking at, of the people you know, do you know how they got there. They hadn't done that analysis.
Senator Segal: Thank you.
The Chair: I'd like to thank you for your time, Mr. Ferguson, and your colleagues. It's now two o'clock. We appreciate the work you do as an auditor. Certainly it's a very good report. It does lay the foundation for us to have a hard look at how things are being done and what recommendations we could bring forward with respect to helping specifically the CBSA and the RCMP do the job we ask them to do. We will excuse you and turn to our next panel. Thank you.
We're now on our second panel today, to quote from our terms of reference, to help inform our ``study on the policies, practices, and collaborative efforts of Canada Border Services Agency in determining admissibility to Canada and removal of inadmissible individuals.''
We're pleased to welcome Mr. Dan Faughnan, Director General of Security Screening, CSIS; and Ms. Shirley Cuillierrier, Director, Federal Policing Partnership and External Relations, RCMP. I understand that you each have an opening statement. Please proceed. We have one hour for this panel.
[Translation]
Dan Faughnan, Director General, Security Screening, Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS): Mr. Chair and honourable senators, good afternoon. I am pleased to be here today to contribute to your study of Canada's immigration system.
I understand that the committee is particularly interested in the determination of admissibility and removal of inadmissible individuals, so I will focus my remarks today on the role CSIS plays in that regard and how we work with our immigration partners at both the Canada Border Services Agency and Citizenship and Immigration Canada, or CBSA and CIC.
[English]
Everything we do at CSIS is grounded in our enabling legislation, the CSIS Act. As an organization, we are perhaps most closely identified with our primary national security mandate through which we collect information and investigate threats to the security of Canada and provide advice to the government regarding those threats, which are defined in the act to include terrorism and extremism, espionage and sabotage and foreign interference.
An important part of this national security mandate, however, is also realized through the service's security screening program. As spelled out in the act, the service provides two principal types of security screening. First, we provide security assessments to Government of Canada departments and agencies, which support departmental efforts regarding the granting of site access and security clearances. We also provide security advice to the Canada Border Services Agency and Citizenship and Immigration Canada in support of their efforts to prevent non-Canadians who pose a threat to our national security from gaining entry or obtaining status in Canada as stipulated by the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Citizenship Act. It is the service's immigration screening program that I will speak to here today.
In discussing the service's immigration screening program, it's important to note that the service does not determine who gains entry into Canada. CSIS conducts investigations regarding threats to national security and provides security advice based on the findings of these investigations to the CBSA or to CIC. CSIS does not determine admissibility, nor do we exercise control over the outcome of immigration or citizenship applications or refugee claims. This is the sole responsibility of our partners at CBSA and CIC, who act based in part on CSIS's advice and based in part upon information obtained from other sources and partners.
[Translation]
In this respect, it is also important to note that CSIS is not a law enforcement agency. We do not have the power to arrest or detain, nor do we have any role in the enforcement of removal orders. In the immigration context, such decisions and actions are undertaken by appropriate immigration authorities in accordance with the provisions set out in IRPA.
[English]
What does the service do, then?
The CSIS immigration screening program is divided into the four main business lines: the screening of applications for permanent residence from within Canada and also from abroad, and similar screening activity for applications for temporary residence visas, Canadian citizenship, and refugee claims both made abroad and in Canada.
We should highlight, however, that while the service screens 100 per cent of citizenship applications and 100 per cent of refugee claimants, screening for permanent residence and temporary residence visas are based on specific referrals received from CIC. A referral is provided to CSIS after CIC has done its own evaluation of an applicant and identifies the case as one which might require specific screening by the service. The service provides information on threats, which helps CIC determine which cases should be provided to the service.
Once a referral is received, the service undertakes the investigative activity required to provide appropriate security advice back to the partners. This might include only a check of our indices, or it could include additional investigation in Canada or abroad. Decisions on how to proceed investigatively are based on the threat posed and the availability of information to support our requirements.
[Translation]
We know, Mr. Chair, that individuals engaged in threat-related activities seek to use Canada as a base from which to further their objectives. These objectives are not only contrary to our security and our interests, but also contrary to international peace and security. Each year the service screens tens of thousands of individuals: visitors, refugee claimants, prospective permanent residents and prospective citizens.
Of these, however, only a very small number of cases raise cause for serious national security concern. It is precisely these cases that warrant further consideration by CBSA and CIC for potential action under IRPA or in accordance with provisions contained in the Citizenship Act.
[English]
Parliament, through the statutes enacted, has clearly indicated that individuals of national security concern are not admissible to Canada. They neither are authorized to enter nor are eligible for Canadian status. The service's security screening program is an essential component of the government's effort to achieve these objectives. Clearly, identifying individuals engaged in such activity and preventing their entry into Canada, or preventing these same individuals from obtaining status in Canada, is an important component of our collective effort to protect Canadians and Canadian interests.
Mr. Chair, I'd like to thank the committee for the invitation to appear today. I'd be happy to take any questions you might have.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Faughnan.
Superintendent Shirley Cuillierrier, Director General, Partnerships and External Relations, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP): Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and honourable senators. I would like to thank you for inviting me here today to assist you with your study on policies, practices and collaborative efforts of Canada Border Services Agency in determining admissibility of individuals to Canada. I'm currently Director General, Partnerships and External Relations with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's federal policing program. My intent this afternoon is to highlight how the RCMP works collaboratively with CBSA in our border enforcement activities.
As you all know, the RCMP is not involved directly in the decision to determine who is and who is not admissible to Canada. The RCMP's primary role with respect to the border is to investigate any criminal violations of the law. In some instances, the decision on admissibility, when it involves security grounds, may be made with information provided by the RCMP, but the RCMP does not make the recommendation about who should be granted entry into Canada.
[Translation]
That said, the RCMP works closely with the CBSA across Canada to protect Canada's border. We work together, both within our respective agencies and in integrated units such as the Integrated Border Enforcement Teams or the Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams.
[English]
The RCMP provides technical assistance to CBSA and Citizenship and Immigration Canada with respect to biometric identification of prospective entrants. For example, we assist with the confirmation of identity and in some instances conduct criminal record checks. We may also be called on to contact foreign law enforcement agencies to confirm foreign arrests or convictions. Clearly stated, the RCMP's role is to provide the information to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and they make the determination.
[Translation]
In instances where the RCMP is the police force of jurisdiction, we assist with the physical transportation and removal of an individual who is subject to a deportation order. We may also assist with the transportation of some immigration detainees in special circumstances when requested.
[English]
The RCMP has approximately 120 separate collaborative arrangements with CBSA or its predecessor agencies. We are currently in the process of negotiating a new comprehensive memorandum of understanding with the CBSA so that we may work together more effectively and efficiently.
Related to the issues discussed today, the RCMP is also responsible for investigating cases of citizenship fraud. Typically, those cases are referred to us by Citizenship and Immigration Canada and in some instances may result in CIC initiating proceedings to revoke fraudulently obtained citizenship. The RCMP's role is limited to investigating the offence itself; the decision to seek revocation is made by CIC.
In his recent report on preventing illegal entry into Canada, the Auditor General made one recommendation with respect to the RCMP. The Auditor General recommended that the RCMP develop a framework to monitor the effectiveness of its border law enforcement activities. The RCMP accepted this recommendation and is currently working to implement changes to its program alignment architecture and performance management framework. When these changes are in place, we expect to be better able to measure the effectiveness of our border enforcement activities.
As I have outlined above, the RCMP is not the decision maker when it comes to granting entry into Canada. We are involved indirectly through our border enforcement activities. We assist the CBSA to the extent that we can within our own mandate.
Thank you. I would be happy to address any questions you may have.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Colleagues, I have two questions to start out. First, I want to refer to the security of our system and obviously the possibility, at least in the last little while, of some exposure to corruption for some officials within the immigration departments. I specifically refer, for example, to the Delisle case of several years ago and now the Trina Kennedy and Nepal cases. This would be a question for CSIS. I want to expand further. We know criminal organizations and certain individual entities place a high premium on influencing immigration officials. That's a fact. Looking back in the last five years, can you tell us or bring us the information back whether there are other instances and how many immigration officials are being investigated or reassigned as a result of security concerns?
I want to go further on that. With respect to the Border Services Agency staff and the Immigration staff, does CSIS do an ongoing review of individuals within the bureaucracy over a period of time to ensure that we're not being infiltrated or penetrated with respect to these individuals doing the job we've asked them to do? Mr. Faughnan, do you have a response?
Mr. Faughnan: Thank you, Mr. Chair. To your first question, unfortunately, I can't speak to specific cases that might be ongoing with regard to the screening. You would probably have to pose those questions to the partner agencies.
With regard to your second question, that relates more to our government screening model, but I can say, because I run both of them, we clearly do screening for members of these organizations at the outset when they gain employment. Depending on the level of clearance that somebody has, they are re-screened every certain number of years. Anybody holding a secret level clearance would be re-screened every 10 years, and everybody holding a top- security clearance would be re-screened every five years, a fair number of people holding high clearances in the Government of Canada.
In addition, however, probably more important, along the way of somebody's employment with the Government of Canada, any time an issue is raised to the service in regard to loyalty or reliability as it relates to loyalty, the service can reopen and often does reopen the security screening cases of those individuals.
The Chair: Colleagues, I want to go to another area, if I could. Today there was a report that the Border Services Agency is seeking the expulsion of an alleged leader of a British terrorist group. I don't know whether you're familiar with this, but this leader of a known terrorist group was deported about 10 years ago. It goes on to say that this particular individual came into the country in November and is now going before a board for review four months later.
Why would an individual like this be allowed to come back to this country if he's a known terrorist? How would the system allow him to come back into the country without being stopped at the border?
Mr. Faughnan: On a specific case, you would have to address it to the department. The service's role, when we're given referrals to cases, is to look at our own indices. If necessary, we do more investigative work, which includes consulting with allies abroad. In essence, once the advice goes over to the partner, the partner has options for how to address information. They can be put on watch lists or dealt with directly. You'd have to pose the question on the specific case to the appropriate partner.
The Chair: Ms. Cuillierrier, do you have anything to add to this?
Ms. Cuillierrier: No, not really. I saw that article in the media as well, but we only act upon information that's referred to us, so I can't add anything further.
The Chair: Maybe we'll follow that up a little later.
Senator Dallaire: I'm always concerned when you have different agencies that have different elements of intelligence on a subject that is of potentially common interest. There's a lack of desire to disseminate information as well as a strong desire to protect your sources, which often makes it difficult to be totally cooperative, even thinking of being integrated in meeting this requirement.
In reading the auditor's report and what both of you do generally in support of the CBSA, is there not something above this that's pulling all this together as a body of border security as an entity versus different organizations feeding different elements to it at different times? Is there not a requirement to go to a higher strategic plane of moving all these elements into the same focused area?
Mr. Faughnan: I can address it from the service's perspective. At the operational level, the mandate of the service is fairly clear. It's quite clear on the national security focus of our advice. I'll let my colleague speak to that issue with regard to criminal information.
At the strategic level, actually a fair amount of coordination occurs. I would say not all of it is as a result of the 2011 OAG report but just in practice. In our organization, we have bilateral and trilateral groups that meet both at the operational and at the strategic level on a regular and fixed basis. The purpose of those discussions is to ensure that information is shared, not only with regard to broad policy issues and practices but also even when we get into more challenging case activity where we're looking at specific investigative activity. We meet on a daily, weekly basis, and I'm on the phone frequently with colleagues at both CIC and CBSA. I feel quite confident — I've been in this job for four years — that we're coordinating a fair amount with regard to our mandate as it relates to facilitating their ability to make good decisions on specific cases.
Ms. Cuillierrier: Same for us. On an operational level, we work very closely with CBSA, particularly at the borders. We have our Integrated Border Enforcement Teams that are in place. We also work with CBSA on the Marine Security Enforcement Teams. We certainly have a good working relationship on the ground, and at a strategic level, at headquarters, because we're working on this new memorandum of understanding, which includes information sharing, which talks about roles and responsibilities, looking at secondments at national headquarters and in the field. So we're working towards working collaboratively and being in a position to share information, particularly when we're going after the same thing when it comes to protecting our borders.
Senator Dallaire: When we're looking at areas of threats, not just people wanting to sneak in because they think the grass is greener on this side, but at the threat assessments, which are far more deliberate for me with regard to terrorism, subversive activities, even people becoming moles who will sit there for God knows how long before taking action, it leads me to believe that there's an absolute requirement of an overarching training, education and development with regard to this arena on the front lines rather than just cooperation and coordination, even collaboration. Do you not think that we should be integrating our capabilities and building a whole new construct of educating and training all the different elements so they are actually working as one and not as components that we hope might even at times be personality driven?
Mr. Faughnan: That's more in the policy realm. I think you'd have to direct that to the policy-makers in the service.
I can safely say that our level of integration at the operational level is quite outstanding. Even on the training side, we don't run many operational level courses at our organization that don't include a component where the partners come in and assist us. That goes with training all over the country as well. To use the colloquial term, we're joined at the hip in many respects, probably more than ever, in part because of the threats themselves but also just because of the frequency of collaboration.
Ms. Cuillierrier: In reference to the RCMP, just building on what Mr. Faughnan is saying, same thing. We leverage our facilities. We work together. We have CBSA attend our courses and vice versa. Secondments where people are actually embedded in each other's organization is also part of the way we do business.
Senator Segal: Thank you both for taking time to be with us today.
Obviously, if you think about a CIC visa control officer abroad who has an application in front of him or her, they will need to get your respective assessments as to whether there's any reason not to grant a visa. That is a screening process, which you clearly do in a professional way. Without getting into specific circumstances, generally speaking, what's the time frame necessary when a visa control officer sends an application for your assessment and analysis? Are we likely waiting a week, two weeks, three weeks? Is it a month or two months? Obviously, you have a workload that existed before getting this particular request. Generally speaking, how does that tend to net out, assuming there may be some cases that have extenuating circumstances and are a whole other time frame? Broadly speaking, what is your general sense of that? Do you have a backlog now that is worse than it has been, than is normative, that is being reduced because you have sufficient resources to do so? I'd be interested in your views on that.
Mr. Faughnan: On the national security side, the good news is we don't have a backlog on the temporary residents' side. We did in the past have backlogs because of the volumes and in part because of the IT systems we use, but we're close to 90 per cent in meeting the agreement level we have with the partners to return, and this on the temporary residents' side, which is our highest volume, obviously. For temporary resident visas from abroad, we do not see all of the requests. They are referred based on criteria that the partner has that they look at.
For most turnaround, the service is 10 days, and the service meets that in about 90 per cent of cases. As you mentioned, those are the easy ones. It's the ones outside of that that cause us the most concern, where we take the time we need to do investigations, including collaboration with allies.
Our advice, of course, goes back to CBSA, and CBSA provides its assessment of recommendations to the visa officer abroad. In a great many cases also, we can turn those requests around in a matter of hours or short days. When it's something very significant, we spend a lot of time on it. We work with them to set our priorities and prioritize the broader volume itself so that we make sure we're focused on the right places that are the most important for our own national interests.
Ms. Cuillierrier: Senator, I'm not aware of any backlog that we have right now, and my understanding is that we are able to meet the timelines requested by the partner agency unless there's extenuating circumstances and it needs to be brought to the attention of a detachment in a particular part of the country where there's a further investigation on the ground. Otherwise, we're able to meet the requirements.
Senator Segal: One of the agencies set up by the Chretien administration after 9/11 was the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre. It was based in CSIS, but it was basically pulling together data sets on terrorist activity and initiatives around the world, and Canada was supplying information to our allies and getting information back.
Are they part of the stream? Are they part of the mix by which names and prospective applicants for entry are assessed, or are they not?
Mr. Faughnan: They're not. ITAC's role is more at the strategic, analytical level.
Senator Segal: Not at the name-by-name, person-by-person level.
Mr. Faughnan: That's right.
Senator Day: My first question goes to the superintendent in relation to border crossings, and we have many of them across Canada. There's typically a sharing at the border. There's usually a U.S. office on one side. A lot of us have driven through a lot of these rural areas, and there's a small building for the U.S. border crossing, and the Canadian building on this side.
In the past, we learned that the information technology that the Canadians had didn't allow them to speak to their American counterparts. Somebody could be coming along from the U.S. side, and the Canadians and Americans weren't able to communicate back and forth. Can you tell us if that has improved?
Just sticking with the border crossing, the role, and you mentioned the IBETs, the integrated role, that the RCMP used to be the firearm for the border crossing people, but now they have firearms. How has that changed your relationship at the border in relation to people who should be intercepted, who shouldn't be driving on through the border?
Ms. Cuillierrier: Well, at the border crossings, as a result of the Integrated Border Enforcement Teams, there is good collaboration, both with our American partners as well.
As for the technology question, I'm not in a position to give you an answer on that today. I do know there was discussions on trying to address that gap, so I would be happy to get back to the committee to provide that information, but the fact that the Canada Border Services agents now carry firearms, it hasn't — I think our working relationship is better.
They call us if there are people running through the border. It would be the RCMP, of course, if it's our jurisdiction, but if it's through another police jurisdiction, the police service of that jurisdiction would be called.
In terms of the actual work on the ground at the border, it is getting better as a result of the initiatives that are being put in place with respect to the collaborative MOU in terms of defining roles and responsibilities.
Senator Day: I would assume the RCMP would be called less than previously because you're now armed. Before that, they used to be called because the RCMP was the armed personnel to deal with this person that you didn't particularly want to admit into Canada.
Ms. Cuillierrier: If the calls have gone down, I'm not aware.
Senator Day: My question is along the lines of Senator Dallaire's and the various silos, and it is from the point of view of the National Targeting Centre. I understand that you have people there.
Mr. Faughnan, you touched on this when you said that you provide Citizenship and Immigration information in advance, and then when that name shows up, they contact you again for information. So their targeting is in part based on information that you had previously provided.
Does the National Targeting Centre have a database? Does the Canada Border Services Agency have a database, or do they have your database, and do they have the database of the RCMP so that they can go on here with these names that they're getting 72 hours in advance from airlines? But not everybody's on that list, as we know, so there are some that may get on in less than 12 hours.
Can you help me on how that relationship works so that you can do the targeting?
Mr. Faughnan: I can give you a relatively brief answer. We work very closely with the NTC of the CBSA. The partners, including us, including the CBSA, all have a variety of databases and indices that we can check for information. Each of those databases has a particular requirement.
The coordination occurs in being able to get access, either using our own personnel or in collaboration with a partner, to the information that is contained in those databases, so that what we assure we're doing, screening of an in- bound flight or of a person who we know from other means is on his way to Canada, we can get into those databases collectively, as a group, not necessarily us getting access to their database directly, and certainly not them getting access to our databases directly but doing it collaboratively.
In the case of the NTC, we have a relationship that works minute to minute, and I feel exceptional confidence that in regard to getting access when they have indicators that they're concerned about, not only can they get access to their indices in the database that they have, the CBSA, they can get access to my database with a very quick check, within minutes.
Senator Day: Superintendent, do you have anything to add?
Ms. Cuillierrier: That is one of the reasons we've embedded an RCMP officer at the National Targeting Centre, so that that information flow can be made in a timely manner.
Senator Dagenais: My first question is for Mr. Faughnan.
Canada welcomes a hundred million non-citizens every year. CSIS does some screening of these individuals, but only when the Citizenship and Immigration Canada staff refer a file.
In 2012, Tom Venner, the executive director of the Security Screening Branch, CSIS, indicated that they screened 300,000 non-visa related in the fiscal year.
Out of the hundred million non-Canadians who enter our country, can you tell the committee how many are screened by CSIS and how many of these are from Immigration Canada, Canada Border Services Agency and the RCMP?
Additionally, I would like to request that you table with the committee the total number of screening requests CSIS receives per country in cooperation and total number of visas provided in the last two fiscal years.
Mr. Faughnan: Senator, if I understand your first question, you want an update on how many requests we've screened this year?
Senator Dagenais: Yes.
Mr. Faughnan: It is about the same total number as Tom Venner illustrated in 2012, divided — the issue for us, and I would have to take this as an undertaking, we receive the referrals based on particular program requirements. So if they're applying for temporary residence or applying for permanent residence or applying for citizenship, not all of our requests come from CIC. Most come from CIC; some come directly from CBSA as well, again depending on the program requirement. I will undertake to get you some specific data on how many of which.
If I understood your second question, you wanted it broken down by which countries they originate from.
Senator Dagenais: Yes.
Mr. Faughnan: I'm sorry I don't have that information at hand, but I will take an undertaking to get you that information.
Senator Dagenais: Thank you so much.
Ms. Cuillierrier, we know that the RCMP has a visa-vetting program that targets organized crime. Currently the program screens only a small percentage of visa applications from three locations: Moscow, Kiev and Mexico.
Can you tell the committee whether the RCMP and CSIS consider the triad a criminal organization? Should such a program exist in China or Hong Kong, given the large number of visa requests we receive annually, including for tourists, students and temporary foreign workers?
Ms. Cuillierrier: Currently, those three locations are vetted simply based on volume and the number of resources that we have. We place priority on the greatest threat based on our intelligence.
In one case, with Mexico, we undertook a pilot project, so that was the reason we focused on Mexico as a result of, again, threat assessment and intelligence. We devoted resources to do that.
Senator Mitchell: I am interested in the marine interception of illegal entry, and actually it has been relatively successful — it's probably Shiprider — through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the RCMP is involved in that.
The point was made in the Auditor General's report that there has been a reduced availability over what was planned for the kinds of vessels that these teams use, and we could have had an even more successful rate of interception. These vessels were to be operational by the end of August 2012. It's getting to be 2014, not all that far from August: It's two years late.
Is this further indication of procurement problems? These aren't even big ships; these are relatively small vessels. Or is it a question of husbanding resources, or is it changing policy, or is it just not getting after it?
Ms. Cuillierrier: Unfortunately I'm not in a position to answer that, although I have colleagues in federal policing who would be more than happy to speak to the whole issue of marine security environments, technology and the resources that come with that.
Senator Mitchell: This is another really specific question. I'm the sponsor in the Senate of Bill C-279, which is the transgender rights bill, and it's been passed by the House of Commons. It's a serious bill that has had serious, all-party support. There were 18 Conservative members who supported it in the House of Commons, I think. There was a recent event of a transgendered woman who was making an effort to enter Canada and had to be imprisoned. There was quite a bit of controversy over the fact that she was put into a male prison.
It is a very specific question, I know, but I would like to get it on the record. Has any effort been made to review that kind of processing? Are transgendered people who are put into an institution, not based on their identity but on their physical attributes, given protection of some sort? You can imagine it would be quite a difficult process for that person.
Ms. Cuillierrier: Again, this is not my area of responsibility, but I can say with great confidence that in relation to people in contract policing who look after the incarceration of individuals once detained or arrested, our policies would need to be reviewed in light of this new bill, yes.
Senator Ngo: This question is for both of you, if you can, and is with respect to the screening of foreigners wishing to come to Canada. Over the past five years, according to the Auditor General, we have had about 10,000 non-Canadians entering Canada each day. Could you tell us about the trends you have experienced over the past five years with respect to those foreign, non-Canadians entering Canada?
Mr. Faughnan: Senator, are you looking for trends in terms of something in particular?
Senator Ngo: The screening of foreigners wishing to come to Canada.
Mr. Faughnan: I'm sorry, I'm trying to understand what kind of trend you're asking about.
Senator Ngo: The trend you have been experiencing over the past five years with respect to the screening of foreigners.
Mr. Faughnan: In terms of the volumes, I can say that there has been a somewhat steady state in the trends. Again, the service receives referrals based on sets of criteria that the partners use to identify which cases should be referred to the service for screening. Much like our colleagues in the RCMP, we're a victim of our resources and prioritization requirements.
When we look at the trends from our perspective, we have upper limits to the amount of labour that we can engage in this.
In terms of dealing with increasing volumes, say, of different types of screening requirements, we look at them from a national threat perspective. We do a fair amount of risk management to make sure that we're focusing our screening efforts on the cases that matter, specifically the ones that matter to national security, ones that would help the partner make a decision in accordance with their mandate under IRPA.
I can't speak to the trends except to say that volumes have been fairly steady over the last few years.
Ms. Cuillierrier: I can't add much more than my colleague. Again, it's based on referral and the set of criteria that has been agreed to. There's not much I can offer regarding trends.
Senator Ngo: Could you let us know a bit about the numbers that have been referred to you for screening, for example, of foreigners who wish to come to Canada? As you say, those are supposed to be referred by the CIC abroad. Could you elaborate on that?
Mr. Faughnan: Our total screening in the immigration stream is still hovering around 300,000 per year, but they're divided between a series of programs for temporary residents, permanent residents of Canada or even refugees, and all of those fall into that. I can't break them down right now. That number has been relatively stable.
In the last year we have seen a decrease in the number of refugee referrals to us, because the refugee numbers have been down. But we've seen an increase in the number of temporary resident visas that have come in. Canada's a popular place to visit, and we're trying also to enhance our ability to take higher volumes on the visa side as well.
The Chair: Can I pursue, if you don't mind, colleagues, the question of the data and these various programs that we have under the RCMP? We also have intelligence under CSIS and then I guess the CBSA for the computers identifying those individuals who may be deemed unwelcome in our country.
It seems to me from what I'm hearing here that we have a number of different computer programs, the accessibility of which isn't necessarily immediate from the point of view of the airlines, for example, when they bring names forward of who will be flying and send it in to Canada. The way I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, it doesn't necessarily immediately go into the RCMP computer bank, which would then identify an inadmissible individual, unless somebody allows them to go into that. Is that correct?
When I swipe my passport, it doesn't immediately come into the data bank that you have unless maybe the CBSA sends it to you. Is that the way the process practically works?
Mr. Faughnan: For the service, our indices contain classified information. So they wouldn't be connected to a front- line officer; they just wouldn't have that kind of access.
You would have to direct the question of which databases are accessed when somebody comes to the port of entry to CBSA, and they could give you a more fulsome answer on that. With regard to coming to us, yes, we have to await the partner to come to us to request something. We also can proactively highlight individuals to our partner and they can place them on the databases.
The Chair: With modern technology the way it is, and ever changing, would it not make a lot of sense that when I swipe my passport before I come into the country, that particular identification would go directly, if they have to be divided, into all those data banks and then red-flagged if it comes up? I can see a real problem here. If somebody is not talking to somebody else, then I get through with no problem.
Have you discussed that aspect with your colleagues in the other departments to see whether you can get a commonality of identification so that we're not trying to chase one individual through various mazes of bureaucracy in a 72-hour time period? Am I expressing myself clearly here?
Mr. Faughnan: It is a fair question, Mr. Chair. I would indicate that the CBSA does have indices with considerable amounts of information that are accessed immediately. The fact that they would have to come in addition to the service to look at specific issues relating to national security, given the sensitivity of our indices, they would have to come to us separately for that.
However, especially over the last few years, technology being what it is, we have been working with them to look at efforts to improve the ability to see things. Those efforts are quite complex, and I can't go into specifics about the techniques used, but suffice to say there's a fair amount of coordination that goes on to ensure that information that needs to get to the partner gets to the partner.
I can't think, off the top of my head, of cases that are missed where the information is in existence.
The Chair: You wouldn't know if it was missing, would you?
Mr. Faughnan: Sometimes we would.
The Chair: And sometimes you wouldn't.
Perhaps, Ms. Cuillierrier, you have something to say in respect to direct access from my passport into the RCMP data bank so that it could be red-flagged immediately.
Ms. Cuillierrier: When it comes to admissibility issues, we get referrals from CIC and CBSA. Once those referrals are made, then we check the names against our databases, with a quick turnaround back to the requesting partner agency.
Senator Dallaire: It is a bit twofold. On one side, you indicate that the concerns were communicated back to CBSA about the admissibility of 667 individuals last year. However, neither of your organizations indicated that they knew: Once CBSA is done with the information, what is the follow-through to validate that your processes are, in fact, functioning? In line with what the senator was asking, there has to be sort of an inspector general backdrop to this to go over and say, ``We have closed the loop on all of it and we followed them through,'' or ``There are some that are still falling through the cracks,'' either between what you have provided or they provided, or what they have not actioned and should have actioned. Is there a body overseeing that?
Mr. Faughnan: I can speak to the service's advice provided, and this speaks in part to the 2011 OAG report. Following that report, the service, CBSA and CIC established a grouping that would look at these issues more systemically.
One of them was the issue of feedback, ensuring that the service, for its part, for its advice, received specific feedback when it provided adverse advice to CBSA. That is now in place and has been for at least a year and a half, if not close to two years.
We have greater confidence now that when we provide advice to CBSA, one, we ensure that it is advice that matters to them, that they can make recommendations subsequently to CIC; and the CIC have established feedback mechanisms, which they can provide you more detail on.
I think it is fair to say that that loop has been closed to an extent because it provides us not only with feedback on the final decision made, or at least the recommendation, but also with the information to ensure that when we provide subsequent advice, it is as good and as clear as it can possibly be for them to make the decision. We're cognizant that when we provide advice under our act related to national security, that advice has to be as clear as it possibly can be to the partner using the information.
Of course, in the intelligence game, sometimes the information simply isn't very clear. It can be very nebulous. But we have been working quite hard with the partners in the last few years to ensure that as we provide it, it is something that is meaningful to them and their requirements to make decisions.
Ms. Cuillierrier: In my previous position as the director of Immigration and Passport Branch, in 2011, we raised that as well, that it would be very beneficial to be able to close the loop on that in terms of metrics because, as Mr. Faughnan has pointed out, it really does provide value for the advice given.
I am not in a position right now to know whether the metric is actually in place, but I absolutely am aware that that conversation did take place. I thought we can only build on that kind of a metric. In the area of developing our alignment architecture and our performance management framework around border activities, that's something we could look at in terms of being able to validate the work and the information that we're providing back to CBSA and CIC.
Senator Segal: I wonder if I could ask our guests today to help me close the loop with respect to the gap between advice given and advice taken.
You do screening and you offer advice to the appropriate agency. Do you follow up as to whether your advice was taken, whether the individual about whom you did screening was in fact admitted, or not admitted, depending on what was decided by the client agency, in a sense, to which you've provided the information?
It strikes me that we did have a time in the past — not so much in the last eight or nine years, but in the past — when a lot of ministerial permits were issued as ways of getting around various difficulties, no doubt because the minister of the day thought there was good and substantial reason to do so. Would you say your batting average is 500 per cent, 300 per cent? Are you batting 800 per cent, or do you not know, really, if the advice you have given with respect to a potential applicant has been taken by the department or the partner agency?
Mr. Faughnan: In the case of the service, senator, we do get informed in a great many of the cases what the final decision was. In certain cases where we consider the national security threat to be considerable, we will follow up directly.
It is fair to say that in all of the advice that we do give to the partners, we know that not 100 per cent of the advice we give is going to result in an outcome that we think might be the outcome we would like.
Our mandate and our threshold for providing the advice is, of course, a lower threshold, to advise the partner of a threat to national security or information that might relate to a threat to national security. The partner's threshold to, let's say, deny a visa, as an example, may be considerably higher than what our information provides them.
I can also say that in the last couple of years, we have done a lot of work with the partners to improve that feedback so that we systemically discuss the results of the advice, in part because we want to know whether we have had an impact with the advice, but also, as I said in my previous answer, to ensure that when we provide advice subsequently, we're making it as cogent as possible so that that partner can make the most informed decision possible. The short answer to that is yes, we do follow up in most circumstances to get a final decision.
Ms. Cuillierrier: I'm not aware whether in 100 per cent of the cases the advice is taken, but because I'm aware of the criteria that are looked at and when a referral is received by the RCMP, I can say with confidence, just in discussion with our colleagues and CBSA, that our advice is taken. I'm not aware of the outcome, but I feel confident that the time, energy and resources that we're devoting to this function are of value to CBSA.
Senator Segal: Understanding that you can't always know what the precise outcome was, unless in the circumstance of a meaningful national security threat, do you think there would be some value in there being a formal structure by which you did know precisely whether your advice was taken, only because to know that, relative to whether someone has been admitted contrary to your advice, would be constructive to have that in your files going forward, for a whole bunch of contingent reasons? Or do you think the present circumstances, from your perspective, are just fine?
Mr. Faughnan: For the service, I'd say there has been such improvement over the last two or three years that I'm quite comfortable that we're on an exceptionally good track. The systems can always be improved at the working level on the business process side to make things as systematic as possible, but if I was comparing now to two or three years ago, I'd say we've come quite a long way. Some of this will probably continue to work through business processes, but, partly because of resource issues, we've become so focused on only those cases that really matter that we're finding the interaction with the partners stronger than it has ever been.
Ms. Cuillierrier: Building on what my colleague said, I think anything that provides feedback is good for us in terms of being able to adjust and adapt the business flow for the future.
As Mr. Faughnan has mentioned, our relationship around security screening with CBSA and CIC has increased dramatically in the last few years, yes.
Senator Segal: Thank you very much.
The Chair: Colleagues, it's now three o'clock. I would like to thank the witnesses for their presentations today and for taking the time to be with us.
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence is continuing its study of ballistic missile defence under the reference approved by the Senate on December 12, 2013. We are pleased to welcome distinguished Canadian academics, Frank Harvey, Professor of International Relations, Dalhousie University, Halifax; and James Fergusson, Director, Centre of Defence and Security Studies, University of Manitoba.
Gentlemen, welcome. You have both written extensively on this subject. We are glad to have you here in person. We understand you both have an opening statement. We have approximately an hour and a half for this panel and we look forward to what you have to say. Mr. Harvey, you may begin.
Frank Harvey, Professor of International Relations, Dalhousie University, as an individual: Thank you very much. I have a pretty straightforward objective today. What I'd like to do is highlight what I regard as a significant and puzzling inconsistency in Canada's policy on ballistic missile defence.
In November 2010, 28 NATO members met in Lisbon to sign NATO's updated strategic concept, which is essentially a document that outlines the alliance members' obligations and commitments to enhance collective security. That's pretty straightforward. The 2010 document included a crystal clear commitment by all NATO to:
develop the capability to defend our populations and territories against ballistic missile attack as a core element of our collective defence, which contributes to the indivisible security of the Alliance.
As President Obama stated in his closing remarks:
. . . we have agreed to develop missile defence capability that's strong enough to cover all NATO European territory and populations, as well as the United States.
At NATO's 2012 summit in Chicago, the alliance members reinforced that very strong commitment to ballistic missile defence.
We continue to be concerned by the increasing threats to our Alliance posed by the proliferation of ballistic missiles. . . . The aim of this capability —
And they're referring to the Lisbon commitment on BMD.
— is to provide full coverage and protection for all NATO European populations, territory . . .
And the United States.
NATO's 2012 defence posture review made the same commitment to ballistic missile defence. Now, as a NATO member, there is no question any longer that Canada officially endorses the logic, strategic utility and security imperatives underpinning BMD. In essence, the Government of Canada now fully embraces the merits of multinational cooperation on missile defence as part of Canada's treaty obligations and alliance commitments.
The debate in Ottawa, I would argue, is over. The debate over BMD is over, except when it comes to the government's obligation to protect Canadian territory and populations from the very same threats. Why?
The most perplexing aspect of Canada's official endorsement of BMD through NATO is the ongoing reluctance or refusal by the Government of Canada to engage in bilateral talks with our most important NATO ally on defending Canadian territory, BMD architecture and the algorithms for interceptor technology. Canada's signatures on each one of these documents that I listed clearly confirm the support for BMD, but those signatures also imply that the Government of Canada now rejects the arguments put forward by critics. Presumably, if they embraced them they wouldn't have signed those documents. The fact that they signed those documents suggests that they've rejected many of the arguments put forward by BMD critics. There are very good reasons why those arguments should be rejected.
For example, critics were absolutely convinced that U.S. BMD would compel Russia to launch a new arms race — and, by the way, committee members can backtrack on previous Senate testimony and house testimony to find references to the threat of a new arms race. Instead, what we witnessed is some of the most sweeping bilateral disarmament agreements in history. I would refer you to the very first slide in the hard copies I gave you. The first two slides provide a pretty clear indication of the decline in nuclear weapons across all components of the nuclear weapons system — the decline over the last 10 years, not an increase. The facts are pretty obvious.
U.S. BMD has become far less destabilizing after the Cold War because Russian officials understand that the system is not designed to affect their deterrent. They understand the system is designed to affect new and aspiring nuclear weapon states, like North Korea and Iran.
Critics also continue to dismiss BMD technology as worthless, despite compelling evidence from testing records showing measurable progress over time. I won't get into the details because they are outlined in my speaking notes. However, if you look at the next two slides, those slides represent the testing records, the success and failure rates, for various components of ballistic missile defence since 2001.
The evidence is pretty compelling that the technology is working and it's getting increasingly more accurate over time: 43 out of 55 interceptor hit-to-kill tests over the last 13 years, since 2001, close to 78 per cent, have hit the targets. That's pretty impressive for worthless technology.
BMD critics are correct when they point out that there's no possible way that a U.S. BMD system can protect against the onslaught of a Russian or Chinese attack using their missiles. That's a stabilizing feature of the current BMD architecture. You don't want to disrupt the deterrent value of Chinese and Russian weapons. It stabilizes BMD because they are no longer concerned that the BMD system is directed at them. Obviously, it's directed at North Korea and Iran.
Critics also mistakenly predicted that U.S. BMD would lead to massive increases in Chinese defence expenditures and proliferation. No such proliferation has occurred, whether measured in terms of a percentage of GDP, a percentage of GDP or the percentage of the defence budget directed towards nuclear weapons; no evidence of massive proliferation by China has occurred. Why? There are two reasons: China is committed to minimum deterrence; they're satisfied that's sufficient for credibility. And they're convinced as well that the U.S. BMD system or the NATO BMD system is not directed at their deterrent; it's directed at North Korea and Iran.
The Canadian government's official assessment of the nuclear and ballistic missile proliferation threats from North Korea is also very clear. The Canadian government gets that threat. On the government's website:
North and South technically remain at war . . . . Canada remains gravely concerned about North Korea's provocative and destabilizing actions, such as nuclear and missile tests and related proliferation, as well as egregious human rights abuses.
Canadian officials acknowledge that the regime in North Korea poses a serious threat to global security, particularly after the launch, in December 2012, of the Unha-3 rocket. If you go to the next two slides, this is a three- stage intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of about 10,000 kilometres. If you look at that graph, that encompasses a good chunk of the United States and Canada. When you combine that with the underground nuclear test in January of 2013, clearly these moves represent a serious threat, not to the United States alone but to Canada as well.
In my presentation notes I've also included two polls. These polls demonstrate that South Koreans, to whom we are committed with respect to their security, are growing increasingly concerned about the credibility of an American and, by extension, Canadian promise to protect them. If you look at the graph, a larger number of South Koreans today are not convinced that the nuclear deterrent provided by the U.S. is credible, that the U.S. would fight another war to protect them.
BMD, American and Canadian officials now understand, is an important component of maintaining the credibility of their commitment to the region. BMD is a fundamentally important part of that piece. That is why all NATO members, including Canada, given its signatures, understand the importance of BMD. There are so many different aspects and contributions BMD makes to global security.
There is absolutely no daylight between the positions adopted by the U.S., NATO and Canada in the context of global security, European security and Asian security, but therein lies the anomaly, the puzzling contradiction. Why would any Canadian government support BMD to protect European, American and Asian allies' territories and populations, yet continue to shy away from embracing the utility of bilateral negotiations with the U.S. to accomplish the same protections against the same threats everybody acknowledges exist? Why?
Possibly Canadian officials are perfectly secure in the belief that the Americans will protect us, that the Americans will protect every piece of Canada, every part of Canada, every city, all of our populations. Perhaps Canadian officials are secure in the belief that they'll come to our defence, so why rock the boat? Why raise another ugly political debate about something we're doing anyway? Just don't tell anybody.
But what if there are no clearly articulated guarantees from the U.S. that they are committed to protecting every piece of Canada? What if those security guarantees exist only in the minds of the Canadian officials who are hoping those guarantees exist? If I'm right about that, then it represents, I think, a very risky abrogation of the government's core obligation to proactively defend Canada and Canadian populations and territories. I think it constitutes a serious error in judgment.
Final point: The onus is no longer on BMD proponents to make the case for BMD. The onus today, I would argue, is on the few remaining holdouts in the Canadian government to explain why Canadians don't deserve the same security guarantees and protections that everyone else is getting. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Harvey. Mr. Fergusson, do you have opening remarks?
James Fergusson, Director, Centre of Defence and Security Studies, University of Manitoba, as an individual: Yes. This is partially based on one of the articles I forwarded to the committee, the most recent one that will be published shortly in an edited volume on Canadian defence policy, which essentially deals with missile defence and outer space, but the missile defence section largely looks at trying to explain why the Canadian government since 2005 has not moved forward or reversed itself on the missile defence file. Building partially on the comments of my colleague, Dr. Harvey, I want to look at two of the essential assumptions that explain this and why both are problematic.
The first is this assumption that has long existed in Canadian defence policy, at least since the end of World War II, that in order for the United States to defend itself, it has no choice but to defend Canada. I've forwarded you a map I put together of polar projection with what is known as threat fans, or at least that's what NORAD calls them — this isn't as sophisticated as what NORAD has — of tracks of missile launches from North Korea and Iran, and the existing and potentially planned and possible other sites for the system, particularly the existing Fort Greely site, which today consists of 30 interceptors as well as 14 planned to be deployed by 2017, the forward-based radar system supporting this and the assumptions that are built into the idea, as Dr. Harvey pointed out, that the United States will defend us.
The assumption is that, given the nature of the system as it exists, if you look particularly at a launch, and my initial comments will be about a launch from North Korea, if it were to happen, the United States has no choice, that its forward-deployed and particularly its ground-based, mid-course phase missile defence system must defend Canada in order to defend the lower 48 states. You can see on the map the tracks that go ahead.
It assumes or posits that the nature of the system, which eventually evolved into a little more sophisticated layered system, will seek to shoot as early as possible against a ballistic missile warhead prior, or it's assumed prior, to the tracking elements of the system being able to identify the specific North American target. The earlier the system is able to shoot at the incoming warhead, the more intercept attempts can be undertaken under a strategy that is known as shoot-look-shoot.
It is also noted, or has been argued, that in terms of intercept points, the preference for an intercept is post-apogee. That is that point where the missile is the furthest away from Earth as it transits through outer space and is beginning its descent towards targets in continental North America. The point of a post-apogee intercept using a kinetic kill is that there is less probability that the debris from the successful intercept will remain in outer space, thereby adding to the existing debris problem of outer space. Rather, the debris will come down or be pulled by gravity back down and burn up upon re-entry.
I would further note to this that if you look at the Fort Greely site, relative to a North Korean target of Washington, D.C., which is roughly 6,800 miles away, Fort Greely, or Alaska — it is hard for me to judge, given what is available for me to calculate these things from the Internet — is roughly about halfway or a little beyond the halfway point. Again, we are dealing with highly classified information on the operation of the system, but likely, all things working out, it would occur somewhat forward of the site. Then you raise the question of the timing of the site.
Importantly, in my view and from people I've talked to, when you're trying to discriminate the target, and this is the key thing for the Canadian assumption for the axiomatic idea that the United States will defend us in order to defend themselves, the question becomes, when do you know where that target would be? Particularly if we assume we're talking about a second shot at an incoming warhead, the question comes, once you know the target, whether you want to assign a second or potentially a third interceptor, if that's possible given the current location of the system.
The key consideration for Canadian defence policy planners and the real thing about defending Canadian cities and populations without relying on the United States to do so for us, without any commitment into that system or any participation in it, is that point when the United States is able to identify the specific target, and then the choice the U.S. Northern Command must make relative to the number of warheads in flight, relative to the number of ICBMs in, in this case, North Korea's arsenal, at whatever point in the future, relative to intelligence assumptions about the North Korean battle plan, whether it will be one shot, a wave, how exactly they will time and what intelligence tells us about it, intervals between launches, number of ICBMs in reserve relative to the number of interceptors available, the number of intercept opportunities and the probability of success per intercept attempt.
All this intelligence on enemy capabilities, on the specific details and capabilities of the U.S. missile defence system, particularly its current one in Fort Greely, Alaska, and the U.S. battle plan is essential to answer the fundamental question: Will Canada be defended regardless of what the United States does and relative to the nature of the attack? It is this vital and important planning information that, in my view, is currently unavailable to Canadian defence planners and the Canadian government, which is vital for Canadian decision makers to make a decision on what they might need or need to do to ensure the defence of Canadian cities. In other words, I would suggest to you Canada's defence against whatever probability of a strike from North Korea, in the example I'm giving, which is the primary or the immediate concern right now, Iran coming further down the road, rests on a hope and belief that the U.S. will have to defend us in order to defend itself.
One might suggest that even if you had all this information, if we had access to all these details, which would likely come in some form pending negotiations or at least discussions with the United States, such information is unnecessary. As a function of geography, the economic integration of Canada and the United States and the devastation of any nuclear attack, if you consider the radiation impact relative to the way the wind blows, the destruction of a major Canadian city would have a devastating effect on the United States. Moreover, there's an underlying hope that the U.S. will be morally bound to defend Canada simply as a function of American values. However, what may apply in the case of the proximity of Vancouver to Seattle, Detroit to Windsor, Toronto-Ottawa- Montreal to the U.S. northeast, does not necessarily apply to Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg or other cities in Canada, and also does not apply to targets potentially in the U.S. south, even including Washington, D.C.
Moral considerations are one thing, but it's important to note that a U.S. officer's command is legally bound to defend the United States. It is not legally bound to defend Canada, even though this commander may wish to defend Canada, thereby, in the absence of our participation, placing the U.S. commander in a difficult situation.
Finally, I would suggest to you that if this principle applies to the U.S., that in order for the United States to defend itself, it must defend Canada, there is a reciprocal element here that Canadian policy-makers never think about — that we are also bound to defend the United States in order to defend Canada. For these reasons alone, relative to the issues surrounding specific targets, I would suggest to you that some form of participation, at least to find out the answers to the key question, under what conditions Canada will or will not be defended, is vitally important.
The second consideration I wish to bring up to you concerns developments that are taking place in the United States regarding the possibility of a third site to be deployed somewhere in the northeastern United States. As you will note from the map I gave you, as best as I could put it together, there are five sites now in the x's — Michigan, Ohio, upstate New York, Vermont and Maine, which will undertake environmental assessments for a future site. This does not mean that Congress has approved moving forward for the future site, nor that this site will actually move forward, but it is an indication that the United States is seriously considering, relative to the pace of Iranian proliferation both nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles, that the United States will need to develop a third site in order to effectively defend the eastern seaboard from a potential Iranian attack.
To this I would note that the Fort Greely site is not optimally placed to intercept launches from the Middle East or from Iran, simply by virtue of geography. I have been informed that they say they will have to undertake, if they could undertake an intercept, what's called a trailing shot. They will have to catch up to the warhead, as opposed to in the case of a North Korean launch, where they would be able to shoot into it as it's coming at them.
The question becomes the importance of this potential site and what it means for Canada. It also, of course, raises the question of how feasible the European system, the NATO system, is; and I would point out that the original plan by President Bush negotiated with Poland and the Czech Republic, which was subsequently cancelled by the Obama administration, entailed the use of long-range mid-course phase interceptors as those deployed in Fort Greely. The current Obama position or the NATO program is to deploy standard missiles, which are the naval-based systems, primarily a theatre-based system and a modernized one in the future as the system develops. It of course assumes how effective this potential will be to a long-range launch relative to their location in launches against North America as distinct from defending European population and territory.
This is where one of the central issues for the future of Canada that is of vital security interest and vital to our relationship with the United States emerges. The Thule radar, located as part of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, is located in the Far North, in Greenland, oriented of course looking over the North Pole. There is effectively, relative to the missile defence system, a question of where you are going to place forward-deployed radars similar to those radars deployed to support the Fort Greely system in the Pacific. The only other BMEWS radars are the Cape Cod site, which is optimized permanently for submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and the Cavalier site south of Winnipeg, which is also optimized for submarine launches looking north to Hudson Bay in particular. Both are old Cold War sites but still operative.
The question for Canada is distinct from the last iteration, that is, in the last case people were concerned that if Canada said no to participation or didn't engage with the United States, potentially this would impact our defence relationship with the United States, would impact upon NORAD and the future of the NORAD relationship, as well as other concerns. Observers will point out, as Alan Stephenson has pointed out, that none of this has occurred. The reason why was simply because Canada's territory was not significantly important whatsoever to the functional effectiveness of the Fort Greely system, designed primarily to deal with North Korea. But when or if the United States proceeds to a third site, Canadian territory will become vitally important. The need to forward deploy a sea-based radar — and I would note here after the 2005 decision, Raytheon officials raised the question of whether or not that decision prohibited or prevented the possibility of a forward-deployed radar, an X-band radar, at Goose Bay and then it was quickly dropped — but as an indication relative to the requirements for tracking and queuing of a ground-based site in the northeast, the primary or the ideal position relative to an existing radar gap for tracking and queuing purposes resides in Canada. For Canada to say no or not to be engaged or not to prepare for this will make us certainly a security liability to the United States and will have direct implications, I would suggest to you, for the future of our vital and key defence relationship with the United States.
These issues are vital to be considered now, not to wait, as Canada always tends to do, until that third site emerges. We have to be prepared, relative to my first point to our concerns about being able to defend Canada relative to the existing system and why it's vitally important for the defence of Canada and in the future our relationship with the United States, to begin engaging the United States once again in negotiations about what it would mean and what it would cost Canada to commit in order to assure that Canadian cities and populations, senators, are defended. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We will start with Senator Dallaire.
Senator Dallaire: Gentlemen, most appreciated, and thank you very much for your clarity, your intellectual rigour in presenting this case from both angles. It leaves me with the following question: Engaging into missile defence would require what sort of outlay, do you believe, in resources from Canada, be it radar or whatever other instrument they use to fund this capability like they're doing with the Poles and everybody else?
Mr. Harvey: I have a quick response to that from one perspective and then I'll throw it over to Dr. Fergusson to deal with the details of some of those costs.
It would cost absolutely nothing to engage in negotiations and discussions with the Americans about all of these issues. No one has a clue what we're talking about with respect to costs because we're not even at the table, we're not discussing this with anybody on that side, and there's no sense of what kind of commitment Canada can actually fit into something like this. There is really no way to assess those costs. Those costs will be a function of political decisions. Those costs will be a function of balancing against other priorities, both domestic and international, and priorities in terms of defence expenditures.
The more important question, I would argue, is whether or not this security threat is sufficient to do something about it. The next question is, how much do we want to invest in it? But we're not even there, and I think that's dangerous.
Mr. Fergusson: If you go back to the 1990s, leading up to the negotiations, then called discussions, that began in the summer of 2003 and concluded in the early winter of 2004 and then to the ultimate end with Prime Minister Martin's decision in February of 2005, the general assumption that guided Canadian thinking at the time was that this was going to be cost-free. There was a belief, for a variety of reasons, not least of all some signals that had come out of the United States in the mid-1990s, that what was important to the United States was simply to have Canada as one of its key allies, if not its key ally, on board. That was always a problematic assumption, but again, it was an assumption relative to the structure of the system that we're now dealing with, which of course became operationally deployed, became operational in the fall of 2004.
At the time that this went on, defence policy-makers, particularly in the military, conceptualized that Canada's possible contribution, that it would have to do something, would be an asymmetric one. That is, Canada would look at where it was thinking about investing for other strategic or defence or security reasons and offer these capabilities to the United States, which would then support American efforts.
Senator Dallaire: Niche.
Mr. Fergusson: Well, it would be a niche, but by and large it would be found, or it was identified at the time that it would be found, in the programs that now exist in terms of Canada engaging in military space. I would reference to you, of course, the deployment last year, the launch last year and now operational Sapphire satellite, and also the value of potentially the future of the RADARSAT Constellation. That is relative to what the United States needed at the time. We wanted to do these things for other reasons relative to the space question and security issues. Therefore, this would be a useful contribution in the United States and hence an asymmetric one.
In the future, I would note, in my view, that if the United States does proceed — and, as Dr. Harvey says, this is about negotiations — when you start to think about the requirements, the potential value of Canadian territory, this will now require a significant investment of defence dollars by the Canadian government.
I would point out to you the United States' current defence budgetary situation, and in fact I saw today on the news that the Secretary of Defense has noted that the U.S. Army may go down to levels not seen since before World War II, which is an extremely small army. The other demands, as a function of sequestration, are that it won't be simply the sense of being able to say, ``We will give you territory. You pay for the radar installation.'' In fact, Canada will have to contribute things.
Let's be clear. When we talk about a potential forward-deployed radar in Canadian territory, it is not a single- function radar. It is not just a missile defence radar. It also has space track value, which supports the NORAD mission, which supports, of course, Canada's contribution right now to the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, and all those aspects that will come from that radar.
So it is not going to be a free ride, and I think the Canadian government needs to know that it won't be a free ride going into this.
Mr. Harvey: Can I make one final observation about the cost issue? It is just to spin the question a little bit. If Canada understands and accepts the nature of the threat, and it does, if it's committed through its alliance to contribute to some form of multinational BMD cooperation with the Americans and European allies, if that's a set of assumptions the current government is working on, or working with, then how much is that worth with respect to Canadian contribution of any value?
Does nothing make sense? Does contributing nothing to European security, Asian security and NATO security, despite accepting the threat, make sense?
Senator Dallaire: Let me throw it another way. The Brits have just signed up to $40-billion worth of improving their nuclear submarine Trident upgrade capability, which I consider to be a terrible waste of money and maybe just a reason to keep their industry going, at the cost of over 17 regiments and God knows how much other capability in their defence budget.
So we've got this capability to potentially come in, and your answer was what I was looking for: Yes, it's not going to be a free ride. Knowing that, I'm taken aback by the fact that military advice to government over these years does not seem to have spoken about or even raised BMD.
Now, it is one thing for policy people to talk about it, but it is a whole different thing for the generals and the military advice side of the house. Have there been any writings or debate inside the Canadian military in regard to BMD and raising it as part of their long-term strategic plans, the 2020s, the 2040s and so forth?
Mr. Fergusson: To my knowledge, nothing I have seen formally written in the public domain has come out of the Canadian Forces with regard to future planning and potential requirements for missile defence contribution.
I would note two things here, though. Within the context of NORAD and the Canadian Air Force, there are informal discussions all the time about the missile defence question and the issue of participation — at least, that's my experience — and understandably why.
The second point I would make is that if you go back again into the history of this file in Canada, and also in the United States, there has always been internal debate within the senior ranks of the Armed Forces and others about whether missile defence should be supported relative to the trade-offs that potentially come in terms of lost army or navy capabilities or other air force capabilities, and this has always been and, I assume, is a major concern.
This was driven internally in the United States as well within the various services. Internally, of course, in the United States, this was driven by the political arm that set the priority of missile defence, particularly the Bush administration, but also other administrations beforehand for other political reasons.
You have that same phenomenon today when you look at questions about the size of the Canadian defence budget and the choices that are going to have to be made in the near future relative to the cuts that have occurred and their impact not only on current operational capabilities but also future requirements and the fear of losing capabilities. You can sort of understand that certain circles in the defence department and the military are going to be reluctant to support a missile defence commitment.
I would add to this one other thing that I think is very important that the department also faces, which I think has been identified, but, again, I only see what gets out in the public domain. That, of course, is the modernization of the North Warning System, which, to my understanding, has to be invested in and moved to be functionally effective relative to the current issue surrounding the Arctic by 2025. That is going to be a pressing commitment.
Again, this goes back to the long-standing arrangements that Canada and the United States have had in terms of funding NORAD-related or these types of arrangements with our ally to the south. For example, the North Warning System originally was funded 60 per cent by the United States and 40 per cent by Canada. It is those types of arrangements that you are looking at in the future.
You will have internal discussions about it. I think the answer to your question is it is understandable why certain elements within the Armed Forces and elsewhere are reluctant to raise the missile defence file.
Senator Dallaire: I would object to your saying that they are reluctant to raise it because of the trade-offs, of course. On the contrary, if you are getting real strategic military advice, that thing is on the table. Now, historically, they couldn't hit the broadside of a barn, so it was pretty easy to move it off to the side and say let the scientists continue to play with it. But we knew it was going to come to capability.
Northern Command runs these things. We are linked in with Northern Command. We have exchanges — for example, General Beare — continuously. Can you actually tell me there's no military discussion nor weighing of that capability in the defence of Canadian territory, which is the first priority of national defence — priority one is defence of Canada — and that there's nothing tangible in any other future or strategic documents that are being produced now?
Mr. Harvey: I wouldn't expect to see much of it — not because it doesn't make sense to a lot of very senior military folks, who happen to be in NORTHCOM and NORAD, but because it is politically untenable to discuss this given its history. The politics underpinning this is such, I believe, that there is no appetite to openly debate and discuss it. If the Government of Canada is not convinced it makes sense to openly debate and discuss this in public, and with our American allies, why would any senior military officer openly make the case for BMD?
Senator Dallaire: Professional advice to government. But anyway, thank you very much.
Senator Dagenais: Professor Harvey, in your paper entitled North Korea, Ballistic Missile Defence And Canada-US Defence Cooperation, you argued that ``any reasonably balanced . . . assessment of all of the facts would confirm that BMD critics have lost the policy debate.''
At the same time, American physicist, Richard Garwin, continues to maintain that given countermeasures and the technical problems that still need to be overcome, it is highly unlikely that a truly effective BMD system will ever be deployed.
How would you respond to the concerns about the cost and the technical problems that still need to be overcome raised by Richard Garwin, and in light of these concerns, are there cost-effective alternatives to BMD for addressing the potential threats from rogue states? In your view, are deterrence and non-proliferation effective alternatives to BMD?
Mr. Harvey: Great questions. A couple of really quick reactions. There are also a large number of very qualified physicists in the Missile Defense Agency who have been convinced that this is a challenge that can be overcome as a consequence of the evolution of technology and military technology, and the evidence that I presented in the slides suggests that they have been right.
Is the system perfect? Interestingly enough, physicists who have been critical of BMD set a very interesting standard that has to be met for them to be satisfied that this is a worthy investment. The standard they set is whether or not the system has the capability to deal with a multiplicity of countermeasures or an onslaught of an attack from states like China and Russia.
It doesn't have the capability to do that. That's a good thing.
What it does have a capability to do as a consequence of the evolution of technology is to at least address emerging threats from states like North Korea and Iran.
On the issue of those two states and countermeasures, it is actually a good thing to force states like North Korea and Iran to invest millions of dollars into producing countermeasures to overcome America's BMD. You want it to be more expensive. If you rip BMD away as an asset, it would be a lot cheaper for North Korea and Iran to produce the capability to threaten the U.S. and to deter the U.S. and Canada from intervening in places like North and South Korea for the right reasons.
On the issue of alternatives, you are absolutely right, there are alternatives. The nuclear arms control and disarmament regime is the alternative that critics point to. We should be focusing on non-proliferation and disarmament. This is the solution. But, senators, I would put to you that it is essential that you evaluate the success of the non-proliferation regime on the basis of the same standards you are applying to ballistic missile defence.
When you look at the nature of the proliferation problem in places like North Korea and Iran, the thousands of pieces of technology they had to acquire to build a very advanced nuclear weapons system, every piece of that technology that got through the system is a failed intercept.
That system of non-proliferation has not been very effective, and it has been costly. So what are the successes you want to point to in the non-proliferation regime to suggest that we don't need BMD? That argument is not compelling.
I think you need both.
Mr. Fergusson: If I could add two things. Part of the criticism a lot of critics have of the missile defence's potential effectiveness relative to countermeasures is that it somehow assumes that a proliferating state such as North Korea, which has tested nuclear weapons, which has tested relatively long-range ballistic missiles, and in the future, Iran, which has tested intermediate-range ballistic missiles — and both have launched satellites into orbit — will somehow in their development phase automatically be able to develop and deploy simultaneously sophisticated countermeasures which we associate with the old Soviet Union and Russia after decades of investment and scientific research. Really, I find it incredible to believe that they're going to be able to do this.
If you look back, for example, in the 1970s in the British Chevaline program, which was a Polaris program designed to penetrate the existing Russian missile defence capacity around Moscow, it took them five, six years and billions of dollars of investment to develop penetration aids and countermeasures to try to defeat the then-Soviet system.
This is not easily done if you look at what you expect a single warhead married to a first-generation ICBM — which is another issue about how effective that targeting and engineering will be if it was actually launched. We have to look realistically at what that type of threat capability is really going to be. It is not going to be the Russian capability or the Chinese. It will be much less sophisticated. The American system is designed — the reason they moved forward before a threat in capability terms actually manifests itself is to stay ahead of that curve.
As to the question of relying upon nuclear deterrence, I would bring two things, which go back to critics of American nuclear strategy during the Cold War.
Deterrence is fine, but what happens if deterrence fails? What do you do? In the case of the absence of a limited missile defence shield for North America, one is then left with the choice of the President to do one thing, and that is retaliate, a nuclear exchange.
Missile defence provides the President of the United States another option besides simple nuclear retaliation. I think that's a very important consideration that has to be taken into account. It supplements deterrence, in my view.
Senator Dagenais: Now that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is no longer in force, the United States can also engage in wider areas of research relevant to missile defence. Under the auspices of the treaty, certain research and development had not being permitted.
Canada's economic future is very much tied to the development of cutting-edge technologies. What economic benefits would participation in BMD have for the Canadian high-tech firms?
Mr. Fergusson: Well, let me reply to this as best I can in two ways: In the context of the negotiations that were held from 2003 and ended in 2004, one of the elements on the table was a memorandum of understanding to create sufficient exchange of information to enable Canadian tech companies and Canadian technology. It was a research development and technology MOU, besides the question of participation that also died. That certainly is going to be one element of this.
There are Canadian technologies potentially coming out of our high-tech industries, our space industry, as small as it is, that potentially can contribute to the future development of the system on a competitive basis. I mentioned already Sapphire, an optical satellite, which is not part of the missile defence program. It is a contribution to the American Space Surveillance Network because it sits in low Earth orbit and looks out at geo orbit for security reasons and for space track reasons.
There are technologies embedded in there that may be useful for the evolution of the space tracking and surveillance system, which is a key future element that the United States is moving forward with, slowly, which will entail deployment of sensors that will enable more accurate tracking instead of from ground, but also from space, which partially is designed to deal with future countermeasure problems.
I don't know if there are great opportunities. I can take you back to the SDI years where the government of the day agreed to allow Canadian companies. As it turned out, one of the important lessons of that SDI decision, which I should note was blessed by the Americans, they didn't mind it, was the key developing agency — in that case it was the Strategic Defence Initiative Organization, today it is the Missile Defense Agency in the United States. Canadian companies did very poorly, and the empirical record that I have seen basically suggests that if you want your companies to gain access, you need to gain access to key technologies and key information, and if the government's not on board, then it becomes very difficult for those companies to engage. But I wouldn't say there's a windfall here.
Mr. Harvey: If I can pick up on a theme from a slightly different angle. I was at a procurement conference where Minister Finley announced the new Defence Procurement Strategy, and in my understanding, the new Defence Procurement Strategy is to embrace the — sorry?
Senator Dallaire: Buy nothing.
Mr. Harvey: Okay. That's one interpretation.
It is to at least provide industry with an opportunity to come into the process a little earlier, to give industry an opportunity to say, ``This is what we have. This is what we can do,'' and, ``This is what we think would be an important contribution to enhancing our capacity to sell and your capacity to develop defence technologies you need.''
This is the very last point that Dr. Fergusson made: If the government is not willing to even engage in discussing BMD with our most important ally, and perhaps the largest industrial base for producing defence infrastructure for missile defence, Canadian industry won't be able to answer or be willing to answer that very important question.
If you open up discussions and you engage industry to answer those questions, that informs the decision and perhaps points to the potential for economic benefits that could enhance the security benefits of something like BMD cooperation, but there's no discussion. There's no debate.
Senator Day: The first point is based on your comment earlier about the U.S. analyzing, in eastern North America, five sites for potential radar.
Mr. Fergusson: Interceptors.
Senator Day: For interceptors, okay. I thought that was for radar. Loring Air Force Base, which closed down in Maine, right on the New Brunswick border, is one of the areas that have been lobbying for some attention there. You show on your map Newfoundland and Labrador. Is that an area that is likely to be considered in Happy Valley-Goose Bay?
Mr. Fergusson: Goose Bay is a potential area for a forward-based X-band radar in support of an interceptor site in the northeast. The x's are interceptor sites. The environmental assessments that are about to begin in the United States are to examine these five sites for interceptors, not for radars, because I don't think they want to co-locate a radar with them, which was the old Cavalier ABM.
Senator Day: That would make them vulnerable, I suppose.
Mr. Fergusson: It's partially to do with the speed of the interceptors, the distance, where you want to intercept far ahead and the need for a proper tracking radar forward-deployed.
The site in Maine is the naval station at Portsmouth, Maine; that's the one on the list. They are Fort Drum in New York, Camp Ethan Allen in Vermont, Fort Custer in Michigan and Camp Nathan Hale in Ohio, I think, if my memory serves me correctly.
Senator Day: Presumably, if Canada was part of this ballistic missile defence shield for North America, then we might potentially be considered for either a radar base or an interceptor base, but at this stage we're not.
Mr. Fergusson: No. If history is one guide, the whole debate in Canada on missile defence, which goes back to the 1960s, interceptor deployments in Canada have never been on the table. The U.S. has hinted very strongly that if we wanted interceptors, they would happily sell them to us at a good price, at cost. But it's never been assumed in U.S. thinking or Canadian thinking that you would put in an interceptor site.
In terms of forward tracking, if you think about Thule being far north and Cape Cod being far south, you have this big gap. You want to be able to track that warhead with as many sensors as possible in order to queue that interceptor, because once it flies, the onboard kinetic kill warhead, a very expensive piece of metal to slam into something, it takes over and tracks itself. It will take over the tracking. It has two dual phenomenology sensors.
This is just supposition on my part because the U.S. doesn't talk about the implications, and nobody in this country talks about it. If you look at where they go with it, Goose Bay is one opportunity. You can think of a band around the latitude of Goose Bay; you could talk about a sea-based X-band, but then you're talking about where are you going to put that. In Canadian waters off Labrador? That's a possibility, but they would want secure waters.
Right now my understanding is that the forward-deployed X-band sea-based outside of Japan is in Japanese waters, and of course Japan is fully engaged in the U.S. missile defence program for their own interests.
Senator Day: As a point of clarification on this, not far from Thule is the Alert base in Canada, and they're tracking a number of activities coming over the North Pole. Is that information being shared with the United States and being used as part of the ballistic missile defence package that they have in place now?
Mr. Fergusson: I can't honestly answer that, but my assumption is that Alert is important for signals intelligence and other aspects but does not feed into the U.S. missile defence program, nor does the North Warning System have the capability to support the missile defence program.
Senator Day: At this stage.
Mr. Fergusson: At this stage, and I doubt in the future it would.
Senator Segal: I have a question for each of our distinguished guests. I'm going to impose on Dr. Harvey, who I know in a previous life was very much involved on issues related to naval strategy. We have this endless, ongoing, no- ships-ever-arrive procurement program. I think the announcement was made in 2008; we haven't cut a square inch of steel. The Chinese have cut all kinds of steel in the interim.
As it looks as if there is some time until we're actually going to be cutting steel, the Americans have a sea-based part of the system, their Aegis-based system for mid-course countervail. I think there are five Ticonderoga Class U.S. battleships that are now carrying the proposition, and some of our Japanese allies now have them on board.
Do you think part of what might focus the attention on this, in terms of a future involvement, would be for us to look for including some measure of Aegis capacity on some of the surface combatants and other ships that are slated for construction, or do you think that would just complicate an already horrific process of avoidance and denial that we're going through?
Mr. Harvey: At this stage in the procurement process, particularly the naval piece of that procurement process, it would more than likely complicate things, because the current government and the Department of Defence are having a very hard time working through the 130 or so changes they have already included in the requests for the current procurement process. Leaving aside the political implications of attaching a BMD component to this procurement process, I think it would be unlikely, to say the least. I don't know.
Mr. Fergusson: I would point out to you the current Tribal Class destroyers carry the Standard Missile 2. Basically the launch silos on the destroyers can take an upgraded standard missile. The Tribal Class destroyers don't have the radars, of course, and they're aging and out of date.
I would also note — and this partially answers General Dallaire's question about military thinking, at least internally — that Canada also engaged in a research and development program for a missile-capable tactical tracking radar for the frigates with the Dutch and the Germans in the 1990s. We pulled out of the program when it was realized that the frigates simply were too small to be able to take it.
I would assume, given Canada's interests in being able to be interoperable with the United States and particularly our close linkages between the Royal Canadian Navy and the U.S. Navy and the ability of Canadian naval capabilities to integrate into U.S. carrier task force and the rising issues of cooperation in the Pacific — I am fairly confident that, when you look down the future to whatever the future combat capable ship will be, it will need a very powerful radar. It will need launch — they're not silos but I always call them little silos on the back of the ships — for air defence and for ground attack cruise missiles, et cetera. It would be logical that we will look at the missile defence capability for interoperability reasons, and just for the nature of a vessel that's going to replace the frigates and destroyers and be multifunctional, because it will have to be.
Senator Segal: To both our guests, another question. It relates to the difficulty that we face between combat engagements, which Churchill talked about very effectively, which is the inertial tendency to write down our defence costs, reduce the size of our Armed Forces and reduce our naval and strategic capacity. The Americans are doing it moderately and the British are doing it quite radically. There is evidence of the same thing, sadly, happening in this country.
It struck me, when Dr. Harvey said why would we not be raising this debate in a constructive fashion, it's because, in our system, the ciphers at Treasury Board reward inertia. They create incentives for inertia.
There are no incentives for broadening the agenda to a more substantive discussion. I think — and I would be interested in your expert assessment of this — no one has really talked about the threat of inertia on this front for the continued integration of Canadian and American forces with respect to NORAD. The separation now exists — and this would be very much an Air Force issue primarily, but not only — between a space command, a missile defence and the Canadian NORAD establishment that's part of the mix, where information is no longer shared in the kind of free- flowing way from all strategic options because we're outside that program, and until there is some understanding on the part of the public that our strategic options and our ability to help defend ourselves will be diminished by our continued disengagement from the missile defence discussion, there will be no countervail to suggest we have to have that debate.
That's a narrow view that I'm advancing, as someone who thinks our Armed Forces should be twice the size it presently is. I'd be interested in your comments on that.
Mr. Harvey: The point at which that disengagement is viewed as more costly than the potential political costs of engaging the Americans on the subject of BMD is when things are likely to change. I don't think we're anywhere close to that at this point in time. That's the argument that has to be made. It's a great way to conceptualize the argument, in terms of inertia and the implications of the decision to distance ourselves from the discussion of the implications for NORAD and for the divide between USSPACECOM and NORAD, or NORTHCOM and USSPACECOM.
Those are crucial questions. There are no costs at this point to getting that wrong. Until someone can convince the government that it's about time to re-engage those really important questions, we're not likely to move very far on them. There are no costs.
Mr. Fergusson: You hit on probably the most important word: inertia. Canadian policy on missile defence dating back to roughly 1963-64 has been guided by inertia, not for budgetary reasons as much as for other political reasons, internal fears about budget, et cetera.
I wouldn't agree with you that this is a treasury and funding thing alone. It's a part of the puzzle of inertia.
I agree with my colleague that one of the elements of inertia since 2005 was that on the surface, at least, and in meaningful political and strategic terms for Canada — as much as Canada thinks in strategic terms — we paid no cost for saying ``no.'' It looked initially like there might be problems, particularly when Rumsfeld reportedly said, after the 2005 announcement, to his colleagues at the Pentagon, ``No, we didn't even invite them; we're not even negotiating with them. Where does this come from?''
Again, it's a typical thing that happens in our relationship with the United States. They were upset that the United States was being used for domestic political purposes, was being a political football.
It's when these things start to have a direct price to pay that it's clear to the government that then the reversal, but it tends always to be too late. When you talk about technology engagement in Canadian companies, many people — and I would be one of them — think we missed the boat long ago on a lot of this stuff, simply because we wouldn't do anything.
In terms of the future of NORAD and those issues, it depends what you think NORAD is and how you view it. NORAD and NORTHCOM are integrated in the command centre except for the operational post on missile defence, which is NORTHCOM only. That's where we stand out.
Importantly, some of the forward-deployed American sensors, as part of their ballistic missile systems, that data is not fed into the NORAD integrated tactical warning and attack assessment process. They don't get that. They still rely on the existing BMEWS system, the space-based DSP that identifies a launch, and then the existing BMEWS. These new capabilities, we don't get, NORAD doesn't get.
It is an element of being marginalized increasingly out of the space world because of developments in the United States, driven also by what we've done here in Canada, where we've bypassed NORAD, seeking a more direct link with USSTRATCOM, which is responsible for this file, and the missile defence global engagement file, for a variety of strategic and political reasons on both sides of the border. But if this becomes an issue where the United States starts to see that Canada's involvement is increasingly important to their own defence, then, as Dr. Harvey said, that's when the price will start to go up and the government will pay attention.
As for the public, I say this all the time, and it's never very popular because it sounds very undemocratic: Let's leave the public out of this. No matter what you do, up or down, with the public, it's not going to matter. This is a decision that has to be made and pushed by the Government of Canada, and realizing that this is an issue of strategic importance to Canada, not about the public and the politics within the public, which is focused on other, more important to them, things.
The Chair: That's definitely an interesting perspective.
Mr. Harvey: Could I just distance myself from that perspective? By and large, Professor Fergusson is right about the way decisions like this should be made. At the core, you should be focusing on the security imperatives out there, making a decision. To the extent that you want to engage the public, it's the point at which you have made the decision, based on whatever advice you've received — from physicists, academics, DND folks; you make a decision about those priorities and you engage the public in explaining precisely why these priorities are crucial to Canadian security. In that sense, you have to sell it.
What happened in the last round is that the government had no appetite to sell it, for a variety of political reasons that I won't get into, but there was no appetite to sell it. The threat narrative was distant enough for the government to face no consequences, except perhaps the consequences associated with inertia.
We're getting closer and closer to the mark where it's getting increasingly more costly to Canadian security, and I'm confident in the arguments I'm putting forward to make that point. It's not getting better. Canadian officials are embracing the notion that there's a serious threat out there from North Korea. They're buying that, but they're not doing very much about it in the context of this technology.
``Ignore the public'' — that's a bit strong. Embrace the notion that you have to do something, but engage the public for the purposes of conveying the importance of the policy initiative.
The Chair: Just to put it on the record, we are having a public conversation here, just so that we all understand that. Part of the reason for this hearing is to inform the public, if there are threats out there, to what degree are those threats, and should we or should we not become involved in this particular North American shield. The public conversation is under way, and I know Senator Mitchell would like to contribute to that.
Senator Mitchell: Thank you, chair.
I have a question for each of you. I really appreciate what you're saying, Professor Fergusson.
It seems to me that, over time, there have been two real catches, if you will, on the part of the public. One is that if we get involved, they're going to blow these things up over us. But the argument could be made that if we were part of a forward-reaching surveillance network, they would blow them up before they got to us. You can answer that relatively well in the context of leadership and selling.
The other one is costs. You saw with the F-35s how it becomes a possible debate.
Dr. Harvey, you made the point that we have no idea how much it would cost because we're not even talking, but you must have some idea at two levels: one, what the U.S. is thinking about overall costs; and two, the differential between the cost of the missile sites — which we're not going to have, I'm gathering — and the cost of a radar site or whatever they would be calling that now. It probably wouldn't be radar, but the surveillance site, which would be much less expensive.
Can you give us an idea? Are we talking $35 billion for Canadians, the cost of the F-35s? Are we talking $2 billion?
Mr. Harvey: Some of my work on the cost of BMD, and the reason I explored that question, was to find out what portion of the U.S. defence budget is being allocated to what American officials believed was a serious threat. It works out to about 2 per cent of the defence budget and about 0.3 per cent of the overall federal budget. Now the question is this: Is 2 per cent of the American defence budget worth protecting yourselves against the inevitability of a North Korea intercontinental ballistic missile tapped with a nuclear warhead?
Ask that question in relation to where the other 98 per cent of the U.S. defence budget goes and whether that 98 per cent is being allocated to address very serious threats. Then you ask how much of the U.S. defence budget or U.S. foreign affairs budget or state department budget is being allocated to all these other programs tied to non- proliferation and how successful are they? It's not a significant chunk of the U.S. defence budget. In relation to the Canadian defence budget it's a lot of money — $10 billion or $12 billion a year, I think.
What are the implications for Canada? Given what the Americans are doing with $12 billion a year, I can't see anywhere close to that amount as a percentage of the Canadian defence budget being allocated to something like BMD. That's not what this is about. We can't afford it. The question is, can we afford to be completely excluded from everything associated with the architecture being developed exclusively now by the U.S.?
Senator Mitchell: That's really helpful.
Mr. Harvey: I have a last point about these things blowing up over us. We're not at the table. We have no say in whether or not they should be intercepted at some point prior to this. Let's think about establishing a forward base so the interceptors can hit these things a little earlier so they're not hitting Nova Scotia. We're not at the table. Should we be?
Senator Mitchell: It's very interesting and it gives context. Even if you went 60-40, which was the split you mentioned earlier regarding years ago on $12 billion, it would be $5 billion, and that's a huge amount of money. You could actually start to get down to what it costs to set up a radar site or a surveillance site, and it's probably not going to be $5 billion.
This has been so interesting. Both of you are immensely interesting and I'm really stimulated by this. My second question relates to deterrence versus retaliation. Dr. Fergusson made the point that this gives another option, so you actually imply with that that they might knock down these missiles and then not be driven to retaliate. This is slightly more than a rhetorical question, but maybe it's that.
Can you imagine a situation where North Korea or Iran would shoot a single missile even that was then knocked down where the U.S. wouldn't retaliate? That begs the question of knocking them down, in a sense. Deterrence exists. They are going to retaliate if it ever got even remotely close, and the other side has to know that. Is it just a question of them being crazy and shooting, knowing they're going to be wiped out?
Mr. Harvey: The question is whether or not it's a nuclear retaliation on the part of the Americans in response to an attack by North Korea. What BMD provides is a defence against that attack; and the U.S. will retaliate, but I'm not sure it would be wise to retaliate with nuclear weapons on the peninsula in response to a North Korean attack. South Korea will probably have something to say about that. As Professor Fergusson mentioned, it opens up other opportunities.
One last point on the deterrence piece: Deterrence is one side of it, retaliation is the alternative, but the unstated component of this problem is the notion of self-deterrence. What BMD provides the U.S. and Canada, given our commitments to South Korea, with respect to not being deterred from going in to fulfill commitments and obligations we have to South Korea and Japan. Facing a nuclearized North Korea, with an intercontinental ballistic tipped with a nuclear weapon, South Koreans are asking, as the French asked: Is this something they're willing to die for? A strong BMD system at least enhances the credibility of a retaliatory threat.
Mr. Fergusson: I'm going to go back in a minute to the public because I want to clarify what I meant by that.
To your second question, Professor Harvey is right; this eliminates a nuclear retaliatory threat. However, you need to consider that the probability of a scenario of a bolt from the blue and suddenly the North Korean leadership or the Iranians wake up one morning and say, ``We've had enough of this, we're going to strike,'' is probably as near to zero as you can get.
We're talking about a scenario in which a war has broken out that's escalating. Given the recognition of American conventional military superiority, they will win the war. If you imagine, after an initial exchange the United States and its allies on the peninsula or in the Middle East move to eliminate the regime and the regime then says, ``Stop, we have an ICBM with a nuclear warhead; if you invade any further, we will strike.'' That's the scenario we're talking about and what missile defence does in terms of that type of threat.
This is why, in the context of missile defence, in fact, it's a stabilizing force because it eliminates that threat because any American president has to take it seriously. If I can't defend against someone with a nuclear warhead — just one is enough — then we in fact can always be deterred ourselves. They will deter us from assisting allies, from intervening where we have to intervene for whatever strategic, political reasons. That's the importance in my mind of deterrence issues.
As for the public, I have no doubt the attentive public is very interested, although most of the attentive public have already made up their mind and trying to convince them one way or another is problematic. The attentive public is important, but that's the public we're talking about. We're not talking about the broader public because we have no evidence whatsoever that what the government does or does not do by and large on the defence file really has an impact publicly when we talk about the voting public as a whole. The public sitting on the margins, in my view, is always used as a political football.
The public you're trying to educate and to inform about things are those people who are paying attention to these issues or are engaged in the defence and foreign policy file. That's the public that's important to this debate, but not the broader public.
As to a blow-up over us, nothing is blowing up over us. It's blowing up as it tracks over Canadian air space in outer space. We do not possess outer space. It's a kinetic kill. Unless your opponent has the capability to have a sensor such that when the kinetic warhead comes close enough it will detonate the nuclear warhead — and I doubt the North Koreans and Iranians have that; it's relatively sophisticated technology as well — when you slam into it there's no explosion, there's debris. Some of the debris might come down, some might stay in orbit and some will burn up on re- entry. That's what we're talking about.
As for the costs — $12 billion — if you think about the U.S. missile defence budget, it includes a lot more than missile defence. It includes a variety of technologies, computing systems and new radars that are multifunctional. You have to ask yourself: What exactly is missile defence in this? By and large, it's the interceptor and where it's put. With the Aegis vessel, there are roughly 25 U.S. destroyers and cruisers that are committed to the missile defence role. That vessel does more than just missile defence. To break that budget down and get into the small area of a radar investment, I'm trying to remember what an X-band radar will cost. Again, we're not paying for technologies or investing in technologies. This is off-the-shelf that will likely be purchased. What about construction costs? How much does it cost to build a radar system? I would suggest a lot less than a billion dollars. All things being equal, it's not that big of an amount if you amortize it.
Senator Mitchell: That's what I was getting at. I don't think this is as expensive as the average Canadian believes.
Mr. Fergusson: It will be money, though.
The Chair: I will ask a couple of questions and make it specific to what we face here. I want to get this for the record.
My understanding is that the present ballistic missile defence program that's in place to provide a shield for the United States does not give any protection for cities such as Calgary, Winnipeg or Edmonton. Is that not correct?
Senator Mitchell: My home.
The Chair: The present system?
Mr. Fergusson: The present system is mandated, going back two decades to various legislation, to be able to defend the continental 48 as well as Alaska and Hawaii. That's their legal mandate and what they must defend. Can the system defend Calgary and Edmonton? Potentially, yes. Is there a guarantee they will? The answer is no.
The Chair: The present system, the way we understand it, has approximately 73 or 75 per cent effectiveness or accuracy to date. Will the building of another site on the eastern seaboard increase the effectiveness of the missile defence system as far as accuracy is concerned?
Mr. Harvey: I'll take a shot at this and then defer to Professor Fergusson. The technology is basically what we have. If you look at the Missile Defense Agency's target assessment score for the system, depending on if you're looking at the totality of each phase from boost to mid-course to terminal, it's between 78 and 80 per cent effective. Adding another radar site will pick up a missile earlier, but the technology with respect to interceptors is a function of the advancement of the technology consistent with the MDA. It will enhance the capacity to track it, but not necessarily the capacity to hit it. Earlier information may enhance the capacity to do it, but we're not talking about placing interceptors on Canadian soil. We're talking about radar sites.
Mr. Fergusson: In terms of the system itself relative to its probability of intercept, depending upon where the site is and on the trajectory of the ballistic missile or its warhead, that will significantly inform how effective the system will be relative to what the test envelope tells us. If you look at the map, if you have a warhead coming from North Korea, for example, that passes over the intercept site and reaches a point where it's been missed, you have a third site. If it's tracking towards the northeast, you now make the system more effective because you can now take another shot at it, which increases the probability of intercept.
The Chair: I'm trying to get down to exactly what this particular shield would do for us. If hypothetically an interceptor station were built in Canada, in Northern Canada, I would suspect, if that were the case, that would increase the effectiveness of the program itself in its entirety because of where it's located and from where the threats are presently located. Is that correct?
Mr. Fergusson: In my view, yes.
The Chair: In other words, from a threat and security point of view, for Canada, it is to the benefit of the people where Senator Mitchell comes from, Edmonton, if the decision were in the affirmative to go ahead. That would give them that much more of a defence as opposed to what it is today. Okay. We can't forget Whitehorse.
Mr. Harvey: You could pose the question to any official in the Missile Defense Agency: Do you think the system would be enhanced if, through a multilateral cooperation with Canada, you now had access to the possibility of positioning other interceptors on the vast territory of Canada? I would be very surprised if any of them said it wouldn't have an effect. Clearly there would be a benefit to expanding the locations for interceptors tied to a ballistic missile system.
Senator Dallaire: I'm an expatriate of Pugwash. I'm into non-proliferation and non-use and getting rid of the whole system to start with. I'm quite proud to see Professor Harvey here because my work on child soldiers is situated in the department that he going to become head of at Dalhousie. I'm glad of the work there bringing it at the tactical level.
In a strategic sense, I'm wondering if you could help us with the deployment of missile defence in Europe and a number of the debates that went on there and whether that could help us. I believe there are radar sites or interceptors in Poland, and there was a lot of flak coming out from the Russians. How was that handled? Do you think some of that might help us in our debate here?
Mr. Fergusson: The European system is a phased system with an initial operating capability declared at the Chicago summit in 2012. It consists of a forward-deployed, Aegis-capable cruiser/destroyer — I can't remember which one is deployed there now in the eastern Mediterranean — and a forward-deployed X-band radar in Turkey. The next phases are to come. I just saw a picture of them turning over the ground for the ground-based, Standard Missile 3 interceptor site in Romania, which will be followed by an interceptor site in Poland with an upgraded, more capable standard missile that will evolve over time, depending on how you read Secretary Gates' announcement last year. Command and control for the system is located at Ramstein Airforce Base. It's American with a NATO cell engaged in it. The Spanish have committed their port as a refueling and refitting base for forward-deployed Aegis naval vessels. As I mentioned, Poland and Romania are giving territory. The planned Czech X-band radar has been cancelled. By and large, there are no other major contributions. The costs of those things are partially being funded out of the NATO common fund, which means that we're funding part of it even though we have no involvement with it, which is an interesting phenomenon.
You can trace the NATO program back to 1999 and the first of the new strategic concepts in Washington, where they stated that the growing threat of proliferation requires considerations of defending, forward-deployed forces, and population and cities. Then there was a series of two feasibility studies done by NATO, one for forward-deployed tactical missile defences. Then that transitioned into European defence, and then of course pushed by the United States and the Obama reset.
There Russian concern about the original planned NATO program, which in fact wasn't NATO — the Bush program was a bilateral between the United States and the Czechs, where the X-band radar was going, and the United States and Poland, which Obama cancelled — was that they believed that those types of interceptors, which are faster and have a longer range than the standard missile system, would pose a potential threat to Soviet strategic forces and also to their ability, if the need be, to threaten Europe. The Obama reset was designed to remove those fears, hence why they moved to the naval option, a lesser capability, more designed to defend Europe itself, and if you look at the map, you'll see the different angles in terms of where they're placed in the capability of the system.
The Russians have not changed their tune at all. They are still using it as something they are deeply opposed to. My view is that the current system poses no threat to Russian strategic forces whatsoever. It's not in the right place. It's not the right capable system to be a threat to the Russians. But for political reasons relative to NATO and bigger political issues in the European theatre, that is the state of it. Again, I think the United States has moved as far as it's going to move. A new administration, I would suggest to you, particularly if it's a Republican administration, will rethink the European component.
Mr. Harvey: Professor Fergusson did a much better job than I could outlining the specifics associated with all of the cooperative arrangements taking place in Europe through NATO, bilateral and multilateral cooperative arrangements, the technicalities and infrastructure associated with those.
The last slide sheet in my collection lists the European partners, the Middle East partners and Asia-Pacific partners that are all engaged in discussing various pieces of BMD because they see the value in that. Excluded on that sheet is Canada. Why?
The Europeans must have a reason why they think this is important. Asian partners must have a reason why they think this is important, and so do the Middle East allies.
Senator Dallaire: Even the Dutch are in this.
Mr. Fergusson: In fact, the Dutch have made missile defence a priority in their defence policy. Not so much strategic defence thinking, but certainly defences for tactical. They possess the Patriot missile defence system. They are deeply involved in a variety of NATO development operational projects. Project Optic Windmill is one of them, about command and control and missile defence. The NATO C3I agency is located in The Hague, which is looking significantly, if my memory serves me correctly, into the missile defence file. The Dutch very much see that in terms of their commitment to NATO, to allied defence, one of their areas within the division of labour is going to be in the missile defence field.
The Chair: It's a very interesting point that so many other countries are looking favourably at least in respect to a missile defence program.
Senator Day: I'm going to go back to your public again. I have a sense that the public is concerned because of lack of proper knowledge about missile defence, thinking in terms of going back to President Reagan's time and Star Wars and the weaponization of space. That's the reason that political leaders of all political stripes have not engaged in this debate, and that's why they have made the decisions they have, because of the public's misunderstanding of just what this is all about.
I appreciate your clarifying, Professor Fergusson, earlier on, that this is not a nuclear explosion that is likely to occur, intended to occur up in the stratosphere, because that is what the public is still thinking.
Having said that, as the chairman points out, maybe this is the place for this kind of debate. If we're going to try to bring around a logical look at the issue, and you make all kinds of good arguments, Dr. Harvey, but I think until we at least inform the public about the first step of what this is all about, you're not going to get the House of Commons a year from an election to engage in something that, as far as they're concerned, there's no wind and there's a terrible downside.
Maybe it is the Senate, which is independent, of course, from the House of Commons, that is the place where we can have this debate going on.
I just wanted to comment on your public issue. I think the public has to be engaged in this.
Mr. Fergusson: Let me reply to that. The way you painted the public on this, this is where I have a problem. The way you painted the public, they will think this is potentially the old ABM system, which never made me nervous even though it was going to intercept with a nuclear warhead at high altitude. This is SDI; it is bad and evil. This is a general assumption of what the public thinks about this. Why do you believe that?
Senator Day: Because I talk to thousands of people.
Mr. Fergusson: I'm not sure who you're talking to, but I'll point out something to you. You go back to the public opinion polls at the time of SDI in 1985, and I've been on this hobby horse for a long time, which is why I get sort of excited about it, I guess. Regarding this idea that the public is opposed to SDI, look at the public opinion polls from 1985 when this was a hot issue. The majority of the public supported full Canadian participation in SDI; they had no problem with it.
We talk about the public opinion poll in 2004, in the fall of 2004, I think it was just before Bush came here, which of course was a big thing, which said that the majority of Canadians, particularly in Quebec, I think it was 54 per cent if my memory serves me correctly, opposed Canadian participation with the United States. If you add Quebec in, you were about 60 per cent in, a little bump. This is why the government had problems.
You turn to the second page of the poll, which was never published, which asked Canadians what they thought about defending Canadian cities from an attack by a ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead. You know what those numbers looked like? They flipped upside down entirely. Way more majority said, ``Yes, we should do something.''
It was caught up in the politics of the day. This is the problem with the assumptions that the political community seems to have about the public on this file, that first, the majority of the public is opposed to missile defence. The evidence says that's likely not true whatsoever.
I think the Senate involvement to try to destroy some of these myths, to get the reality of the system, to say this is what we're really talking about, is very important, particularly within the political community here in Ottawa and with the attentive public, which may spill a bit into the public. But by and large we have done this many, many times, and it doesn't seem to ever change. That's why I get frustrated with this.
Mr. Harvey: I think that's a very important distinction. Canada, unlike all our other allies, isn't participating in BMD. The assumption is that political officials are looking at public opinion and saying there's nothing there; we can't work with this.
That's one explanation. The other explanation is that political preferences are driving interpretations of public support for something like this. Political motivations determine support for BMD, not public opinion.
Depending on the kind of question you want to ask, you're going to generate completely different responses. But there is one dimension to public opinion in relation to BMD that's very important. It is easier to sell the critics' case. It is much easier to sell the argument that this is likely to create an arms race. It is easier to sell the argument that the technology is not working, because you can reference a physicist who is making that claim.
It is much easier to create the impression that this will create proliferation by China. It is much easier to create the impression that this is going to take away money for education and social programs.
That argument is easier to make and easier to sell. It's very difficult to sit in front of a committee or a public audience to make the alternative case — much more difficult. That doesn't mean it's wrong; it's just far more difficult.
As you engage in the public debate and produce reports on this, I think it's important to understand that there is a qualitative distinction with respect to how you make this argument. It is much easier to make the critics' case.
It will be a challenge. It will be a big challenge.
Mr. Fergusson: Let me add one other bit of empirical evidence here. From the emergence of the U.S. ABM program in the mid-1960s through SDI to the end of the Cold War, European governments and European public opinion were firmly opposed to U.S. missile defence efforts — the governments for strategic reasons, because it was wrapped up in arguments about strategic stability and nuclear weapons, within a very large attentive public — because of course they were attentive, because they were on the front line of anything going bad in the Cold War.
After the end of the Cold War, with the new strategic environment, the U.S. moved forward with missiles, the European governments being closer again now to the limited threat, because they are under direct threat now — which we aren't under, per se, but will be if you think of the distance, the capability of Iranian intermediate range ballistic missiles, without nuclear warheads for now — you saw slow process by which the governments all started to move.
Part of it was simply a function of generational change, the strategic environment. But what happened to the public on missile defence in Europe? The answer was that it didn't exist. There was no political price. I would suggest to you there's a lesson about that for Canada, when you think about how the Canadian government is going to deal with this issue.
Senator Day: Assuming we're going ahead with public education on this, to the extent that we can, are there any international treaties that Canada is currently a member of or a signatory to that would prevent Canada, at this stage, from engaging in discussions with the United States on ballistic missile defence? I'm thinking about non-proliferation. I'm thinking of Bush the latter; President Bush withdrew from one of the international treaties on the pretext that he was going ahead with ballistic missile defence.
Mr. Harvey: Just a quick distinction between the ABM treaty and the non-proliferation treaty: the ABM treaty was between two states. When the United States decided to pull out, it was in their right to do so. The non-proliferation treaty is a multilateral treaty.
I'm not aware of any treaty Canada is currently a signatory to that prevents us from engaging in ballistic missile defence discussions with the United States. And any treaty we are a part of, so are our European allies, and they don't see any problem, not only with discussing but also with moving forward with establishing infrastructure in cooperation with the United States. So a quick answer is I'm not aware of any treaty.
Senator Day: That's helpful.
Mr. Fergusson: Two points: The old ABM treaty that was cancelled in 2002 did have a prohibition. Article 9 prohibited third-party involvement in either the U.S. or Soviet ABM systems, which was one of the reasons we couldn't move much. It promoted part of the inertia in Canada; it was what I called the ``ABM safety blanket.'' That's gone now.
Professor Harvey is dead right: There's nothing that we have legally signed that prohibits us from being in discussions, negotiating and being involved in missile defence with the United States.
I will predict something. Usually, my predictions are horribly wrong, but I will predict something: When engagement begins to occur in negotiations, what you will hear is that the kinetic kill interceptors we are going to be involved with through the Americans have the capacity not only to intercept warheads in outer space but also to intercept satellites in at least low Earth orbit in outer space.
That is weaponization of space. Critics or opponents will incorrectly argue that it is prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty, which is wrong. Nonetheless, that realm will come into this debate, and it is important, when you look at this, to make sure that this type of issue gets killed really early on, because it is just fallacious. But it will happen. It did last time.
Senator Segal: My question, Dr. Fergusson, goes back to the map of the various radar arrays that were shared with us early on.
What I need to understand is the granularity of Canadian participation relative to increasing the efficiency or the effectiveness of the radar arrays already in place and those that are planned.
In other words, can one make the substantive case that Canada's presence would increase the efficiency, effectiveness and the prophylactic capacity of the radar arrays? Contrary-minded to that would be the view that our participation makes no difference at all, relative to the effectiveness of the radar arrays in detecting incoming problems. Because, clearly, if one could make the case based on substantive technical data that a Canadian presence on the radar side would increase the overall capacity of the system to protect North America and Canada, and the cities that have been cited in your testimony, that would be of some value.
Mr. Fergusson: There are other alternative potential technologies that could be employed that would negate the requirement of placing a radar in Canadian territory for future third site, but in my view, if you draw a straight line under Thule and point it north, and clear Alaska, you will get an idea of the ranges that are covered for north.
Cavalier is a phased array, big-faced radar which provides coverage to a certain degree north as well. Cape Cod will as well. But the point, from what I understand, is that you have gaps in here. There are potential gaps that need to be filled for a more effective system, and that's where we come in, in my view.
Senator Dallaire: What if we put the interceptors in Canada? It's more sophisticated than Bomarcs, of course.
Mr. Fergusson: They most certainly are. You would require engineering technology. My hunch is you have a site closer to further north from the northeast U.S. that would make it that much more effective because you would be able to engage sooner, relative to where you want to engage, of course.
Senator Dallaire: It is interesting. In NATO, we did not deploy nuclear weapons, but we had capabilities of using them on the front.
So we're into this sort of ethical scenario. We're in, but we're out, and when push comes to shove, we use them, and so I think there's a strong argument for our ethical position to be clarified in this system in particular.
Mr. Harvey: Or exposed.
Mr. Fergusson: I would answer that. It goes back to your point, Senator Dallaire, about the discussions that are going on within the military circles in Canada, within DRDC in Canada, on these questions.
At the end of the day, what does Canada want out of this? Well, when we strip it all away, Canada wants to be able to have as much assurance that Canadian cities will be defended. What is the best way to defend Canadian cities in the case of a missile attack, relative to what capabilities the Americans have and how they plan it? What would be optimal to defend all of North America in terms of a third site? Would it be the northeast U.S.? Would it be Canada?
You get very sophisticated scientific issues, which I can't answer. But the point is we're not even talking about them. We're not engaged in that. We aren't even engaged in acquiring the information and the knowledge about what the U.S. is capable of really doing, because, well, if you're not in, you don't get to sit at the table. It is out the door, because you become ``no foreign eyes,'' and that to me is the crucial problem right now.
The third site issues are way down the road, probably five, ten, a Republican administration, maybe, down the road, but it is something that is coming.
I can't see why, when you think about what USSTRATCOM says about global engagement. STRATCOM is the owner of missile defence. It is parcelled out into the forward commands for operational purposes, NORTHCOM, Fort Greely, Pacific Command, European Command. They parcel it out, but the overall is USSTRATCOM, which is about global engagement, and this gets you into a bigger set of issues surrounding the big strategic picture — the defence of North America is a global defence in many ways for technological reasons — that we need to know about in order to make decisions about what we want to do and how much we have to do to get whatever we want to get out of this. How much defence are we willing to buy here?
Mr. Harvey: When it comes to questions of ethics and morality, my sense is the way the debate has typically played out is that you have this distinction between the military, on the one hand, that wants ballistic missile defence, and the ethical disarmament community that doesn't want any form of proliferation. ``You can't have BMD because it will create proliferation.'' They were wrong about that. It didn't.
The other thing they're not discussing is the contribution BMD makes to the accomplishment of that ethical outcome of non-proliferation in places like Asia. So when you think about Canada and South Korea relations, and whatever objectives we have with respect to enhancing our economic relations with South Korea, South Korea is in a very ugly part of the world, and they're looking to BMD and allies engaged in BMD for their security. BMD has and can contribute to this other ethical piece of this debate.
Senator Segal: I'm frustrated a little bit by the sense of despair that you have collectively that we can actually have an adult discussion about this in this country. I'm not questioning the despair. In fact, I sadly share it.
My concern about it, though, is that I have two distinguished academics, who probably have done more scholarship around this issue in Canada, and related defence issues, than perhaps any others, who have the sense of genuine pessimism about a capacity for an adult discussion on this issue.
What hope is there that, as Senator Day suggested, politicians, who need to be re-elected, have to pick their priorities, have to pick the issues that are publicly salient, which may not involve this one, are going to be encouraged by anything anybody does to have this kind of rational, wide-open discussion? A discussion, by the way, which allows those who are proponents and those who are opponents to have a full, substantive engagement in a fashion that is educational for the country and allows people to decide. But your pessimism is quite striking, and it says to me that there's something we may be missing around this table about the capacity of our population to reach tough decisions, as we did on Afghanistan, as we have in the past, which were actually quite difficult decisions in many ways. There was, in fact, cross-partisan cooperation on some of those difficult issues.
I want you to perhaps, if you can, share the depth of your pessimism, not to discourage people more directly, because I know that's not your intent, but so that we as a committee can reflect on where we can go to facilitate an open and broad discussion on this critical issue.
Mr. Harvey: Typically, in my opinion, critical decisions unfold in the context of crises. A decision on Afghanistan, post-9/11 crisis, the decision to rapidly make important decisions about procurement usually happen in the midst of a crisis. We're not there.
If you think about the political forces driving an adult debate about this and the security imperatives that should, we're still in that transition phase. Until we reach a point where the security costs are so overwhelmingly obvious, I'm not optimistic in predicting that the political officials in Canada will move on ballistic missile defence despite all the arguments that we have put forward. I'm not optimistic at all that they see the necessity of moving on this. I'm not very optimistic that political officials see the necessity to move rapidly on these procurement issues, because there are no costs to failing on procurement. There are no costs right now to failing on cooperation in BMD with the United States. There are no costs.
Until those costs are bubbling to the surface either in a crisis or in some epiphany, I'm not optimistic.
Senator Segal: I can think of a Chief of the Defence Staff of recent vintage who was very clear about what our requirements were to serve our troops properly in Afghanistan. He took some political risks, but he laid his position out clearly and precisely.
We can go back to Admiral Landymore, who took a clear position against a particular government policy of the day. He resigned because he accepted that military officers have to follow other people's orders. Fair enough, but he took that position.
Isn't what we are really missing here the head of the air force or CDS or others who would point to the costs of the inertia in perhaps the most fundamental defence relationship we have, which is NORAD, with space defence and air defence and all the rest, that there would be an isolation of Canada's capacity and the capacity of his officers to have the information they need to give solid advice to the political and democratic forces? Isn't that the kind of thing that would kick open the debate? And failing that, it is going to be very hard to kick open that debate.
Mr. Fergusson: I would tend to agree with you, and I agree with Professor Harvey's point. I think it is both the same point, that there has to be a crisis or certain costs that become clear to a government in order to move on issues like missile defence.
There are several reasons why I'm pessimistic. If you think about the integrated nature of North America, whether Ottawa, Canada, Washington, the United States, like it or not, we live beside each other, we're integrated with each other, and even if certain elements of that defence relationship go bad, neither of us can walk away from cooperating with one another. It is always going to be there.
That's one of the problems of the absence of costs to risks. I can put to you, as I have argued to you, that in the future if the U.S. suddenly sees Canadian territory as vital, there will be a price to pay, but it is not a price that entails the death of the Canada-U.S. defence relationship. It is not a price necessarily that means the end of NORAD. It will have implications, and this is part of the problem, I guess, at the end of the day and why I remain pessimistic about the debate.
I'd like to say one thing relative to the empirical evidence. Politically, when you talked about priorities of governments for re-election and that standard principle of democracies in this area, the evidence tells us one thing very clearly, that in that world of politics, defence doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I have seen too many debates that if the government does this on defence, the public will punish them at the polls. It never happens.
So if that's the case, the question that I have — and this is where my public view comes about this — is this gives a great deal of scope for one thing, which is a Canadian thing, leadership. Leadership is the key issue here. How do you convince the current government to in fact take this and lead with it? Such leadership and the value of the study you are doing, the report, is not, in my mind, to the public. It is to the government, to say, ``You need to take leadership on this file, and if you take leadership, then you will not have to pay a political price for this. You might even get a little benefit. Not much, but a little benefit.''
If you ask about Afghanistan, despite the images in the press at the time, Prime Minister Paul Martin took leadership on that and said, ``We're going to Kandahar.'' Now, it is of course more complicated, but there was a leadership. And what happened? The Canadian public followed along.
General Hillier took leadership, but leadership is a rare thing in Canadian political culture, in my view. That's the key audience I think you have, and that's where this has to be put to them that there's a need for leadership.
The last thing I will say about this, and I will get off my hobby horse: In a world where missile defence, strategic defences are here, and they will grow, and they will become more and more significant at the end of the day, we want to be out?
The Chair: Gentlemen, I would like to thank you very much for sharing your wisdom with us here today. It's been a very worthwhile hearing. You have given us a lot to think about.
I would like to point out for the record that this is a public conversation, as we said earlier in respect to what one of our objectives is, which is to ensure that Canadians are getting the necessary security that they should have in respect to the modern technology that we face. We are facing some threats from outside North America, which I think more and more Canadians are becoming aware of and somewhat becoming a little bit nervous about when you read the news every night and you hear what is happening in some of these countries that we have spoken about.
I think the one area that we have to really seriously consider as a country is that the system we're talking about is not built during a crisis. It is built over time, and it is built with thought and it is built with long-term planning. That's the other aspect that I think the Government of Canada and the Parliament of Canada have to consider. It is not just one political party here that has the responsibility for the security of Canadians. It is all political parties, and they have to take their responsibilities.
I would like to thank you for coming, and hopefully we will come forward with a report that has some substantive recommendations in respect to an issue that should be of concern to all Canadians.
(The committee adjourned.)