THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENCE
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Monday, April 18, 2016
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 1 p.m. to examine and report on Canada’s national security and defence policies, practices, circumstances and capabilities; and to study security threats facing Canada, including but not limited to (a) cyber espionage; (b) threats to critical infrastructure; (c) terrorist recruitment and financing; and (d) terrorist operations and prosecutions.
Senator Daniel Lang (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Colleagues, welcome to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence.
Before we begin, I would like to introduce the people around the table, beginning with me. My name is Dan Lang, senator for Yukon. I would like to begin on my immediate right. Before I do that, I want to give a special welcome to a newly appointed senator, Senator Lankin from Ontario.
Senator Day: My name is Senator Joseph Day, a senator from New Brunswick.
Senator Lankin: Frances Lankin, Ontario.
Senator Ngo: Senator Ngo from Ontario.
Senator Mitchell: Grant Mitchell, Alberta.
Senator Carignan: Claude Carignan, Quebec.
Senator Beyak: Lynn Beyak, Ontario.
The Chair: Thank you, colleagues. I would also like to introduce the clerk of our committee, Adam Thompson. And we also now have Senator Dagenais from Quebec.
Now that everybody has introduced themselves, I have just a few comments before we begin with the witnesses. We will be meeting for four hours in public and then go in camera to consider future business.
Joining us on our first panel, as we continue our examination of Canada's national security and defence policies, practices, circumstances and capabilities, are three representatives from the Canadian Space Agency: Sylvain Laporte, President; Luc Brûlé, Vice-President; and Manon Larocque, Acting Director General of Policy. Welcome to the committee. We're looking forward to your update.
Mr. Laporte, I understand you have an opening statement. Please begin.
[Translation]
Sylvain Laporte, President, Canadian Space Agency: First, allow me to thank you for giving me the opportunity to come here to speak briefly on the role of the Canadian Space Agency in support of Canada’s sovereignty, defence and security.
[English]
Space is essential to our Canadian way of life. In fact, many Canadians do not realize that they rely on space every day in almost every facet of their lives, from using personal services such as telecommunications, the Internet and banking, to the collective benefits we get from using satellites to forecast weather, better manage our natural resources and monitor our coastal zones.
In many respects, the tools and infrastructure that space technologies and space systems provide have become critical to the national interest of Canada. They have become vital to our prosperity, to our defence and to our security.
A pioneer and leader in telecommunications, Canada was the first country to build and operate a domestic telecommunication satellite system, with Anik A1 launched in 1972, followed by Hermes in 1976. Hermes was a joint effort between Canada, NASA and the European Space Agency, and was the most powerful telecommunications satellite in existence at the time. Since then, telecommunications satellites have become part of our critical infrastructure, providing telephone, television and Internet access anywhere in Canada, including in the North, where fibre optic networks are virtually impossible and unaffordable to build.
Another area where space technologies have provided powerful and innovative solutions to Canada's unique needs is Earth observation. To help observe and monitor vast landscapes and ice-laden waterways during long, dark and cloudy northern winters, Canada has developed advanced radar technologies that provide detailed ground images day or night and under any weather conditions.
RADARSAT-1, launched in 1995, and RADARSAT-2, launched in 2007, have provided our nation with eyes in the sky that are critical to the daily operations of many federal departments and agencies, such as Environment and Climate Change Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Canadian Coast Guard and the Department of National Defence.
To ensure continuity of this important data, the Canadian Space Agency is working closely with Canadian industry to develop and build the next generation of space-based radar, the RADARSAT Constellation Mission. RCM will be launched in 2018 and will consist of three satellites orbiting the Earth, providing critical information for three main uses: maritime surveillance, disaster management and ecosystem monitoring.
While the mission design of RCM initially focused on maritime security requirements, land security, particularly in the Arctic, will be greatly enhanced by offering up to four passes per day in Canada's Far North and several passes per day over the Northwest Passage. This enhanced capacity will be a game changer for the defence and security of Canada.
It cannot be understated, then, that as a modern economy, any type of disruption to Canada's satellite infrastructure can have serious implications. For example, on the morning of October 6, 2011, a rare technical anomaly disrupted services from Telesat's Anik F2 satellite. Over 25,000 customers in communities from the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut and parts of northern Quebec and Ontario lost cellphone use, long distance calls, Internet access and cable and direct-to-home TV reception. ATM and debit card machines stopped working in Nunavut. First Air was forced to ground 48 flights, stranding about 1,000 passengers, while the Premier of Nunavut used CBC radio to communicate to northerners.
[Translation]
Many other examples illustrate our growing dependency on space systems in the central importance that they have for our commercial, civilian and military infrastructures. You will, no doubt, understand the strategic importance of space systems for the whole of the Government of Canada, and most particularly for Public Safety Canada, the Canadian Coast Guard and the Canadian Armed Forces.
Even if the core mission of the Canadian Space Agency remains the promotion of the peaceful use of space, it remains clear that we have an important role to play in encouraging collaboration amongst government users, including the Department of National Defence. It is therefore our role to enable the coordination and integration of the different segments of the Canadian space program and to support the development of technologies that respond to Canada’s current and emerging needs.
We must also continue to work with our international partners in order to ensure that the use of space remains sustainable for the long term and that we tackle the growing problem of space debris that threatens our satellite infrastructure.
[English]
As an illustration of the growing importance of space to the defence, security and sovereignty of Canada, the CSA, in collaboration with National Defence, has developed a unique small satellite that was launched in February 2013 to increase capability in addressing the growing threat of space debris.
The Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite, or NEOSSat, is the world's first space telescope dedicated to detecting and tracking asteroids and satellites. Circling the globe every 100 minutes, NEOSSat scans and pinpoints asteroids that may some day pass close to Earth. NEOSSat also sweeps the skies in search of threatening space debris as part of Canada's commitment to keeping orbital space safe for everyone.
Built on Canada's know-how and technological expertise, this innovative mission is a perfect example not only of successful collaboration between industry and government but also of the close collaboration that exists between the CSA and the Department of National Defence in leveraging investments in space assets.
In his review of the aerospace sector in 2012, the Honourable David Emerson recognized the importance of this level of partnership and recommended that a deputy minister-level governance body be created to coordinate federal space-related activities. I'm pleased to co-chair the Deputy Minister Governance Committee on Space, DMGCS, with my colleague John Knubley, Deputy Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development. The DMGCS includes the membership of key departments such as National Defence and plays an important role in ensuring effective oversight, accountability and decision making on major multi-departmental projects.
In closing, I can assure you that increased collaboration will continue to be a key principle of our space program, strengthened with the goal of serving Canada's needs, be they environmental and climate change monitoring, strengthening our economy, protecting our sovereignty or supporting our defence and security.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to the questions of the honourable members of the committee.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Laporte. Your responsibilities cannot be understated in respect to the effects that you have on Canadians in the agency that you're in charge of. The unfortunate aspect of that is most Canadians are not aware that you actually do play such an important role in the day-to-day lives of Canadians. I'm pleased to have you here because this is a public forum that allows you to be able to bring that message forward to the general public and recognize the need to support the various programs and innovations that you bring forward.
I'd like to begin, if I could, colleagues, as the member from Yukon that represents Canada's Far North. There are a couple of areas, and you touched on one particular situation that arose some time ago in Nunavut.
In your opening remarks, I believe you made a statement about the satellites forecasting weather, better managing our natural resources and monitoring our coastal zones. Yet, we have RADARSAT in place and the RADARSAT Constellation as well. A lot of work was done in the last number of years on the question of bringing forward a program for Northern Canada for the polar communications and weather satellite. Some serious negotiations were going on for a period of time with Telesat. Could you update this committee on the importance of that particular project, because, for the North and for the Arctic it would bring in the questions about weather reporting and weather communications for the Far North, up in the far Arctic. Can you update us on that particular file?
Mr. Laporte: It's a pleasure. There was a profile for the mission called PCW at the time, Polar Communications and Weather, which combined some communication capabilities for the North as well as a weather payload all on the same satellite. A request for information was issued to industry at that time, which was about four years ago. Since then, the profile with respect to the requirements has evolved.
Clearly, we are looking at a National Defence-driven communication requirement from a tactical, narrow-band communication requirement. Right now we're in conversation with Defence with respect to finalizing their business requirements so that we can then initiate the follow-up discussions with respect to — that is, if we can put more functionality on that satellite, such as weather — should it be weather and, if not weather, then what else can be put on that satellite?
All that is to say that there was a profile a few years ago. Requirements have evolved since then. We're looking at capturing the new requirements so that we can reinitiate the discussions on the particular mission profile, the technology requirements and the technology development requirements before we can look at finalizing what this mission will eventually look like.
The Chair: If I can just pursue this, what's your time frame in order to make a decision? Are we talking a year or two years?
Mr. Laporte: Years in plural, so more than one year, I would say.
The Chair: But it is a priority of the agency?
Mr. Laporte: Of National Defence for sure, and then we react to that, yes.
The Chair: If I can follow up on one more question about the North, I'd like to hear what your contribution is to the placement of the early warning system located in the High Arctic. Is the Canadian Space Agency involved, and if so, in what capacity?
Luc Brûlé, Vice-President, Canadian Space Agency: If it's okay, I'll take that question. The short answer is that we're not involved in that program.
The Chair: That was a quick answer.
Mr. Brûlé: I hesitated because I used to be in the military. Years ago, I was one of the project engineers that worked on the upgrade to the early warning system in the mid-1980s. I've been following that system since it was put up there for operations. I do keep in contact with my colleagues, and our role right now as the Canadian Space Agency is primarily to provide all-weather surveillance using the RADARSAT system.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Your agency’s budget has been slashed. You reduced your expenses by $51 million in the last financial year, representing a cut of about 10 per cent of your budget. The arrival of a new government may not change your approach, but there will perhaps be changes in the way you work.
That said, can you tell us what the impact of those cuts will be on your programs as a whole, particularly on infrastructures and education?
Mr. Laporte: There will be no impact on infrastructures. In terms of education, the previous government announced quite significant cuts to our school education programs in 2013. We are already constrained by the budget cuts that were made in 2013. I do not foresee a major impact because of new budget restrictions.
As for a more generic impact, we make sure that we are able to operate the satellites that are already in space. There will be no operational repercussions there. Some cuts were necessary to major projects that are in progress, including the deployment of a new constellation of satellites for the RCM project. We often carry budgets over from one year to the next, because the industry with which we work closely can experience delays. So we stagger financial years to match the time when the expenses are made. We have to manage things very carefully to avoid impacts on our major projects. Overall, we do reasonably well with our budget.
With the RCM project, despite some delays, we are just spreading it over financial years. We anticipate finishing the project on time. The date set for putting the satellites into orbit has not changed.
Senator Dagenais: Let me ask a second question. I would like to go back to the trials that North Korea is conducting. Do you believe that those trials could significantly increase the risk of electromagnetic attacks or cyberattacks on the satellites that Canada is using?
Mr. Laporte: That is a very interesting question. Unfortunately, it exceeds my expertise. The Canadian Space Agency’s mission is to explore space for peaceful purposes. The Department of National Defence is responsible for assessing risks. I am sorry, but I am not able to answer your question.
[English]
The Chair: Do you have a supplementary?
[Translation]
Senator Carignan: Yes, I have another question, or I can give up my turn.
[English]
The Chair: Can I start with Senator Day and then Senator Carignan?
[Translation]
Senator Carignan: In that case, I will ask for more time.
I understand that defence is not your role, but Canada’s system of satellite communications is still an essential infrastructure. As an agency, do you not have to conduct risk assessments and put security measures in place in order to protect telecommunications?
Mr. Laporte: That role actually belongs to the Department of National Defence. Are we aware of the risks? Yes, certainly. However, we rely on their field of expertise and on the role that they have to play. When we are developing a new satellite, we make sure that we design it to be as robust as possible. We have to conduct trials and simulations that allow us to assess the potential risks of natural disasters. In Canada, as in other countries, the Department of Defence takes that role in terms of technology and engineering.
With debris, our role is a little broader; we make sure that satellites can fly in their orbit without being struck by anything, which is a major risk in space. So we also play a role in protecting the satellites.
Senator Carignan: Electromagnetic threats can come naturally from the solar system. They can also be "activated" by a threat or by a third party trying to attack the system, another country, for example.
I assume that the defence department is responsible for plans to deal with the risks of electromagnetic pulses coming from the solar system. However, is it your mission to design satellites equipped with protection systems, specifically to deal with that type of threat?
Mr. Laporte: Absolutely. Actually, we conduct research with a good number of universities. We conduct research internationally on the effects of the sun and the transmission of solar flares. They can have an electromagnetic impact similar to an atomic bomb exploding in space. We are making significant scientific progress, especially in understanding the effects of the sun and the radiation and electromagnetic waves that can come from the sun. However, issues related to objects designed by an enemy power are not what we are concerned with.
We make sure that we design satellites capable of absorbing those impacts to the extent possible. Clearly, there are risks associated with attacks of any kind, and it does happen that satellites are destroyed.
[English]
Senator Day: Just so the record is clear for those watching, your total budget, Mr. Laporte?
Mr. Laporte: It kind of varies because of our project work. At this point, the A base would be around $260 million, but our annual budget is in the order of between $450 million and $500 million, depending on the year that we'd be considering.
Senator Day: And how many employees?
Mr. Laporte: About 700. Full-time equivalents?
Senator Day: Yes.
Mr. Laporte: That’s 580.
Senator Day: Thank you. In the background reading that the Library of Parliament has been able to prepare for us, it wasn't clear to me. Maybe you could clarify the ownership issue and your ability to generate revenue as the Space Agency. A lot of the use of these various satellites can be commercial use, as well as military use and normal public service use.
Do you own the satellites? Does the Space Agency own the satellites, or do the Government of Canada and the Space Agency manage that federal property? Are these privately owned?
Mr. Laporte: We have a hybrid mixture. Some satellites we own. Some satellites are done through a PPP, and some satellites are purely commercial. Unless I'm mistaken, we extract no revenue from the satellites themselves, but we do have a very specialized, highly complex test facility in Shirleys Bay, here in Ottawa, where, when industry uses the facilities, they pay some fees, but those fees do not come to the CSA.
Senator Day: Where do they go?
Mr. Laporte: They go to the Consolidated Revenue Fund. In effect, although we collect a little from our laboratories, which would be the only source of revenue, we do not see that.
Senator Day: Who invoices? Senator White and I wouldn't start invoicing them, so somebody must have the authority. Are you not doing that?
Mr. Laporte: We're not aware of any other source of revenue.
The Chair: I may be able to help. The question is, if a satellite is being utilized for a certain kind of imagery, and another country or organization wishes to buy that imagery because it's being transmitted through that satellite, who gets that money?
Mr. Laporte: We have a situation. For example, with RADARSAT-2, the radar belongs to MDA Corporation. It's private. They license and sell images. As part of the deal, we buy from them as well. That's one of the hybrid situations we have.
Coming back to what will be launched in 2018, the RCM project, the similar radar technology, we'll put three satellites doing imaging in orbit in 2018. Those will be owned by the government.
The Chair: Will you get revenue from it?
Mr. Laporte: I'm not aware that we're looking at selling those images at this time.
Senator Day: Is there any inter-agency transfer within the public service? We're trying to test your budget to understand why you have the budget you have and whether there's going to be any opportunity to reduce the amount that's allocated to you through revenue generation. Is this just a public service that you're expected to offer?
Mr. Laporte: It can be labelled many different ways. RCM Technologies is not looking at creating a revenue-generating opportunity. In fact, the participating departments would include National Defence, which, for example, is looking at using all of the capacity of those satellites for their internal use.
Senator Day: Is that for their new satellite that's going to be put into orbit?
Mr. Laporte: Yes, for the three new satellites in 2018. But for now, today and until that time, we buy our images, including National Defence and every other government agency, from MDA. In 2018 we'll switch the business model around from being a buyer of images to an owner of images.
The Chair: One would think you would have taken the next step to selling images so that you could offset your costs.
Mr. Laporte: At this time it’s just to satisfy the internal requirements of each department so that they can fulfill their mandates; there's no spare capacity plan for 2018.
The Chair: Before we go to the next questioner, because it's important that viewers understand when we talk about images, the ones you can generate through these various satellites are images such as doing an examination of the agricultural lands in Canada to determine what they can grow and how they could increase their ability or their yield if they did certain things with these farms — all that type of thing. Crucial information is made available to certain segments of industry and individuals to enhance our economy.
At the same time, that information would be invaluable if we were to generate it as the satellite travels, for example, across Australia. One would think you would be able to contract with farmers and Australian governments to sell some of those images while it's under way or being transmitted. Should we be looking to generate some wealth so that we can offset our costs? Is that a fair statement?
Mr. Laporte: The data are very useful for a number of industries, and you mentioned agriculture. We could say the same about ice flows and shipping lanes. A lot of shipping information comes from those satellites.
But in terms of revenue, the principle at this time is that following some of the principles of the government, the data collected by these satellites will be put in an open data information-sharing medium so that it is available to all scientists around the world. Even if we image over Australia, those images would be available under this open data principle.
Senator Day: That's interesting. In the past, your business model was to pay for images. Now you've decided to pay for the satellite, but you're not charging for the images. It’s an interesting change in philosophy.
Mr. Laporte: Canada, like many other countries, has abided by the open data concept such that our scientists are able to go to other similar sources of information from other countries. Now it's time for Canada to contribute to the open public information bank so that — if I may be as informal as possible — two-way sharing is done. This is our contribution to the science community.
Senator Day: You're talking about government to government here. A privately owned satellite doesn't endorse open, free images.
The Chair: They don't?
Senator Day: They charge for them.
Mr. Laporte: RADARSAT-2 data are not in an open public database. RADARSAT-1 was a government-owned satellite, and all of its data are currently in an open data repository.
Senator Day: I've beaten this horse to death, Mr. Chair.
The Chair: You've raised a very incredible question.
[Translation]
Senator Carignan: I am no expert in satellites and I am trying to understand. Currently, as I understand it, all needs are met by private satellites or those controlled by private entities, with the possible exception of the Sapphire, which is a privately owned military satellite. So we buy some images, but perhaps not in the case of the national defence satellite. If I understand correctly, in 2018, the new satellite will be set aside entirely for the needs of the Government of Canada. Is that correct?
Mr. Laporte: I have one correction. At the start of your question you said that we buy images from most satellites. However, that applies to one type of satellite, the type designed to observe Earth. We have other kinds of satellites and a number of other kinds of instruments measuring, for example, the atmosphere, rates of chemical products, and all kinds of things. We are really focusing on Earth observation satellites. So I can confirm that, indeed, we have one satellite, the RADARSAT 2, which belongs to MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA), from which we buy images under licence.
Senator Carignan: If we are launching a new satellite in 2018 and we are anticipating that it will be used solely for the needs of the Government of Canada, with no room for anything else, does that mean that there will be a significant capacity increase in the use of one or more satellites?
Mr. Laporte: Yes, it does.
Senator Carignan: So, if our satellites are underused today, compared to the use we are anticipating in 2018, which areas, which departments, are left unserved at the moment? For which areas, where we have no satellite capacity, will we be able to meet the needs in 2018?
Mr. Laporte: I don’t think I said that our satellites are underused.
Senator Carignan: No, that was the conclusion I drew.
Mr. Laporte: So, as a correction, we had a plan to buy a number of RADARSAT 2 images from MDA and we are following that plan. We are meeting the needs that we established when we set up the contract with MDA.
Senator Carignan: In what year?
Mr. Brûlé: The RADARSAT 2 contract goes back to about 1998.
Senator Carignan: So it is out-of-date in terms of current needs.
Mr. Laporte: Yes, certainly.
Senator Carignan: What are the current needs that the satellites are not meeting?
Mr. Laporte: Since that time, a lot of research has been done in the departments of fisheries and oceans, agriculture, environment and national resources. Their scientists have developed new applications that need much more information, much more data. About seven or eight years ago, that work gave rise to the development of the RCM project, which involves three satellites that will be put into orbit in 2018. We determined that, by putting the three satellites into space in quite precise orbits, we could optimize coverage over Canada and target the areas we are interested in. We believed that we could thereby meet the emerging needs that are now part of the mandate of those departments. So we are not moving from undercapacity to overcapacity, we are responding to the needs as we are able to make use of different satellite technology.
Senator Carignan: Which sectors, which areas, will benefit from the launch of these three new satellites?
Mr. Laporte: The ones I have just named. When we were looking at developing the RCM project, we not only worked with departments that would use it, but also those contributing to the project financially. We consulted with officials from the departments of agriculture, environment, fisheries and oceans, and, according to their needs, they contributed a certain percentage of the project. Most still came from the agency, however.
From my perspective, I have established captive clients and I consider myself above all a supplier of services and images. So we provide services to officials from the departments of fisheries and oceans, agriculture, environment and natural resources and, of course, national defence. In fact, National Defence by far the biggest user of the new constellation. There is also Environment Canada, of course.
Senator Carignan: Even given the importance of these three new satellites, what they cover, and their strategic importance for Canadians, you have no other responsibilities for the security of the satellites and you leave that responsibility to National Defence? What is National Defence’s role, what links do you maintain with them to make sure that this essential infrastructure, which will be launched in 2018, is secure?
Mr. Laporte: I understand your question. Putting a satellite into orbit requires us to comply with a host of regulations, and with international law, as part of our responsibilities and our partners’ responsibilities. The environment is quite complex; this is not the law of the jungle. We have to comply with all those requirements, which, over time, have developed to make sure that satellites in space are as secure as possible.
Protecting a satellite differs from the way in which one would protect an important target in a theatre of war, like a microwave tower. The satellite can travel at several times the speed of sound and orbit the Earth a number of times. Protecting satellites falls into the purview of international agreements and international treaties.
If a hostile country decided that it wanted to eliminate everything in space, it would face consequences from the superpowers. Cases like that take us into the realm of defence, and that is beyond my area of expertise. If someone wanted to cause damage in space with malicious intent, a whole host of activities, protective measures, would come into play, and that is clearly in the realm of defence.
[English]
Senator Beyak: Thank you very much, Mr. Laporte. As our chairman says, space is a fascinating subject, and for those watching at home, I'm sure your presentation was very impressive in terms of all the work that you do. I certainly learned something today.
Could you tell me if the Canadian Space Agency is working with the James Webb Space Telescope program, and if so, could you elaborate for us?
Mr. Laporte: We are, in fact, involved in that in a big way. We were one of the initial participants in the project, and it's a fascinating environment: If you, like me, paid a little bit of attention to the Hubble Space Telescope and how much it helped us observe planetary formations that we had never seen before — the fact that it's in space, where the atmosphere doesn't create any issues for it, allows for much clearer and far-looking images — the James Webb Space Telescope is of a technology that I think will be a hundred or a thousand times better in terms of looking farther into our universe.
It will lead to incredible discoveries of different things of a magnitude that we can't fathom today, and open up new areas of the universe that we've never, ever gone to before.
So, it's quite exciting. And the JWST mission is still scheduled for launch in 2018, so we're looking at it grow as it's being built up, and we're quite anxious for scientists to have access to that data.
Senator Beyak: Does the Canadian Space Agency work in conjunction with NASA on space exploration? Are any new things going on there?
Mr. Laporte: Absolutely. We have been one of the key partners with NASA on the space shuttle, and we've had an astronaut on the International Space Station every single day for 15 years or so — right from the beginning.
Canada has played a very critical role on the International Space Station: after having the Canadarm on the space shuttle, NASA quickly recognized the value of such a robotic contribution and asked Canada to contribute an arm for the space station.
What began as just an interesting-to-have piece of equipment to move things from one part of the station to the other has ended up being, today, one of the most critical operational pieces on the International Space Station.
In fact, the Canadarm is now being used with another robot called Dextre, which is much smaller and it looks like a robot, in fact, with lots of arms sticking out. Where Canadarm is big and can move something as large as a school bus on the station, Dextre is more finite: We can put Dextre on the end of the arm and move it towards a piece of critical equipment on the outside of the station, and because Dextre is a lot more precise with its movements, it can cut a little bit of wire, unscrew some bolts, open up a latch or refuel something.
The combination of the two — the brute force and the size of the Canadarm with Dextre's more finite elements — means we've made a substantial contribution to maintaining and operating the International Space Station. In fact, it's sad to say that our astronauts will only go outside when our robots can't do the job.
We are very proud of Canada's contribution to that, and we are one of the key partners from a NASA perspective.
Senator Beyak: Thank you very much for that. I'm always impressed at how many Canadians watch these Senate hearings at home. You've been very informative and helpful today.
Senator Mitchell: Thanks to each of you. As you were talking, I was sitting here thinking about the fact that I watched Gravity, so I know something about space debris. I'm glad to hear you're working on it.
I'm very interested in education. No matter how you visualize or envision our future economy, science is going to be important in it, obviously, and increasingly so.
I'm interested in knowing how much money was cut, causing the education program be cut, and what would it cost to reinstate it? What have we lost because you can't go out and teach science to, I presume, young students?
Mr. Laporte: To make sure that I didn't leave you with the wrong impression, yes, there were budget cuts to the STEM programs - science, technology, engineering and math — or education programs for students. Yes, there were cuts there. The cuts resulted in us not being able to do certain types of education programs. It doesn't mean that we went to zero, far from that.
We do recognize — all of our international partners have recognized as well — that space, by its nature of being exciting, attracts children. It appeals to their sense of imagination. It has quite a bit of oomph to it. Most countries, like Canada, take that opportunity to spend a substantial amount of time in school where we're teaching students the value of science, teaching them what Canada or other nations are capable of doing in space. For example, our astronauts spend a substantial amount of time in classrooms. I don't know if you've had the pleasure of looking at them go into a school. Rarely have I seen eyes so widely illuminated than when an astronaut walks into a gymnasium full of elementary schoolchildren, and their teachers as well, by the way. They create this sense of awe, and it allows the astronauts to then deliver some very important messages about staying in school, some fundamentals with respect to that, but also with respect to science and encouraging children to stay in those technical fields.
We do a substantial amount of that. In fact, Jeremy Hansen, one of our two astronauts, just did a tour in Regina and Ontario. He had a few powwows with some of the northern communities, smoked a peace pipe, and he had quite a number of live sessions where schools attended live. I'm going from my poor memory here, but I would say there were about 7,000 people watching him live on his social media program.
We still do a substantial amount in schools.
The Chair: Senator Mitchell asked a specific question: What exactly was cut? That was the question.
Mr. Laporte: There were initiatives at the time. We had a travelling display of a few kits of space hardware that would provide a few science lessons. That kit travelled through multiple Canadian schools. That was cut.
We had a session where we brought in teachers in the summer and taught them some basics of space so that they could go back and teach the children. That was cut as well.
Senator Mitchell: On the imaging program, the satellite that will provide imaging, is that going to allow us to be more precise in our estimates of the impact of climate change on our country and on the world and to be better able to predict the impact and, therefore, ultimately the costs of climate change?
Mr. Laporte: Clearly, more precise and more frequent data in terms of passes per day, absolutely. In terms of prediction, then you fall into how that is data used. That would depend on the scientists at Environment Canada, for example. That's the application of the data. We don't really get involved from that perspective.
Senator Mitchell: You mentioned you do PPPs, and it's clear you work with the private sector and so on. Do you have any assessment of the economic leverage that your investments with the private sector create for growth in the aeronautic space industry in Canada, the number of jobs, the ripple effect in GDP? Do you see that as part of your role, supporting and nurturing the aeronautics and space industry in Canada?
Mr. Laporte: Yes, absolutely. We are part of the Innovation, Science and Economic Development portfolio. Clearly, there is quite a bit of priority with respect to industrial growth. In fact, we have a space policy framework that calls for our increased collaboration with industry, and academia as well, from a science perspective, with the objective of growing, and particularly growing companies where there's an export potential.
We clearly are there, and it is a big part of the consideration when we look at investing into a new project.
Senator Ngo: According to the 2014-15 Departmental Performance Report, the launch of the M3MSat previously planned for 2014 was delayed up to April 2016 for geopolitical reasons. Therefore, instead of two satellites, we only have one.
Could you give us further details of what the M3MSat is and its purpose? And what is the reason for what you call "geopolitical delay"? Are you going to launch the M3MSat in April as planned?
Mr. Laporte: With respect to your last question, the launch —
Senator Ngo: Is the launch of the 3M3Sat, previously delayed until April 2016, going to be on time?
Mr. Laporte: M3MSat is a collaborative effort with the Department of National Defence, DRDC, and its objective really is focused in and around AIS, ship monitoring capabilities. The satellite brings about some new technologies with respect to new ways of looking at ships that is a bit more precise than what we've seen with other satellites. So there's still quite a bit of interest in making the satellite fly.
You spoke of geopolitical delay. The initial launch period coincided with some of the major frictions between Canada and Russia at the time, and Russia was to launch our satellite. It was decided to take another option with respect to that.
We've approached the Indian government, who agreed to launch the satellite, and one delay to the next, we end up in April of this year for the launch.
Mr. Brûlé: The new launch date is June this year. We just got an update last week from the Indian government.
The Chair: When you say "more precise" monitoring of shipping, what exactly will it do that we already don't do?
Mr. Brûlé: It has a transponder on board, so this satellite is capable of detecting those signals from the transponders on every ship. We collect all of those signals, and we can relay them back to the ground, and we can build a precise map of where the ships are everywhere in the world when the spacecraft is in view of those ships.
The Chair: And that's 24 hours a day, seven days a week?
Mr. Brûlé: It is, yes.
The Chair: Aren't we doing that already?
Mr. Brûlé: There are satellites already in orbit doing this. As we discussed before, we need to add resilience and redundancy to the network. As satellites age, we need to replace them. This is a new satellite, more capable, and it will provide better performance for us to be able to better detect the ships everywhere in the world. It is also a precursor to what will be deployed on the RADARSAT Constellation Mission because each satellite on the constellation will have a transponder capable of detecting the messages from every ship on the ocean.
[Translation]
Senator Carignan: Is it the same for aircraft?
Mr. Brûlé: No, the technology is not compatible for aircraft. Some satellites and aircraft travel at very high speeds, so there is not enough time for us to be able to track them correctly.
[English]
The Chair: I want to follow up on the question of public security here. The information that your agency accesses is more precise. DND is able to access it. How is that information made available to our allies? We're talking about ships which may have a mission other than a peaceful mission. How does that work in conjunction with your agency? Do you just provide the information and you don't know where it goes?
Mr. Brûlé: Well, we work closely with the Department of National Defence, Transport Canada, and DFO in terms of the Canadian Coast Guard. They do receive good data of all the ships detected.
On their side, they do have agreements with their international partners. They do share information, depending on the agreements they have with their partners. For example, with the U.S. the agreements exist already for some time, so the exchange of information occurs on a regular basis, but it's governed by international agreements.
Senator Lankin: My first question is on your comments on NASA and about the contribution of Canada. You spoke about Canada and "we." I'm trying to understand the difference between what your agency does and what you might do in conjunction with Canadian industry, the aerospace industry, SPAR, the Canadarm. Do you have a specific role with respect to economic development and working with the aerospace sector? Could you elaborate on what your role or contribution is as an agency versus the Canadian sector in total?
Mr. Laporte: The role of economic development rests with the department. Minister Bains manages that. The agency is part of the portfolio reporting to Minister Bains, but given that we are in such close proximity, we also contribute to the development of the industry. So the policy shop, for example, for space, rests with the department. We complement that with a more tactical, more international type of knowledge. We work very closely with the strategic policy developers in the department when it comes to space. A very close collaboration takes place there.
The policy collaboration creates an interest for us to keep developing the industry. Our space policy framework was very clear. Given the choice of developing something in-house or having industry develop it, we will tend to look at having industry develop it, as an example.
Senator Lankin: Thank you. You have spoken about your role in support and service to the Department of National Defence. Do you provide any support and service to intelligence agencies, such as CSIS or CSEC or anything in that arena of operations?
Mr. Brûlé: Our main interactions are with the Department of National Defence. There might be additional discussions among DND, CSEC and CSIS, but not us directly. We do work with Public Safety Canada for emergency response requirements but not with those intelligence groups.
The Chair: Thank you, colleagues. I'd like to thank the witnesses for their time. It has been very informative. I'm sure you'll be invited back at some other time to share what your agency does.
Joining us on our second panel today, as we examine issues related to search and rescue, are Lori MacDonald, Assistant Deputy Minister, Emergency Management and Programs Branch, Public Safety Canada; Dominik Breton, Director, National Search and Rescue Secretariat, Public Safety Canada; Gregory Lick, Director General, Operations, Canadian Coast Guard; Peter Garapick, Superintendent Search and Rescue, Central and Arctic Region, Canadian Coast Guard; and Rear-Admiral Peter Ellis, Deputy Commander, Canadian Joint Operations Command, National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces.
As Public Safety Canada is now the lead agency for search and rescue, I understand Ms. MacDonald you have a prepared statement. Are there other members that have a prepared statement as well? We have one hour for this panel.
Lori MacDonald, Assistant Deputy Minister, Emergency Management and Programs Branch, Public Safety Canada: Good afternoon, honourable members, and thank you for the opportunity to provide an update on Canada's National Search and Rescue Program.
Canada is one of the most challenging countries in the world for search and rescue operations due to its extreme weather and geographical characteristics. We have a large country with a widely dispersed population. Search and rescue is a shared responsibility amongst federal, provincial, territorial and municipal jurisdictions as well as a number of volunteer search and rescue organizations.
The Canadian Armed Forces is responsible for aeronautical incidents, the Canadian Coast Guard is responsible for maritime incidents, and both partners work cooperatively in the coordination of search and rescue response in the Joint Rescue Coordination Centres.
The Parks Canada Agency is responsible for search and rescue within national parks and national historic sites, while provinces and territories are responsible for ground search and rescue. However, this authority is often delegated to jurisdictional police services, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Transport Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, and other departments and agencies also play critical roles in supporting the provision of search and rescue services for Canada.
The National Search and Rescue Secretariat is responsible for managing the framework that serves to coordinate the strategic activities of the National Search and Rescue Program. These activities are supported by a Canada-wide network of more than 18,000 specifically trained ground and marine search and rescue volunteers.
This shared responsibility contributes to the National Search and Rescue Program, a nation-wide, collaborative program that focuses on response and prevention through cooperation and information sharing. The number of stakeholders and jurisdictions involved in prevention, response, education, regulation and enforcement efforts leads to complexities for the National Search and Rescue Program. The program has evolved over the years to align with the operational roles and responsibilities of its key partners and to take on broader responsibilities related to the North.
Prevention is a core mandate of the National Search and Rescue Program, and it can have a profound impact on the frequency and severity of search and rescue incidents by increasing awareness, mitigating risk and changing behaviours to encourage Canadians to take responsibility for themselves in their outdoor pursuits.
Response is characterized by fostering collaboration and interoperability. Although a search and rescue mission response is initiated by a specific organization based on the nature and location of an incident, the complete operational nature and response is frequently multi-jurisdictional. This is what's known as a "seamless search and rescue," where the importance is on saving a life, and mutual aid across organizations stands as a fundamental principle of our system.
In July 2015, responsibility for the National Search and Rescue Program was transferred to the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness as part of the transfer of the National Search and Rescue Secretariat. The National Search and Rescue Secretariat focuses on non-operational matters, fostering integration and interoperability among federal, provincial and territorial authorities, as well as air, ground and marine volunteer partner organizations involved in search and rescue activities.
Moving forward, we have a number of opportunities to bolster the National Search and Rescue Program. Given the authority of the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness under the Emergency Management Act, there is an opportunity to advance linkages between emergency management and search and rescue and to improve coordination and collaboration. This includes better leveraging existing mechanisms and establishing a modernized governance structure.
Public Safety Canada is committed to leading a renewal of the National Search and Rescue Program and the development and implementation of a national policy framework that will better bridge the efforts of all levels of governments, first responders, volunteers and non-governmental organizations to enhance an integrated approach to search and rescue. In fact, the minister is mandated to work with provinces and territories, indigenous peoples and municipalities to develop a comprehensive emergency management action plan to better predict, prepare for and respond to disaster. Search and rescue will be incorporated within this overall framework.
This renewal will also include an assessment of how best to align heavy urban search and rescue, HUSAR, with the National Search and Rescue Program. As you know, the Government of Canada is committed to restoring funding to HUSAR teams, and Public Safety Canada will work with provinces and territories to undertake a national dialogue on what constitutes an effective urban search and rescue response capacity across the continuum of light, medium and heavy urban search and rescue.
My organization will work closely with partners to support meaningful engagement throughout the renewal process.
Honourable senators, Canada is privileged to have achieved much success in search and rescue operations over the years, involving a wide variety of partners with diverse capabilities and competencies. This complex mosaic of jurisdictions and responsibilities has evolved to meet Canada's unique needs, and we will work over the next few months to further a dialogue in order to bolster the National Search and Rescue Program.
Thank you for your time today.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. MacDonald. We will ask Mr. Lick to proceed.
Gregory Lick, Director General, Operations, Canadian Coast Guard: Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members. It is my honour to be here today to discuss the current state of Canada's search and rescue system along with our vital partners that make this system work.
I would like to introduce my colleague, Mr. Peter Garapick, Superintendent of the Coast Guard's Search and Rescue program, Central and Arctic Region, and who is an expert in the Coast Guard's Arctic initiatives.
My remarks will focus on the Canadian Coast Guard's area of responsibility in the search and rescue system: the on-water component.
I'd like to start by emphasizing that life at sea continues to be a risky operation. The Coast Guard responds to over 6,000 distress calls every year, ranging from disabled small craft to larger vessels that encounter challenging seas or onboard emergencies. It is vital that Canada maintain a robust and highly effective search and rescue capability. Every day, the Coast Guard saves 15 lives and assists 52 people in distress across the great expanses of this country. It remains a sobering fact that over 200 lives are lost every year in Canada in marine activities.
We do not perform this important work in isolation. We achieve these successes with our partners in the Canadian Armed Forces, with whom we operate three Joint Rescue Coordination Centres in Canada, located in Halifax, Trenton and Victoria. The Coast Guard also operates a Maritime Rescue Sub-Centre in Quebec City to further assist with local coordination efforts, particularly due to the importance of ensuring our services in both official languages. Furthermore, we work with our Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary, a Canada-wide network of hundreds of coastal communities whose 4,000-plus volunteers contribute vital resources to Coast Guard-led marine rescue efforts. These community assets are particularly in demand in Arctic regions where local crews are both highly experienced and able to respond where resources are fewer and farther between.
[Translation]
Our search and rescue services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to mariners in Canadian waters. The Canadian Coast Guard also monitors distress calls through its marine communications and traffic services (MCTS) network and these calls are then relayed to the rescue coordination centers, which take the appropriate action.
All Canadian Coast Guard vessels and helicopters support search and rescue operations, including the 39 search and rescue lifeboat stations (40 stations, when Kitsilano becomes operational) and the 25 seasonal inshore rescue boat stations strategically positioned across Canada. The reaction time for search and rescue assets is 30 minutes or less.
In spring 2013, the Canadian Coast Guard and the Canadian Armed Forces further reinforced this close cooperation by establishing the federal Search and Rescue Operational Governance Committee to respond to the recommendations in the audit conducted by the Office of the Auditor General and ensures strong oversight of the federal management of search and rescue operations.
[English]
I spoke briefly about efforts in the Arctic that are dependent upon partnerships between the Canadian Coast Guard, the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary and the Canadian Armed Forces. The Coast Guard is investing in Arctic search and rescue operations to address the growing marine safety concerns in the Arctic. We have increased funding to the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary to support their immediate expansion in the Arctic. The Coast Guard Auxiliary is now receiving an additional $500,000 annually to support their membership, growth and training efforts in the Arctic.
In addition, the Coast Guard is leading a two-year review project approved under the Northern Marine Transportation strategy that will inform future proposals on expansion of marine SAR services in the Arctic region.
The Coast Guard is pursuing a four-year community boats pilot project to enable indigenous communities to participate in local marine emergency response activities as members of the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary. We are also increasing our efforts to bring marine expertise and knowledge of indigenous peoples into the SAR system through training. Examples of this include our Rigid Hull Inflatable Operator Training School in Bamfield, British Columbia, and the future marine emergency training centre that will be part of the Kitsilano Coast Guard Base.
We work in a SAR system that works but also one that everyone in the system tries to improve every day. This system works due to the thousands of passionate people who go out on the water or in the air when everyone else is trying to get back in. It works due to all those who oversee and coordinate their efforts for success. All of our collective efforts every day are to make sure those in distress and those who go out to help come back safely.
Thank you, members of the committee, for this opportunity.
The Chair: Thank you very much, sir.
[Translation]
Rear-Admiral Peter Ellis, Deputy Commander, Canadian Joint Operations Command, National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces: It is my honour to be here today to discuss the current state of search and rescue system along with the key federal partners that make the system work. I would highlight that we work very closely together, not only in the context of search and rescue, but also in many other areas of emergency management in support of Canadians both at home and abroad.
Canada’s search and rescue area is the largest in the world. As you know, it comprises over 18 million square kilometres of land and sea. Its geography is varied and demanding and its climate can be harsh year-round. The vastness of the area and the variable nature of its environment give the search and rescue community an impressive challenge.
As has already been highlighted by my colleagues, responsibility for search and rescue is shared by many stakeholders. I would like to underscore that the Canadian Armed Forces work in very close partnership with all the stakeholders to provide a first-rate search and rescue service for Canadians.
[English]
My remarks will focus on the Canadian Armed Forces’ specific area of responsibility in the federal search and rescue system and specifically on the operational aspects. As the Deputy Commander of the Canadian Joint Operations Command, I assist my boss, Lieutenant-General Stephen Bowes, in exercising command and control over Canadian Armed Forces operations, including search and rescue. The military commanders of Canada's three search and rescue regions — and each is either a rear-admiral or a major-general — report to the commander of the Canadian Joint Operations Command, or my boss, if you will. They have the authorities in respect of their regions, but it's the Joint Operations Command that has the responsibility from a CAF perspective for national coordination and leadership. I also happen to co-chair the SAR Operational Governance Committee, to which Greg referred in his remarks. I have the privilege of doing that with the Deputy Commissioner for Operations of the Canadian Coast Guard, Mr. Mario Pelletier.
The Canadian Armed Forces are responsible for the effective coordination of aeronautical and maritime SAR, which we exercise through the three Joint Rescue Coordination Centres located in Victoria, Trenton and Halifax. In those centres, Royal Canadian Air Force air controllers and Coast Guard marine controllers work elbow-to-elbow. In Halifax and in Victoria, the Joint Rescue Coordination Centres are co-located with the Marine Security Operations Centre, creating an even greater synergy from the whole-of-government perspective, and are co-located with Canadian Forces Regional Joint Operations Centres as well.
The Canadian Forces are also responsible for the conduct of aeronautical SAR, for which we use dedicated search and rescue platforms. Approximately 9,300 incidents are reported to the three JRCCs each year. This generally generates a response of somewhere around 950 dispatches of aircraft to tasks.
Across Canada, the Canadian Forces have approximately 950 people who deliver SAR on a 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year basis. This number includes the personnel who man the Joint Rescue Coordination Centres as well as the search and rescue technicians, pilots, navigators and flight engineers who crew our aircraft and the technicians who maintain them. They maintain our fleet of 12 dedicated Hercules fixed-wing aircraft, 6 Buffalo aircraft, 14 Cormorant helicopters and 5 Griffon helicopters that are identified as primary search and rescue assets, located in Trenton.
[Translation]
These resources are stationed in Comox, Winnipeg, Trenton, Greenwood, Nova Scotia and Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador.
[English]
In addition to these dedicated search and rescue assets, the Canadian Forces routinely press into service what we refer to as secondary search and rescue assets. Basically, those could be any of our fleets of aircraft or ships. They're all generally prepared to contribute to the search and rescue effort. Or, as frequently occurs in the North, some of our land elements, particularly the Canadian Rangers patrols, who are frequently called upon to assist in ground search and rescue. Whether those secondary search and rescue assets are tasked really depends on whether or not they're suited to the conditions and available for the job.
In addition to our partners here present, we work very closely with the provincial, territorial and municipal authorities and, of course, with the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association of Canada, CASARA — you would have heard them referred to and probably will hear about them in the discussions later — and, of course, as previously mentioned, the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary.
Internationally, we cooperate closely with our neighbours in adjacent search and rescue zones, including in the Arctic, where all eight Arctic nations have agreed to cooperate in search and rescue.
Though I focus on operational response, I think I do have to underscore the importance of prevention. By that I mean that those who may find themselves in remote or harsh environments, whether at sea, in the North or in isolated regions, should ensure that they are adequately prepared for their undertakings. This means being equipped with beacons, survival suits, up-to-date and well-maintained safety equipment and having the training either to avoid or, if avoidance is not possible, to survive a calamitous event.
[Translation]
In conclusion, the Canadian Armed Forces will continue to work closely with the many organizations that share responsibility for the effective delivery of search and rescue services in Canada. I would like to reiterate my thanks for inviting me to participate in the proceedings today.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you very much. I'd like to take the opportunity, if I can, taking the prerogative of the chair and representing the Yukon in the North, to ask Rear-Admiral Ellis, has your organization been testing long-range drones to monitor the Arctic region? If so, are you in the process of acquiring drones, or are you considering acquiring them? Perhaps you could tell us what capabilities you might be able to derive from this new, modern technology.
Rear-Admiral Ellis: The Joint Operations Command has not been testing long-range drones per se. The Canadian Forces lead for unmanned aerial systems is the Royal Canadian Air Force. They have the JUSTAS Project, a major capital project looking to procure on behalf of the Canadian Forces writ large unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles.
From my perspective as an operational commander, it's very clear that the prospect of unmanned aerial systems has great potential with respect to conducting surveillance in Canada and its approaches and obviously direct application to search and rescue — at least in the location and identification of specific sites.
We do have extensive operational experience at the tactical level, in Afghanistan with smaller UAV systems, and, of course, our navy ships have flown UAVs in the past as well.
The Chair: Perhaps you could expand a little further. If it's another area of government that's responsible for acquiring these drones, how will that relate to you and how will it affect what you do on a daily basis?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: That's correct, sir. The Royal Canadian Air Force will be the project sponsor for this capability, and ADM(Mat) will be charged with the delivery, just like in all our capital projects.
From my perspective, CJOC will be the employer, and these capabilities will certainly contribute to the surveillance and sovereignty of Canada and its approaches. Generating that domain awareness will help us to understand more clearly what's out there and will help us to respond in the event of search and rescue, absolutely.
The Chair: When do you expect this purchase to take place, and when would it be in place?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: I'm not sure what the timelines are.
The Chair: This year?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: No, sir. I don't believe it's this year. I would have to check with the project office and the RCAF on what the timelines are.
The Chair: Could you give us a written update on that, if you don't mind, please?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: I'll certainly do that.
Senator White: Thanks, all of you, for being here. My question, firstly, looks at the understanding that there is a need for new aircraft when it comes to search and rescue. I wonder if you could give us an update on where acquisition of new aircraft for search and rescue is. I think it was in the report of the Auditor General discussion in 2014-15 or even previous.
Rear-Admiral Ellis: The bids for the fixed-wing search and rescue were received this January. They are in the process of evaluation right now. This project would replace our fleet of Hercules search and rescue aircraft, as well as our Buffalo search and rescue aircraft, with, probably, a common airframe that would do both jobs.
As I said, the bids are being evaluated, and we anticipate that we will be in a position to proceed to contract either at the end of 2016 or in early 2017.
Again, the Air Force is leading this with ADM(Mat). I don't know the programmatic aspects of it, but we're certainly looking forward to the delivery of the capability.
Senator White: You piqued my interest on the UAVs and drone operation long range. You know the Arctic, and we can look at the extreme areas on both coasts as well, East and West. Would you see those placed locally and maintained from there, or would you see them actually operating from Trenton as we operate manned aircraft?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: I don't think that we've resolved exactly where those would be based. Certainly, some of the systems we're looking at have very long endurance, and so it's more likely, because of the infrastructure that they require, that we would co-locate them with other assets because there are some economies of scale to be had there. But that's really beyond my expertise to provide that kind of —
The Chair: I'm going to let Senator White go for a very short supplementary, but some senators are getting a little bit more time for questioning than others. Please, let's try to balance it out. Senator White, please proceed.
Senator White: Similar to drones with forward-looking infrared that are being operated along the border in the Southern U.S — I think they are operating them back and forth across the U.S.-Mexican border — is that what we envisage? I'm just trying to get my head around how they would work. I lived in the Arctic for 19 years, and we were out many times searching for people.
Rear-Admiral Ellis: There's a difference between the actual platform or the unmanned airplane and the different kinds of payloads and sensors it could be. In a perfect world, as an operator, I would like to see electro-optic, infrared. I would like to see an automatic identification system and maybe a radar capability.
I'm not sure what the particular requirement is, but the project is working to help to develop not only the airplane but also the airframe and the sensor sweep that it would carry.
The Chair: Mr. Lick would like to add to that.
Mr. Lick: I can provide a little bit more information on the Canadian Coast Guard's use of unmanned aerial vehicles. We have been testing them, in particular oriented more towards our programs of environmental response, icebreaking surveillance and remote sensing of our tower infrastructure, particularly for marine communications and traffic services.
In fact, we actually gave a briefing to the SAR Operational Governance Committee on Friday, just on this particular project that we have with Transport Canada, with other partners within the federal government as well.
Really our role, particularly with drones, is to help the commanding officers aboard our particular vessels to extend their eyes and ears. It's particularly important for icebreaking, in our world, but we'll also be using them to extend their eyes and ears for search and rescue purposes as well.
Senator Mitchell: Thanks to all of you. Very interesting. My first question is to Ms. MacDonald, with respect to heavy urban search and rescue.
There is a heavy urban search and rescue simulation area in Calgary, if I'm not mistaken. I was actually there at its opening probably 10 years ago. I'm wondering how that is operating, whether it's being fully utilized. I've heard that it may not be being utilized as much as it should be or could be.
Ms. MacDonald: Thank you very much for your question.
I would say, just for context, that right now there are heavy urban search and rescue operations in Victoria, in Calgary, in Manitoba, and in Toronto, and in fact we've toured a number of them in the past several weeks, with the announcement with respect to reinstating the funding to those operations.
They all have varying degrees of capacity at this time. Some of them have lost some of their capacity over time as a result of changes to the program, funding, support and so on. Some have more engineering capacity. Some actually have capacity, large rubble piles, as an example, for the engineers to use and for their heavy equipment operators to use to practise with their equipment.
I have not been to Calgary in the past several weeks. We went to Vancouver and in a couple of weeks will go to Toronto as well. I can find out what the capacity is in Calgary. But I do know their team is operational, and they are capable of using their team at this time.
Senator Mitchell: If you would submit that to the clerk, that would be great.
I have a second question. Several years ago, the committee went to Comox, to the SAR group there. One very tough, very fit senior NCO addressed the issue, as only somebody like that can, about the replacement for the Buffalo. He was very concerned and actually made us promise that we would never forget this concern and would do whatever we could to address it — getting a replacement that didn't have a back ramp, making the point that it was impossible to jump out of a side door at 300 or 400 miles an hour with 400 pounds of equipment and survive.
Could you give us some idea as to whether or not you're meeting that demand? If not, how are they going to get out of these planes?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: I'm not sure where that actually sits in terms of the tender and the statement of requirements, so I wouldn't want to mislead the committee. I can get back to you specifically on whether or not the ramp is a part of that requirement.
Senator Mitchell: Can I ask one more, or would that be unfair? I could go on second round.
The Chair: Very quickly.
Senator Mitchell: Cyclones. They are to a purpose. Could you give us a quick update on where they are? I know we've taken possession of them, which means any problems that they have are our problems, I guess. Are they operational? Are they fully functional? Did we finally overcome all of the technical and other problems with them?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: We are in the process of integrating that capability into the fleet. There are some teething problems, as there are with any new sophisticated equipment. The approach we're taking is a graduated capability development, so the more simple aspects of the capability proven first, the ability to fly, to launch, to recover on ship, to do utility tasks like transport — that would give them an ability to participate in, say, a search and rescue — graduating to the more advanced things like anti-submarine warfare and anti-surface warfare, the more what we would call demanding, war-fighting scenarios, which demand greater sensory integration and integration of the mission system with the whole ship's mission systems.
So this is going to be a tremendous capability when it's full up. It's a great airplane. It will provide a lot of the flexibility, and the sensor package and its integration will be terrific. It will be almost like having an Aurora flying off the back of our ships in terms of the sensor package and the compatibility. It's a great capability to come.
[Translation]
Senator Carignan: I listened to your presentation, and my first question is for Rear-Admiral Ellis. You said that one of the first responsibilities was to protect ourselves. That is a basic safety principle for us as individuals as well; we must first look after our own safety, and then the safety of others in terms of external factors.
Just now, we had guests from the Canadian Space Agency, with whom we talked about satellites. They seemed to depend a great deal on you for the protection of satellites, particularly in terms of electromagnetic pulses. What are you doing to prevent this type of situation, and what is your relationship with the Canadian Space Agency in terms of communication, to make sure you meet their needs?
RAdm Ellis: We work very closely with the Canadian Space Agency. In the Canadian Armed Forces, we have implemented a project to specifically identify satellite-related risks, looking at threats that may come from outside, be they particles or other objects in orbit, and so on.
So we work very closely with the Canadian Space Agency. Our space CEO works with the joint forces head of development on projects, maintaining ongoing contact. Within the Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC), our operations centre, there is a small group of space operators who liaise with the Canadian Space Agency and with our allies working in space matters.
Senator Carignan: What potential threats have you identified?
RAdm Ellis: In terms of threats, there are objects in orbit that can pose risks to any satellite. Every time someone throws dust or waste in orbit, they remain in orbit and, given how fast they travel, collisions can be very serious.
You also mentioned electromagnetic interference, which is among the risks. In addition, there are natural phenomena, such as solar flares.
Senator Carignan: My understanding is that solar flares could be created by nuclear warheads launched by enemy countries. Is that also part of the risks you are studying and trying to prevent?
RAdm Ellis: In that case, those would not be solar flares. We would be looking at an electromagnetic pulse that could be the result of a nuclear device being detonated. I am aware of that possibility, but as I am no expert in the field, I cannot tell you what the likelihood of that is or who might be behind it. However, in theory and in practice, we know that this may be the effect of a nuclear detonation.
Senator Carignan: Can you give us the name of the person who could answer that question?
RAdm Ellis: Of course.
[English]
Senator Beyak: You answered most of my questions in your excellent presentation; thank you for that. I have a question on our maritime security operations and the integration there.
With local police services on the coasts and on Lake Ontario, how well do you think, from your perspective, they are integrated?
Ms. MacDonald: In a moment perhaps I'll ask other members of the table. My colleague with me, Dominik Breton, is the Director of the National Search and Rescue Secretariat. He may be able to provide additional information on this.
One of the advantages we have and one of the advantages of this National Search and Rescue Secretariat coming to Public Safety is that we have a very strong governance model in place with our provinces and territories; and so we work closely with them literally on a day-to-day basis. The advantage is that it allows us to have a much stronger engagement piece with the jurisdictions and municipalities, with the people working in our inland waters, and with our marine and coastal areas.
I'll give you an example. Last fall we had held a national search and rescue conference in P.E.I. We brought together well over 400 people from across the country to work on issues exactly like that. They were experts in the area which allowed them to come together to network and engage, talk about the issues that were working well and about those things where they felt they could work together better. Recently in the past few weeks, our minister actually approved a second search and rescue conference for our secretariat, which we'll host in Edmonton this year. We'll bring together a large group of people to do a couple of things: talk about those issues in terms of how we engage, ensure that we're communicating and sharing information well, and advance the search and rescue program.
I'll turn to Dominik Breton to see if he has anything additional.
Dominik Breton, Director, National Search and Rescue Secretariat, Public Safety Canada: At this point that covered it all. If you are specifically referring to maritime security operation centres and the interaction there, it would be more under the realm of our colleagues, if they would like to add anything.
Mr. Lick: As you heard from Rear-Admiral Ellis's opening remarks, the two centres on the East and West coasts are very much integrated with the JRCCs in contributing to that maritime domain awareness picture for SAR purposes and for other purposes as well.
On the Great Lakes, it's led by the RCMP. On the question of integration, the three MSO centres are closely linked. They also very much integrate the five partners there. It's actually a very good success story around how to integrate all the various roles and responsibilities, experience and knowledge, the tools, and the awareness they have of their particular areas into one MDA. It's been a very good success story for the whole country.
The Chair: What is MDA, for the record?
Mr. Lick: Maritime domain awareness. MSOC is Marine Security Operations Centre.
Senator Ngo: In 2013 the Auditor General noted:
The information management system used to manage search and rescue cases does not adequately support operational requirements and is nearing its breaking point.
Can you tell us about the information management system and its purposes? What would be at risk if the system were to break down?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: First, the system is used not only to archive search and rescue information but also as a planning tool and to communicate between different search and rescue coordination centres and other nodes. For instance, our headquarters in Ottawa, Canadian Joint Operations Command, feeds off this search and rescue mission management system. It provides a bunch of information for situational awareness and for archived and post-activity analysis.
The problem is that the system is old and, as noted in the OAG report, in need of some significant repair. We've invested significantly in sustaining that capability to keep it going until we can bring the new project online. Right now that project is in what we would call the "definition phase" in National Defence. I'm not sure what the time horizon for delivery is at this point, but I believe it's still a couple of years out.
In the meantime, we are very careful to manage the system the way it is. We're investing through contractors to sustain it.
Senator Ngo: What is at risk if the system breaks down?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: If the system breaks down, it means we would have to go back to manual record keeping — handraulic — and we would have to recover the database separately. I'm not sure of the technical safeguards to maintain the integrity of that database, but I don't think that that's a huge risk. The issue would be that the system becomes less efficient and effective, particularly with respect to having less facility for automatic data and information exchange.
Senator Ngo: So you say that the system will be replaced in approximately two to three years?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: Yes, sir. I think it's around two to three years out. I can give you the definitive programmatic date separately.
Senator Ngo: Could you, please?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: Yes.
Senator Day: Ms. MacDonald, first of all, you talked about 18,000 specially trained air, ground and marine — or maritime — volunteers. That's an awful lot of people to train and coordinate.
Is money set aside to do that? How is that done so that they are specially trained to get out there and do the work that Canadians are relying on?
Ms. MacDonald: Thank you for the question. It's a very good one, and the answer is very complex in terms of how it's actually done at the end of the day.
When the vast majority of our volunteers — that's ground, air and marine — come together, first and foremost, the most responses are at the grassroots level, so the different jurisdictions — provinces, territories and municipalities — take on the roles and responsibilities of training individual people. Training happens at the federal level as well, but I'll ask my other colleagues to provide any additional information they have on that.
Each province and territory has its own set of training standards that they put in place. They offer training to volunteers, and they have a set of professional standards that must be met. They're not all equal across the jurisdictions, but there's a common set of principles that they go by.
In particular, the volunteers who work for our ground search and rescue, who are quite expansive across the country, have a set of professional standards that they have to meet with respect to the training. It's offered in various fashions: Grants and contributions money is given out to provide training, and different organizations and municipalities offer training on their own.
No specific pot of money is identified for all of these different training initiatives. Some of it comes through individual organizations and volunteer, not-for-profit organizations taking on responsibilities; some is through municipalities; some of it comes through provinces and territories; and then some of it happens through grants and contributions at the federal level.
I'll ask Dominik and my other colleagues at the table if they have anything to add.
Mr. Breton: Indeed, this training happens within the various jurisdictions to meet sets of standards that would allow the volunteers to be called out to support the authorities conducting the search. The national association for ground search and rescue volunteers — also known as SARVAC — was a key enabler in developing a core competency standard, which is currently supported by the Canadian Standards Association.
We're currently in a phase of developing the curriculum so that a baseline for a voluntary standard is established that jurisdictions across Canada can look to for common skills for different roles in search and rescue. That covers the ground piece, so I'll turn it over to our colleagues for the air and marine component.
Peter Garapick, Superintendent Search and Rescue, Central and Arctic Region, Canadian Coast Guard: I'll speak to the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary. By name, obviously, auxiliary to the Coast Guard, reports directly to us, but we are very independent.
They have been around for almost 40 years in Canada and have seen a bit of an evolution through that period. There is a high level of expertise within the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary. They have created their own courses and training; they run them past us, we approve them, and their own instructors provide that training.
The latest course they produced is modular so that it can be delivered on weekends and evenings because that makes it easier for the volunteers.
The most important thing is that there is a high level of expertise. We work with them, but it's the volunteers’ time that's gone into this. That cost isn't great because training is done on the weekends and evenings.
Senator Day: Many of us are familiar with volunteer fire departments in small communities. Are they like that in volunteering, or are they like the Class A reservists in the Canadian Armed Forces?
Mr. Garapick: I should be familiar with both, but I'll say that there are five regions in the Coast Guard Auxiliary: West, Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland and Maritimes. Within those groups you have zones or districts, but you have a director of training for each region, and then you'll have instructors under that director. There will be some regional-based training and then some zone and district training, and, sometimes, unit training. Unit training is usually on a vessel doing a SAR — rescue — practice. The regional training is on a course, like a Search Master course or a boat operation course. That's how that works.
Senator Day: What I'm getting at is, are they paid for this job? And if they're not treated like volunteer firemen and women, should they be treated like them and given a tax break to help them with the uniforms and training?
Mr. Garapick: In the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary, there's no remuneration for time.
Senator Day: That's what I thought.
Mr. Garapick: Their costs are covered for travel, meals and accommodation. The culture of the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary accepts that, and they are very proud of that culture. I understand, though, that they can claim the tax credit for hours spent.
Senator Day: The same as volunteer firefighters?
Mr. Garapick: Yes. That was passed recently.
Senator Day: Good.
My final question is with respect to this coordination. This is a hugely important coordination of all the different elements that get involved in search and rescue. Sometimes an operation can evolve from being on the water to being on the land, or being in the air and then on the land, for sure.
Who takes the lead in any particular search and rescue, if it's not obvious which particular area needs help?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: It all comes together in terms of the maritime and aeronautical search and rescue operation at the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in each of the three regions in Canada, commanded by a military officer of the same rank as me. The search and rescue regional commander has the flexibility to direct the operations. He has a coordination function, as we've referred to earlier.
He can also reach back to other secondary and SAR assets. For instance, through the Coast Guard, a merchant ship is frequently called upon to assist in a search and rescue, or we might call on our CASARA resources or other cooperating aircraft in an aerospace construct.
The land, or ground SAR, perspective is, as Lori laid out, a provincial or territorial responsibility, primarily, except for the national parks aspect to it.
The search and rescue regional commander may receive requests for assistance from the provinces — the emergency management organization — to assist. That's where we'll see Canadian Forces aircraft tasked, occasionally, to assist in humanitarian missions, or we may task a Rangers patrol to go out and assist with the search. All of the strings kind of get pulled together at JRCC.
Senator Day: If there's a helicopter sitting somewhere and there's a child lost who needs some help somewhere else, is it the JRCC — the coordination unit at Trenton, Halifax, or Victoria — that makes a decision whether to deploy that helicopter, even though it's sitting there?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: Yes, sir, it could be, in that particular scenario, if the request came from the province or the territory who said, "Hey, we really need your help. We've exhausted all our resources. Can you help us?"
The Chair: Could I follow-up on the Coast Guard Auxiliary? I notice you never talked about the Arctic or the North as a region. Could you, perhaps, elaborate as to how the Rangers play a role in this? And, also, are they allowed to operate in open water? If they're not, what steps are we taking so that they're trained to operate in open water, in the Arctic?
Senator Day: There is more and more of it up there all the time.
Mr. Garapick: That's a very good question. Right now, we have a Quebec region, which represents the Arctic through Nunavik, in northern Quebec, and we have the Central and Arctic Region, based in Toronto, which handles everything in the Arctic for areas other than Nunavik.
This project that I'm leading right now is Arctic SAR, to expand the auxiliary through the Arctic. We're linking Nunavut, Nunavik and the Northwest Territories. It's going very well. Two auxiliaries in the South are working together closely in the Arctic. We'll see where that leads.
Prior to this project, I did investigate working with the Rangers and how they could be used for water-based SAR. I submitted a report that said it would be very difficult. They're an excellent resource on land. They report to DND, and the tasking of those resources through DND and the remuneration to those volunteers was very different than the Coast Guard Auxiliary. First, on the tasking, the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre can pick up the phone, phone a unit, and they will go. They are fully insured and tasked to go. I'll let the rear-admiral speak to how to task a ranger.
Second, rangers do receive pay when they're tasked to go on a rescue, auxiliary or not. There's no question, the culture of that. They're very committed to go and not worry about the money. They go first. If they're tasked by JRCC, it is a very quick response with expertise on the water. That's why we're pursuing that in the Arctic right now.
To date, after one year, we've visited almost 30 communities with very enthusiastic response from those communities and a very good potential to be able to put units in all those communities in the future.
Rear-Admiral Ellis: Senator, if I may, activating the rangers is like activating the reservists; we call them up on duty and they get paid.
The authority to task the Canadian Rangers out to assist in the ground search and rescue lies with the regional search and rescue commanders, but it also lies with the Regional Joint Task Force commanders across the country. For instance, the Regional Joint Task Force commander located in Toronto, who has jurisdiction for Ontario, can task the ranger patrol in his territory to assist ground search and rescue in Ontario. That will become information to the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre. There's a slightly different command and control relationship when you're providing support directly to the province.
Senator White: These communities are often 125 to 600 people. To suggest for a second they're not the exact same people going on either of those, whether they're rangers or volunteers, I would suggest is a little naive. I've been in those communities for a long time. They still wore the same hoodie as when they left the community. It's a little unfair because we're not paying them, we separate them. If I need them to find somebody, I ought to be willing to pay them a small stipend to do that.
Mr. Garapick: You're exactly right. When we've gone to the communities, we recognize we're dealing with the rangers that come. Many have the red hoody, and that's the system under which they work. When we mention there's no remuneration, we do that very sensitively. There is a reaction. Some people leave the room and others stay. There is a SAR society usually in most of the communities. They know a little bit about Coast Guard Auxiliary and Coast Guard. They're very enthusiastic based on the model of Coast Guard Auxiliary, a very affordable and effective model to join in. Yes, you may have the firefighter, the ranger, the first responder in some instance. They come forward to do the same thing. They're ready to do the on-water rescue under the model of Coast Guard Auxiliary without the pay. However, there are two different cultures. What we're offering is being embraced.
Senator White: I think we've built the two cultures. That's my point. The one culture of helping is the one we see in those communities. I speak mostly to the eastern Arctic and up in the Inuvik area. The culture of helping is absolute. We're the ones who have separated the culture by saying some of you will get paid, if you do the other you will not get paid. Working in those communities, they were lifesavers for me a lot. My perspective was, if we expect them to be out there, putting their lives on the line, we ought to be willing to pay them for that.
Mr. Garapick: We're moving in with the auxiliary where the rangers have been for a while. We're bringing a new culture there. It is a model that works. People are coming forward saying they want to join. We know culture change takes a long time. Right now where there is a model that's working and is attractive, I'd like to continue to push that forward. I feel like the community is embracing that as well.
Senator White: We'll respectfully disagree.
Senator Beyak: Thank you very much. Can you tell me if there are any shipboard nuclear detection systems in use, by Defence vessels or the Coast Guard, that would warn us of incoming nuclear ships unauthorized to be holding those materials, either in weaponry or nuclear?
Rear-Admiral Ellis: Warships do have some sensors that are either fitted or mission-fitted, or mission-fitted for the self-protection of the vessel. Particularly during the Cold War, this was a great risk. We trained a lot on it. Our warships are fitted to detect any threat to themselves.
With respect to the ability to detect illicit cargo, we don't have an organic capability. That may be tailored to a specific mission using a specialized agency, probably not resident in the Canadian Forces.
Senator Lankin: I'm not sure if it's the Coast Guard Auxiliary or some other aspect of volunteer services, but I'm aware there is a movement to create merit recognition, a medal or an award for the volunteers out there. Are you aware of it? If so, could tell us the status of it? Is any consideration being given to the creation of this? I, for one, would support it very much.
Mr. Lick: Certainly we're aware of it. It's part of the Governor General's honour and awards system. In the last couple of months, there was a ceremony in Vancouver for that. The Governor General is pursuing this type of recognition for volunteers across a range of different activities, whether it's search and rescue or more humanitarian type of volunteerism. It is very prevalent and it is in place.
Senator Lankin: Supplementary. I thought that there had been a movement from some of the volunteer societies and local communities to create a particular medal of merit for volunteer search and rescue.
Mr. Lick: The Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary has its own awards and honours system. They have a Coast Guard Auxiliary medal for exemplary service or for a particularly heroic type of activity that may not meet the criteria of the Governor General’s award system. The auxiliary itself has its own. Other than that, I'm not aware of any particular other system.
[Translation]
Senator Carignan: My question is for the Coast Guard officials. Specifically, what are your three most significant weaknesses in terms of organizing search and rescue efforts? In other words, what are the three primary needs that the government could address so that you can be fully operational?
[English]
Mr. Lick: A very good question, senator. A very broad question.
Without overstating it, we have a huge country. In particular, as the Arctic opens up, as we see more traffic across the Arctic, whether it be small vessels, adventurers, cruise ships, as we're seeing now more and more larger cruise ships, that would be one area that we are pursuing, as you heard Mr. Garapick state, in terms of expanding our auxiliary.
We shouldn't forget that every summer we have, at a minimum, six icebreakers up there patrolling the Arctic not only for icebreaking purposes, sovereignty, Arctic resupply, but also for search and rescue purposes. The Arctic certainly would be one of the areas that we would look to, whether it's to increase our presence or increase our ability to respond to a whole range of things.
I think the other areas would be very similar in a sense. As we see more pleasure craft traffic in various other areas, whether that is in Vancouver as we reopen our Kitsilano base, not just to provide a search and rescue presence there but also to increase our ability to respond to all emergencies that may be happening in the greater Vancouver area or across the B.C. coast. For that reason, the Kitsilano base is not going to be simply a SAR station; it will also be an emergency training centre for B.C. communities, in particular for one of the large groups that we're actually concentrating more of our efforts on in bringing them into the SAR system. Those are the indigenous communities not only across the B.C. coast but across the country as well.
If I were to state the three that you were asking, I would say the Arctic, areas where there is increasing traffic, whether that be pleasure craft and so on, and we use a particular risk-based methodology to look at particular areas across the country to establish where those risks are getting higher, what measures are already in place in those particular areas to respond and what other measures we need to respond to that risk. I think the third point would be bringing the very marine-experienced indigenous First Nations communities into the SAR fold.
The Chair: Thank you, colleagues. We have run past time, so I would like to thank our witnesses for appearing. We appreciate the information you have provided the committee.
Colleagues, we're going to combine the third and fourth panels today. We are continuing to look at security threats facing Canada, including, but not limited to, cyberespionage, threats to critical infrastructure, terrorist recruitment and financing, and terrorist operations and prosecutions. As part of bringing focus to this mandate, we're focused on issues related to our critical infrastructure.
First, I'd like to welcome to our panel Dr. Peter Pry, Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security in the United States. He is also the Director of the United States Nuclear Strategy Forum and is a contributing editor to Family Security Matters. Dr. Pry has served on the Congressional EMP Commission, the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, the House Armed Services Commission and the CIA. He's the author of Apocalypse Unknown: The Struggle To Protect America From An Electromagnetic Pulse Catastrophe.
Joining him is Cynthia Ayers, Deputy Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security. Prior to accepting the task force position, she served as Vice-President of EMPact America, having retired from the National Security Agency after over 38 years of federal service. Her intelligence community career included a position as an NSA representative to the Director of Counterintelligence at the Counterterrorism Center at the CIA headquarters where she worked throughout the attack on the USS Cole and the attacks of 9/11 from 2000 to 2002. She also served as the NSA visiting professor to the United States Army War College.
Welcome, Dr. Pry and Ms. Ayers, to the committee.
I would also like to welcome Thomas S. Popik. He was initially going to be here on video conference, but he has driven up from New Hampshire to be with us this afternoon. We appreciate the time and effort you've taken to be here.
Mr. Popik is the Chairman and Co-Founder of the Foundation for Resilient Societies. Mr. Popik is a principal investigator, specializing in vulnerability assessment, comparative risk analysis and economic modelling. He holds a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Science and Mechanical Engineering from MIT. Mr. Popik, welcome to the committee.
I understand both parties have opening statements. Mr. Pry, if you wish to begin.
Peter Vincent Pry, Executive Director, EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, is the greater threat to North American and modern electronic civilization everywhere, yet it is also the least understood. An EMP is like a super-energetic radio wave that can cause widespread destruction of electronics and blackout electric grids and other critical infrastructures necessary to sustain life. The sun can cause an EMP naturally by generating a catastrophic geomagnetic superstorm on Earth. Humans can cause EMP catastrophes with nuclear and non-nuclear weapons.
The U.S. Congressional EMP Commission warns that an EMP-induced blackout of the North American electric grid that lasts one year could kill up to 90 per cent of the population due to starvation, disease and societal collapse. Yet a Wall Street Journal article about NORAD moving back into Cheyenne Mountain and spending $700 million to further harden the mountain against a nuclear EMP attack from North Korea received hundreds of comments from shocked readers, half of whom who still think EMP is science fiction.
Senator Carignan: Excuse me, chair. Could you ask the witness to go a little slower, because I think the translators have been having problems following?
Mr. Pry: I will certainly accommodate, but I might not meet the seven-minute limit.
The Chair: That's perfectly fine. Please take your time.
Mr. Pry: Very good. Thank you.
On natural EMP, we know that natural EMP from the sun is real. In 1989, the Hydro-Québec storm blacked out half of Canada for a day, causing economic losses amounting to billions of dollars.
However, we are most concerned about the rare solar superstorm. The most powerful geomagnetic storm on record is the 1859 Carrington event. If a solar superstorm like Carrington were to occur today, it would collapse electric grids and life-sustaining critical infrastructures worldwide, putting at risk the lives of billions. NASA estimates that the likelihood of such a geomagnetic superstorm is 12 per cent per decade. This virtually guarantees that Earth will experience a catastrophic geomagnetic superstorm within our lifetime or that of our children.
The U.S. Congressional EMP Commission warns that Russia, China and North Korea have the operational capability and contingency plans to make a nuclear EMP attack against North America. Iran aspires to such capability in military doctrine and exercises, and terrorists could potentially execute a nuclear EMP attack.
The iconic EMP attack detonates a single warhead about 300 to 400 kilometres high over the centre of the U.S., generating an EMP field over all 48 contiguous United States and most of Canada. North Korea and Iran have both practised the iconic nuclear EMP attack. Both nations have orbited satellites on south-polar trajectories that evade U.S. early warning radars and national missile defences. If their satellites were nuclear warheads, they would place an EMP field over most of North America.
North Korea and Iran also have apparently practised making a nuclear EMP attack using a short-ranged missile launched off a freighter. Such an attack could be conducted anonymously to escape U.S. retaliation, thus defeating nuclear deterrence.
Just as nuclear and natural EMPs are not science fiction, we also know that the EMP threat from non-nuclear weapons, commonly called radio frequency weapons, is real. RFWs, typically, are much less powerful than nuclear weapons and much more localized in their effects, usually having a range of one kilometre or less. But they offer significant advantages over guns and bombs for attacking electric grids. The EMP field will cause widespread damage of electronics, so precision targeting is much less necessary.
In the military doctrines, planning and exercises of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, nuclear EMP attack is the ultimate weapon in an all-out cyberoperations aimed at defeating nations by blacking out their electric grids and other critical infrastructures. For example, Russian General Vladimir Slipchenko in his military textbook No Contact Wars describes the combined use of cyberviruses and hacking, physical attacks, non-nuclear EMP weapons and, ultimately, nuclear EMP attack against electric grids as a new way of warfare that is the greatest revolution in military affairs in history.
China's military doctrine sounds an identical theme in the People's Liberation Army textbook The Third World War: Total Information Warfare. Iran, in a recently translated military textbook, endorses the theories of Russian General Slipchenko and the potentially decisive effects of nuclear EMP attack some 20 times. An Iranian political military journal states the key to defeating the United States is EMP attack and that "if the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years."
North Korea appears to have practised the military doctrines described above, including by simulating a nuclear EMP attack against North America. On February 7, 2016, amidst the most recent and ongoing nuclear crisis with North Korea, Pyongyang orbited a second satellite, the KSM-4, on the same trajectory as the KSM-3 — apparently calculated to evade NORAD's early warning radars and missile defences — and practised a surprise EMP attack on North America. Tonight the KSM-4 will pass over Kansas, at a location and altitude where a detonated nuclear warhead would project an EMP field covering all 48 contiguous United States and most of Canada.
The West is not connecting the dots through a profound failure of strategic imagination. Like the Allies before the blitzkrieg of World War II, we are blind to the unprecedented, existential threat that is about to befall our civilization, figuratively and literally, from the sky, like lightening. Canada is more at risk than the lower 48 United States from natural EMP generated by geomagnetic storms because Canada is at a higher northern latitude where such storms occur more often. Where nuclear EMP attack is concerned, Canada and the U.S. are in the same boat because they are literally wired together, both nations working off the North American power grid.
What should Canada do? Canada should harden its national electric grid against nuclear EMP attack, as protecting against this worst-case threat will also mitigate all lesser threats, including natural EMP, non-nuclear EMP weapons, cyberattacks, physical sabotage and severe weather. Canada should give high priority to protecting its nuclear power reactors.
Nuclear power reactors can be converted from being a significant risk into a major asset for grid resiliency and recovery from an EMP. Canada should be skeptical of claims by the utilities and the North American Electrical Liability Corporation that they are experts on EMP, cyberattack and physical sabotage and can be trusted to protect the grid against these threats.
In the U.S., protection of the grid from an EMP is moving ahead but slowly due to the resistance of the power industry, yet change is coming. The U.S. military is hardening its key facilities. Several states are mandating protection of their grids, and the U.S. Congress has re-established the EMP Commission and is passing legislation to implement commission recommendations.
Given the deteriorating world geopolitical situation, one must hope the fixes will be done in time. Remember tonight as you go to bed at 10:42 p.m. that a satellite, perhaps carrying a nuclear warhead, will pass over central North America. This satellite was put in orbit by a nation whose leader is known to be unstable and has threatened to obliterate the United States. Canada will be collateral challenge.
Thank you for hearing this testimony today.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Pry. Ms. Ayers, you have a presentation?
Cynthia Ayers, Deputy Director, EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security: Yes, I do. I wish to thank you for this opportunity to discuss a topic that I believe is of primary importance to the national security of both the United States and Canada: threats to our nation's critical electric infrastructure.
I do wish to add one more thing to my bio. I am now honoured to be serving on the board of the Mackenzie Institute in Canada.
My testimony will be concentrating on the possibility of a catastrophic cyberattack to the systems we depend on for the delivery of our electricity, the lifeblood of our modern civilization.
Cyberanalysts have proposed that the nations around the world have been and are currently engaged in a cyber cold war. If indeed that's been the case, the year 2015 might, in retrospect, be classified as a point in which this cyber cold war has escalated to the very edge of the global hot war. It began with the revelations of a system infiltration and data death on a massive scale. It ended with a successful show of force, a message in the form of what could be considered a proof of concept, a display of a cyber first-strike strategy against an opponent's military and civilian centre of gravity.
On December 23, multiple regional power companies in the Ukraine were identified as targets of a major cyberattack which resulted in a power outage to 225,000 customers. That would be households and businesses as opposed to simply individuals.
For Ukraine, this proof of concept was an act of war. For the rest of the world, it was an omen of what's yet to come. Based on analysis of the known operational aspects of the malware associated with this event, to include a variant of BlackEnergy, the Ukrainian attack is believed to have originated from Russia. Originally intended for espionage, adaptations of BlackEnergy malware may now pose a threat to energy, water distribution systems and financial systems worldwide.
Arguably, the devastation resulting from a massive cyberattack may be more limited in scope than that expected of a high altitude nuclear weapon or from a great geomagnetic storm, but the abilities of attackers are growing as vulnerabilities lie unaddressed.
Certainly at this point in time, a more highly coordinated effort would be necessary to initiate, to institute a continent-wide collapse and maintain it for a long period of time, but capabilities are ever-increasing and will undoubtedly remain very inexpensive, with additional benefits of limited or no attribution to attackers. For example, KillDisk malware, which is seen in conjunction with BlackEnergy, wipes clean infected systems, and it adds to the disruption. It can actually effectively limit attribution.
Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are the main culprits at this level. Semi-state and non-state actors such as those connected with the Islamic State, the hacktivist group known as Anonymous and the Syrian Electronic Army are of somewhat lesser concern, although ransomware attacks, which are gaining in popularity and in sophistication, remain a threat to virtually all critical infrastructures.
The distraction and disruption caused by an unexpected digital assault paves the way for a post-cyber event: kinetic action. In fact, the progress of a digital first strike can be seen in the aggressions involving Russia, beginning with the cyberattack on Estonia. Cyber and military activities have been ongoing within the Ukraine since early 2014, without yet reaching a climax associated with a complete invasion. Yet Ukrainian analysts believe there to be notable similarities between the buildup in Ukraine and the earlier, pre-2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia, which was actually seen as a prototype for cyber kinetic war.
The lack of kinetic action at this point in Ukraine, at the point of a grid-down scenario, could be explained by a simple intent to supply a message to the world or the need to obtain more information, such as lessons learned for a subsequent larger effect on a larger target.
There are many benefits to the utilization of cyberwarfare weapons for a first strike. Flexibility with regard to timing is one; the ability to use the same deployed cyberweapons for intelligence surveillance and for weapons activation is another; the ability to monitor and modify deployed cyberweapons as deemed necessary is yet a third. If deployment is successful, a cyberassault can mask, by virtue of data corruption or distraction, other activities associated with the conflict to include the arrival of kinetic weapons, military forces and/or prepositioned cyberproxies.
Although necessary protection against cyberattacks is the usual method — that would be passive defence — they are not enough to thwart major adversarial cyberoperations. A 2014 Verizon report noted that finding specific vulnerabilities and blocking specific exploits is a losing battle.
Risk management is also a problem. The worst case does happen. Therefore, risk management should not be and cannot be relied upon for our national security.
A major cyber intrusion and compromise at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers national inventory of dams which had been attributed to Chinese cyberattacks in some open-source reporting is one example of an alarm that was raised of a future cyberattack by China on the North American power grid. The attacks occurred over a period of months, beginning in January 2013, only to be discovered in April. This is a delay that could be very costly if not deadly in a cyberwar first-strike scenario.
Blocking devices and surge protection devices specifically designed to eliminate the threat from GMD and EMP will go a long way toward mitigating the effects of a cyber-threat. This is because mini cyberattacks utilize data manipulation to cause damage to specific pieces of equipment. Obviously, passive defence practices must not be discounted, but they do need to be supplemented by physical mitigation measures.
I ask that you consider the possibility that, in one decisive attack, one decisive action, vulnerabilities existing within our electric infrastructure could be exploited so successfully that the first and last battle of the next war might occur simultaneously. An attack, if well-coordinated, as well as sufficiently staffed and resourced, could have catastrophic effects on the United States and Canadian populations. The Pearl Harbour analogy used by many senior leaders would be nowhere near sufficient to describe the damage that would result.
Cybersecurity is everybody's business, but leaders, in both the public and private spheres, must provide an environment conducive to the preservation of national security. The destruction of our critical infrastructure is not simply a worst-case scenario that will probably never happen. It's a weapon of choice that will ensure victory to the attacker.
Our enemies are already protected against critical infrastructure collapse. We, the United States and Canada, cannot and must not wait to protect our own centre of gravity against inevitable attack. I thank you for your time, Mr. Chair, and I look forward to any questions you might have.
Thomas S. Popik, Chairman, Foundation for Resilient Societies: My name is Thomas Popik. I'm Chair of the Foundation for Resilient Societies. Before I get into my prepared remarks, I would like to make a personal statement. I'm extraordinarily grateful to be here because my involvement in the defence of Canada, my personal involvement, goes back to the early 1980s. As a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, I was assigned to the program office that updated the Distant Early Warning Line. My first supervisor in the U.S. Air Force and my mentor was a major in the Royal Canadian Air Force. So this is actually an opportunity for me to contribute back to your great country in some small way.
I've also had the opportunity to personally visit much of your country. In addition to the major cities, I've been to Cambridge Bay, on Victoria Island. I've been to the vast expanses of Baffin Island, too. I think I have a feeling for not only the southern part of your country but also for your vast reaches in the Arctic.
Senator Day: You should visit New Brunswick as well.
Mr. Popik: Of course, I have been to New Brunswick. I have, indeed.
With that little bit of background, I'd just like to talk about what Resilient Societies does. We are very involved in the regulatory system for the electric grid. The way the regulatory system works, there is a private organization, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. It is a self-regulatory body. It's dominated by industry representatives. It sets grid reliability standards, and these standards must be approved by the governments of Canada and the United States. In the United States the approval process is through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and in Canada it's through the various provincial governments. I have been down to visit the folks at FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, many times. I've met with staff. I've personally met with the commissioners multiple times. They know our organization very well, and we know how this process of setting grid reliability standards works, too. It's given us a tremendous amount of insight into critical infrastructure vulnerabilities, both in the United States and in Canada.
I do have more extensive prepared testimony. I apologize that it hasn't been translated yet. Our attorney had to review it because it's international testimony, so you'll get that afterwards. I'm just going to go through some of this testimony very briefly.
Key infrastructure threats, physical attack: There have been a couple of significant physical attacks on the North American grid already, one at the Metcalf substation in San Francisco in April of 2013, also a significant attack on the Hydro-Québec network in December of 2014. I actually had the opportunity to be at a meeting of industry operators where they discussed the forensics of that attack, which actually caused a blackout and caused the normal flow of power, which goes from Quebec to the United States, to reverse in almost an instant. We could have had a cascading blackout due to that domestic terrorism incident.
There was also the threat of cyberattack, as Ms. Ayers very capably went through. As she said, there was a significant cyberattack in Ukraine. My organization did an extensive analysis of the reliability standards for cybersecurity and compared them to what had actually happened in Ukraine, and we concluded that, if the Ukrainians had followed all the standards for cybersecurity for North America, they still would have been vulnerable to that attack. Again, I encourage you to ask me questions about that.
A third threat is electromagnetic pulse, which Dr. Pry very capably went through.
Finally, the threat of natural electromagnetic pulse or solar storms. As many of you would be aware, there have already been several blackouts in Canada due to solar storms, one in Toronto in the 1950s and another in March 1989 in the province of Quebec.
At this point, I'm just going to briefly talk about how critical infrastructure in the 21st century will be the new battlefield. What will happen is that critical infrastructure attacks will increasingly be used against human populations. We already see this in the Ukraine with not only the cyberattack, but also a physical attack on transmission lines that preceded the cyberattack, the physical attack happening in Crimea.
Studies have been done by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about the vulnerability of the North American electric grid. Their conclusion, based on an analysis that was meant to be confidential but ended up being leaked, was that if only nine critical substations are attacked, it could bring down the U.S. electric grid, and, by implication, have major effects on the Canadian grid as well because it's interconnected, for a period of over a year. This would cause really dramatic consequences for human populations. We could see population losses that would be in the tens of millions. I refer you to my written testimony for more explanation about that.
We also have a situation where there's a gap between infrastructure protection and military defence. The way it works in the United States is that we have a law called the Posse Comitatus Act. It prevents the U.S. military from engaging in domestic, essentially, law enforcement. This means that there's not a lot of coordination between civilian infrastructure defence and the U.S. military.
We also allocate a tremendous amount of our national budget for defence to things like the Joint Strike Fighter. Canada also has this situation. The life cycle cost for just that one weapons system will be $1.5 trillion. If a small part of the defence budgets of Canada and the United States were reallocated to critical infrastructure defence, it would have an enormous impact.
There are a number of cost-effective measures that could be taken for critical infrastructure protection. I explain some of them in my written testimony. I'll just talk about one in detail, which is for solar storms. The protective devices for solar storms only cost $350,000 per installation. We estimate that about 300 installations would be required to comprehensively protect all of Canada. That's a very small amount of money compared to the societal costs of a blackout that would extend weeks, months or even years.
Let me just finish up in the next couple of minutes and talk about challenges for democratic and capitalist societies. Again, I explain this more extensively in my written testimony.
The problem in the political system is that events that haven't happened yet are very hard for political leaders to grab hold of and to explain the importance of to their constituents. Many of the constituents would be astonished to know of the problems that the three of us are talking about today. Often they assume that governments have diligently considered these problems and are already protected; but we know that's not the case. By the way, I very much admire the leadership of your committee in trying to address these issues now.
We also have a problem with the capitalist system and the profit motive whereby the majority of critical infrastructure in the United States, say over 90 per cent, is owned by private companies. There's a profit motive, and often these critical infrastructure risks extend beyond the tenure of the current executives. That's a problem societies need to address.
Finally, we have some deficiencies in the regulatory system. I talked about this before, the North American Electric Reliability Cooperation, NERC. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, is supposed to pass standards in the public interest. Often the "public interest" coincides with the corporate interest. We're trying to get them to look more at the public interest aspects. It's been a real challenge because, in many ways, FERC essentially treats reliability standards as a private negotiation with NERC.
Again, I'd like to thank the committee for quite extraordinary leadership in holding this hearing and trying to address some of these issues. You folks could play a very important role going forward. Again, thank you for the opportunity to testify; and I look forward to any questions.
The Chair: Thank you all for taking the time to appear before us, in particular Mr. Popik, who obviously went to a great deal of effort to be here in person as he was supposed to appear via video conference.
I'd like to begin with an overall question, speaking about our committee and what we're examining. I understand that the question of the electromagnetic pulse has been debated. The debate began about 14 years ago in some quarters in the United States. That debate has become broader and broader, as I understand. In Canada that has not occurred. We are the first public forum that's really starting to question the threat that it holds, the validity of the threat, what it would mean to Canada and what we can do to negate or prevent such an attack. Let's go to the United States and your knowledge. Perhaps all three of you will respond so that we can start this public conversation.
What concrete steps are being taken in the United States, whether at the federal level, the state level or the municipal level, to meet the concerns that you've laid out here in respect of the possibility of preventing this type of attack doing the damage that it could without taking any measures to prevent it? Perhaps we could start with you, Mr. Pry, and then move to Ms. Ayers and Mr. Popik.
Mr. Pry: I'll first respond to the debate aspect of that over EMP applications and the nature and magnitude of the threat. With the way our public policy is supposed to work in the United States, the debate is over, or it should be over. That's what congressional commissions are all about. When you have a highly technical, scientific issue that could possibly have existential stakes to a society, a congressional commission or a presidential commission is formed to bring together the best minds, the best scientists we have on the topic. These commissions are given broad powers, as the EMP Commission on which I served had, to go to the intelligence community and the Department of Defense to get all the information to task them to do all the analysis. The commission then comes up with a judgment about what the threat is, whether it is a threat and how serious it is.
The EMP Commission spoke back in 2008. The way our system is supposed to work is that as a matter of public policy, once the commission has spoken and given everybody their day in court, the finding becomes the basis for public policy.
There really shouldn't be a debate, but there is one because there are lots of people who are non-experts, and the whole electric power industry doesn't want to accept the judgments of that commission because they don't want to be regulated or to spend money. From a scientific, technical standpoint and in terms of the way public policy is supposed to work in our country, the debate is supposed to be over.
We've had not only the Congressional EMP Commission but also multiple commissions, such as the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, a national economy of sciences study and a big U.S. FERC and Department of Defense nuclear weapons lab study. They all came to the same conclusions: that an EMP, natural or manmade, would have catastrophic implications for society.
At the federal level, I'm sorry to say that the findings and recommendations of the commission were not followed up until recently. The commission delivered its report back in 2008, and the majority in Congress tried to pass bills. In fact, unanimous bills were passed. For example, the GRID act had unanimous support in the House of Representatives, but Washington is so broken that a single senator can put a hold on a bill; and that's what happened to the GRID act. The whole House of Representatives, Democrats and Republicans, supported it and it went to the Senate, where one senator put a hold on the bill. They can do that anonymously, by the way, in the U.S. and don't have to take responsibility for it. It is a bit of a mystery which senator did that.
However, having said that and the fact that we've been frustrated at the federal level for so long, this past year we achieved some pretty spectacular progress in terms of legislative initiatives passing. The SHIELD Act, which had been languishing in the House of Representatives, finally passed and was folded into the energy bill. Another bill, the critical infrastructure protection act, passed the house last year, again unanimously. It looks like it has strong support, so I expect it to go forward.
The EMP Commission has been re-established — it's back. I'm also working for the EMP Commission again because Congress is frustrated with the fact that there hasn't been the kind of progress made that should have been made on this.
There has been dramatic progress in the Department of Defense because our commission was making recommendations not only for the civilian critical infrastructures but also, as our first duty, to look at Department of Defense assets. The DOD is doing a lot of the things that I mentioned in my testimony. It's a matter of public record. They're spending almost $1 billion to protect Cheyenne Mountain, the NORAD alternate command post. There're many other things that the Department of Defense is doing, about which we can't get into detail here, where they're following EMP Commission recommendations and implementing them.
At the level of protecting the electric grid and other critical infrastructures, we face a problem in progress because the electric power industry is the only critical infrastructure that still basically exists in a 19th century regulatory environment. The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission does not have the power to order NERC and the utilities to go forth and protect their grids, for example like the Federal Aviation Administration can do to the airline industry if they find something wrong with an airliner. Because hundreds of lives are at stake when people fly, they can order a plane fixed or ground a fleet of aircraft. They have the power to do that if the airline industry does not comply with their directives.
There is no equivalent power like that in the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is what the SHIELD Act and the GRID act were about. The GRID act was about empowering FERC So that it would have those authorities.
It's an important first step that we've taken at a policy level in terms of giving legal authorities.
In our frustration, my task force started going to the states because state public utilities commissions have the power to direct their utilities in various states. That's what this book is about. The states shown here in white, Main, Virginia, Florida and Arizona, have passed legislation. Several of them are taking concrete steps to install blocking devices, surge arresters and Faraday cages to actually harden their electrical grids. At the state level, concrete progress is being made and things are being done. Virginia is particularly impressive because in addition to dealing with the nuclear EMP, the steps they are taking would protect against all the threats we have discussed today, cyber, physical sabotage and natural EMP as well as the nuclear EMP.
The EMP Commission core recommendation had been to protect the highest priority against the nuclear EMP. Not only is that the most dangerous threat, but if you protect against that, it will also mitigate all the lesser threats: non-nuclear EMP, EMP from the sun, physical sabotage and the worst-case type of cyber-threats.
Those are the things on which we have seen a lot of progress at the level of the Department of Defense. Things are being done there. We have been frustrated at the federal level, but we're finally achieving the legislative breakthroughs that we hope will result in progress being made at the national level.
I should mention that the President did pass a National Space Weather Action Plan that basically does entail looking at additional studies to protect the grid against the EMP from the sun.
Most of the progress so far is being made at the state level, however. Just to wrap up my comments, I think it's interesting that while we finally started getting movement in Washington eight years later after the EMP Commission delivered its last report, it took Maine about six months to start actually moving, and it has been the same in other states. Even though many state legislatures have never heard of EMP, once they are briefed on it and understand the urgency of it, for some reason, state governments are able to move more quickly than Washington has been able to move.
Ms. Ayers: I found that on the cyber side, the President and senior leaders are actually much more able to comprehend a major cyberattack. Their descriptions of such have actually seemed more relevant to a high-altitude nuclear explosion than an actual cyberattack that could have happened during the period of time when they began to warn us about these things.
Nevertheless, it's been a bit of an uphill battle in a lot of ways, mainly because many of the things that the President and Congress have done have been voluntary in nature, and as a matter of fact that's been written about by the Brookings Institution. They wrote an article called "Bound to Fail: Why Cyber Security Risk Cannot Simply Be ‘Managed’ Away." This began the discussion about risk management being a poor tool for use in critical infrastructure protection.
Otherwise, in the aftermath of the Ukrainian event, the FBI, the DHS, NSA, a few utilities, ICS vendors and other government personnel have been holding meetings this entire month to discuss the implications of what actually happened, and what their determinations were of that cyberevent. I can't go into that for security classification reasons, but it's fascinating to me that this was a major step by our federal level of government.
Also, as far as exercising, the U.S. Army War College has started, again, exercising the critical infrastructure issues in regard to a total blackout, whether it be a regular EMP, a great geomagnetic storm or a cyber blackout.
The National Defense University also did an exercise quite some time ago. It was actually the second, for the U.S. war college did a first, rather small event, and NDU did one right after that. Afterwards there was a bit of a dearth, but we've picked this up again, and recently the Army War College started a series of events where they're looking at all hazards, essentially, and what could be done at the federal level, and by the military specifically, to address this issue.
There is one more thing: The National Security Agency and DHS have put out something on the Web which you can access, called "Seven Steps to Effectively Defend Industrial Control Systems."
Again, this is a bit of a big step, and although they really don't do much more than the typical software and passive defence majors, it's obvious that people are getting worried. It appears to me that the concern is much higher than it was even in 2012, when we were hearing Leon Panetta, the former Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and many others stating their own concern over major cyberattacks.
Mr. Popik: Today, South Korea announced that their government believes North Korea is about ready to conduct their fifth nuclear test. I'm going to give a very direct answer to your question, but before I do, I'd just like Mr. Pry to weigh in. Mr. Pry, do you think that fifth test may be a super EMP device?
Mr. Pry: I suspect, as does the commission, that all of the tests they have conducted might have been of super EMP devices.
Mr. Popik: As a matter of fact, within the next week, we may actually hear an announcement by the leader of North Korea that they have successfully developed the super EMP device. When that kind of thing happens, the public perceptions about EMP could change nearly overnight. If that does happen, your committee will be right at the leading edge of changing the public perception.
What could be done within 12 months to establish a successful nuclear deterrent against the North Korean super EMP device? Installing neutral ground blocking devices at the extra-high voltage transformer locations would be would go a long way to establishing a nuclear deterrent. It wouldn't be 100 per cent protection, but it would establish a lot uncertainty for foreign adversaries.
Again, I think my organization believes that could be done within 12 months. It's just a matter of the political will for that to actually happen.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: My first question is for Mr. Pry. There are many similarities between potential targets in the U.S. and Canada, and I understand that even sabotage action carried out by electromagnetic emission controlled by an enemy country could cause damage, in both the United States and Canada.
You talked about this earlier in your answer, but could you give us a summary of your recommendations to the U.S. Congress? That will definitely help us in preparing our report.
[English]
Mr. Pry: The recommendations weren't mine. They were those of the Congressional EMP Commission that was headed by the foremost experts we have in the free world on this subject, including my chairman and the chairman of my task force, Dr. William Graham.
In effect, what the commission had recommended was installing surge arresters and blocking devices to protect not everything but the most important elements of the North American power grid. That would include the extra-high voltage transformers, which are the foundations of our modern electronic civilization. They are to our civilization what the roads and aqueducts were to Roman civilian. They enable you to take electricity from a place like Niagara Falls and project it hundreds of miles, and then there's another EHV transformer down the line that steps it down so that it can be consumed and distributed locally.
Most of those transformers are custom-made; they can't be mass-produced. It takes 18 months to build one of them, and they cost hundreds of millions of dollars. They are so heavy; they're larger than a house and weigh hundreds of tons. Roads and bridges would have to be reinforced, and there are only three railway cars in the whole United States that can carry the weight of one of these things, yet there are 2,000 EHV transformers in the United States.
There are not as many here in Canada, but you're still talking about, probably, hundreds of EHV transformers in the country, so you've got to protect those.
The other thing would be the generators, for example; those have to be protected by putting surge arresters on them. When you plug your personal computer into a wall, you'll notice that the plug is larger than a normal one. It's got a surge arrester on it. It's designed to protect against a lightning strike on the power line from coming in and frying your personal computer.
There are surge arresters that are designed much bigger than that, of course, to handle the energies that we're talking about from a nuclear EMP attack, and that would protect generators and EHV transformers.
Another element would be the control systems. Supervisory control and data acquisition systems, called SCADA systems, are little computers. There are hundreds of thousands of them that run electric grids, natural gas and water through pipelines and regulate traffic lights. There are hundreds of thousands of these things that make our electronic society go. They're very vulnerable to EMP, but they can be hardened, or you can just order new ones as you replace them so that the designer will design them so they'll be hard to EMP.
We found from the Department of Defense experience that that adds only 1 to 6 per cent to the cost when you're designing a thing EMP-hard, to make it hard so that it would survive it. It's a nominal cost that would be involved as these devices have to be replaced. This would be a slower way of doing it, a less painful way of doing it, instead of replacing everything.
Those are, fundamentally, the recommendations. Also, to train people in the electric power industry and the other critical infrastructures about EMP so that they exercise it and know about it, to plan for this kind of an event. It's 90 per cent planning and thinking about how to recover and 10 per cent investment in actual hardening technology.
Those are the essential elements: EHV transformers, the big generators and your SCADA systems. Those are the key vulnerabilities in the grid.
We've also found that if you did nothing else but protect the electric grid, that would be an enormous step toward increasing the resilience for your whole society, because you can save the electric grid and keep it up, and you can usually bring back all the critical infrastructures pretty quickly.
If the grid goes down and you can't bring it back, as I said in my opening remarks, you could lose 90 per cent of the population through starvation, disease and societal collapse after a blackout that lasts one year. You don't have to be an engineer to know that if it takes 18 months to replace one EHV transformer, and if you lose hundreds of these transformers, you are going to be faced with a blackout that lasts far more than a year.
The Chair: When we put in this adaptor on that infrastructure, the high voltage station, if you were to say today, "We're going to put these adaptors on," do we have them available, and how long does it take to put them on? Are we talking a week per station?
Mr. Pry: We do have them available, and there are private vendors that make them. There is more than one kind of technology available for doing this, the surge arresters, different kinds of blocking devices, different kinds of surge arresters from different vendors.
One of the things I would suggest — and what I suggested to individual states — is to talk to the various vendors and have them compete among each other and come up with a plan for Canada; who can do it most cost-effectively? Instead of the burden being on you and the government to do this, have them compete for your business by coming up with the best plan, the most cost-effective plan.
It's sort of like if you were thinking about protecting your house from fire, you might say, "How much is that going to cost, and how does one do it?" You could spend very little money by just buying a smoke alarm. If you had no protection from fire in your house at all, but you just did that one thing and spent $15 and put a smoke alarm in your house, it greatly increases your security and decreases the likelihood that your family is going to die from smoke inhalation if there's a fire. But you can buy a lot more security than that by buying fire extinguishers to put in a kitchen area and the garage. You can buy even more and put a sprinkler system in.
All these things will increase your security, but ultimately, it is a political decision to say, "Well, where in that knee in the curve do I want to spend money? How much security do I want to buy, and which company do I think has the best technology?"
You need to shop around. There isn't necessarily a one plan that fits all. I'd recommend talking to all of the vendors out there that do this kind of work.
How quickly you want to move, the commission estimated that we could probably protect, moving at a normal pace — that is if you look at what the lifespan is of a SCADA and the life cycle of a SCADA — to change out enough SCADAs so that we would be secure, and put in the blocking devices and surge arresters and cages, it would take about three and a half years. Moving at a leisurely pace, three and a half years to get the country protected.
If you wanted to make it a Manhattan Project — I would suggest that when we have now arrived at the place where we are, where North Korea is orbiting satellites over North America and we don't know whether there's a nuclear weapon in those or not, that maybe we are at a Manhattan Project phase where we need to move more quickly on this. I agree with Tom Popik's assessment there that you could accomplish a lot in a year, even in six months. An enormous amount of things could be done in six months.
There was one plan by one of my colleagues on the EMP Commission, a guy named John Kappenman, who had an idea that if you did nothing else, at least protect the big EHV transformers that support life in the major cities. You're not protecting all of them, but you're protecting the most important ones. That could probably be done for about $200 million, and it could be done in about six months. You'd go from being utterly vulnerable to significantly diminishing the risk and danger that the population is in.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: I have one last question for Ms. Ayers. How effective are the U.S. intelligence services in detecting sabotage plots? Does your commission share the information it has with Canada and the other allies?
[English]
Ms. Ayers: I'm not sure to what extent can I get into the first part of your question, based on classification. In open source, it appears we're relatively good at detecting threat. It's very difficult, however, within the cyber realm because everything is so instantaneous. It's instantaneous, and we do find, over and over again — at least in open source — where a threat has been resident within systems for a good period of time before it's been found.
I'm sorry, could you repeat the second part of your question again?
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: The second part of my question was about the way your commission is able to share the information with other countries, such as Canada and allied countries. I’m assuming that, if you have inside information about a spying system, you must share it with your allies.
[English]
Ms. Ayers: Absolutely. In fact, coming from the National Security Agency, I know that we deal with Five Eyes, or the Canadian, New Zealand, Australian and British partners. Yes, I am absolutely convinced that if we do have a significant threat that would affect Canada, we would indeed share that.
Senator Mitchell: There's nobody who is diminishing, one would think, the significance of an EMP attack.
I went to your website, and there's an article, "Deep-sixing another useful climate myth," and you have "Climate Fraud," so that's climate-change denial. Then I see "WATCH: Hillary Clinton dances to Latin music in Washington Heights." On the one hand, you're worried about world destruction, your website and your organization. On the other hand, you've got an article denying the climate, if I’ve got the right website.
Mr. Pry: That can't be my website.
Senator Mitchell: familysecuritymatters.org?
Mr. Pry: That's not my website. I'm a contributing editor to that magazine. I write articles for Family Security Matters, but I'm not responsible for the content of their publication.
Senator Mitchell: Good. That's helpful.
Another issue I need to address then with respect to credibility: On the one hand, from what you're saying, you wouldn't trust Iran the further you could throw them, I bet.
Mr. Pry: Yes.
Senator Mitchell: There's a quote here saying, "Iranian researchers . . . have built an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) filter that protects country's vital organizations against cyber attack."
Mr. Pry: That's what they say.
Senator Mitchell: But that's your only evidence that they have it. If they have it, why wouldn't we have it that easily? If we don't have it, how could they even begin to have the technology?
Mr. Pry: We do have it. That technology is not that hard to come up with, but in their article, they describe themselves as violating the international sanctions that prohibit them from getting that technology, how they got it, by going through the Germans and French to acquire that technology. They boast openly about acquiring that technology.
It's possible that they're lying about their strength. It's possible that they're making a claim that isn't true and that maybe they didn't acquire that technology and are very vulnerable to EMP.
However, I wish that our official — well, we don't have official state papers. The administration in our country is concerned about EMP attack on our critical infrastructures, and being so open about it, as the Iranian government obviously is. That's state-controlled media. It shows that at a state level they're aware of the EMP threat. They want to protect their country from it. Maybe it's being put out there as paranoia because they're afraid that the Israelis will pre-empt them to stop their nuclear program. I suspect it's true that they probably have illicitly acquired. After all, they have illicitly acquired capabilities that are far more sensitive, like the centrifuges that enable them to make atomic weapons, the ability to build an atomic weapon, and the ability to put satellites into orbit, which is what they're doing. They have demonstrated the ability to put satellites in the polar orbit. That's a lot harder to do than come up with an EMP filter.
I didn't have time to put it in the article. There's a piece of artwork that goes with that article that's in that Iranian magazine. It shows a satellite with an EMP blast coming out of the bottom of the satellite covering a vast part of the earth. That's from the Iranian's own depiction that goes along with that.
Senator Mitchell: I am concerned about that association with this website. Yes, there's a huge threat of EMP. How do you rate that threat to infrastructure and critical infrastructure? How would you compare that to the threat from climate change and military ports that flood? That's one of the concerns that port authorities in Canada have. Huge storms, unlike things we've ever seen, that could severely wipe out infrastructure in whole cities, whole regions. Do you see a comparable? That's much more likely because we know that's happening. Are you saying that's not happening?
Mr. Pry: I'm not a climatologist, but I'll tell you this. In our country the way public policy is made is on a complex question of that sort that has a lot of scientific issue and is extremely controversial scientifically.
Senator Mitchell: I don't think it's controversial scientifically; 99 per cent of scientists say yes.
Mr. Pry: There are people who would disagree with you, including me. It's not true that 99 per cent of climatologists agree on climate change. That has actually been debunked. There has never been a congressional or presidential commission established on climate change. That's what you're supposed to do with an issue like that, go through the hard scientific work, like you did with EMP, where we had not just one bipartisan congressional commission but several that have looked at this. The people have been selected, so we know it's not politically biased. The data is out there and has been examined by the best scientists we've had. That has not been the case with climate change.
In terms of a public policy decision, and the eminence of the risk, I'm not a climatologist, but these predictions that our cities are going to be flooded and all the rest, I would contend that the threat of a nuclear EMP attack is a clearer and more present danger. We have two North Korean satellites flying over us at the optimum altitude for invading our national missile defences and putting an EMP field. The leader who has done this, Kim Jong-un, is a psychopath. He is unstable. He is a Caligula armed with nuclear weapons.
How imminent of a threat would you regard it if you had a neighbour who every time he came out of his house would level a shotgun at you and say, "One of these days I will kill you and your family." Would you regard that as an imminent threat? That's what North Korea is doing to us on an almost daily basis. They are leveling nuclear threats against our societies. Unlike us, there is no police force we can turn to.
Senator Mitchell: You're on the CIA, I notice. Would you have no faith that the CIA understands that threat? We talked to the top generals in the U.S. They're not stupid people. I'm just trying to put this in perspective. I'm not saying we shouldn't do something. You were in the CIA.
Mr. Pry: Well, I was working with the CIA; that's right. Are you suggesting the CIA doesn't think North Korea is an imminent threat?
The Chair: Senator, please. We're here to —
Mr. Pry: That's certainly not true, if that's what you're inferring.
The Chair: Colleagues, we're here to discuss and to hear the imminent threat of the electromagnetic pulse threat to North America. Please can we confine our questions to that because we're trying to ascertain the depth and extent of the threat and perhaps what we in Canada, with the provinces, should be doing.
[Translation]
Senator Carignan: If I understand correctly, it seems that the information about electromagnetic pulses may not be classified in the United States. Here, in Canada, we are often told, when we dig a little, that the information is classified. In this case, would it be in our best interest to declassify this information? What would be the benefits of doing so?
[English]
Mr. Pry: This was the same situation in the United States up until the EMP Commission was doing its work. When I was the CIA's chief expert on EMP, this stuff was deeply classified. We wouldn't have been able to talk about it. It was only known to a handful of narrow specialists who were experts in nuclear strategy and nuclear weapons design. The chairman of our commission, Dr. William Graham, was President Reagan's science advisor, the administrator of NASA, and the free world's foremost expert on this subject. The views I'm expressing here today are from his commission. His assessment was we need to declassify. Enough of this. That way, the private sector that owns and controls the critical infrastructures, the electric power grids, water supplies, telecommunications and the like, will be aware of this threat so that they can harden their industries so that we would be able to survive as a society. The only people we were keeping in the dark at that point were the American people. The Russians, Chinese, North Koreans and Iranians all knew about it.
Those EMP Commission reports that were published in 2004 and 2008 represented an enormous breakthrough. That was the first time that that detailed kind of information about the EMP threat and what to do about it was disclosed to the public. We continue along those lines. There's a limit to what we're able to do. The details of nuclear weapon design and things making EMP, there are limits to what we can do. People should know the threat is real and imminent. We should be doing something about it, and here's what we can do about it. We can protect against this threat. That's the kind of information that the EMP Commission judge should have declassified.
I agree. I think Canada would be wise to follow the example of the Congressional EMP Commission, or at least those commission reports should be available to the public. Learn from those EMP Commission reports that are already declassified by the United States and follow their advice.
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Senator Carignan: What type of collaboration do Canada and the United States have on the issue? To your knowledge, do the two countries exchange a lot of information? In terms of comparing our federal and provincial levels to the States, you mentioned that Maine seemed to have a better protection policy. For example, Hydro-Québec sells electricity to Maine. Does this even mean that the contracts to supply electrical power must include a provision stating that Hydro-Québec is protected against such threats or accidents?
What is the cooperation between the countries, and are there concrete examples of cooperation between the state and province?
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Mr. Pry: Maine is acting on its own and is not collaborating with Canada. Maine has put a surge arrester on the line coming in from Canada, so in case an EMP happens in Canada, Maine will be protected.
I would add that Canada did a similar thing in the 1989 Hydro-Québec storm, which blacked out half of Canada and cost billions of dollars of losses. At a minimum, one has to acknowledge the reality of the natural EMP from the sun because that has actually happened here in Canada. As a response to that, Hydro-Québec ended up not hardening up to the level where you could deal with a nuclear EMP attack, but they did some things to protect their transformer and to protect their systems here in Canada after the 1989 Hydro-Québec storm, and that benefited you during the great Northeast blackout of 2003. If you look at a satellite photograph from space of the aftermath of the great Northeast blackout of 2003, you'll find that the blackout stops at the border. Most of the grids stood up in Canada because of the steps you took in 1989 to protect against the 1989 geomagnetic storm. Mind you, that's not a Carrington event. That's not a superstorm. It's not a nuclear EMP attack. But you did the right thing there. I'm saying there are bigger EMP threats out there that are coming, and you need to do the right thing again.
In terms of collaboration, I can't speak to what's happening at a classified level, of course, but Canada is a cooperating with NORAD and is represented with NORAD. It is a matter of public record that NORAD takes the EMP threat so seriously that they're spending almost a billion dollars to harden Cheyenne Mountain, NORAD headquarters, against a nuclear EMP attack from North Korea. That's putting their money where their mouth is. There are many other assets within the Department of Defense, including NORAD. Since Canada is a member, I can't imagine that there isn't some awareness, some collaboration — at least between NORAD and its partner in Canada — about this.
Senator Beyak: Thank you for very informative presentations. Welcome to Canada. I've worked on national defence in your country for the past few years with Newt Gingrich and some other people. Thank you for all that you do.
I was concerned that here in Canada — and after this committee it won't be declassified any longer, but this discussion on electromagnetic pulses has been behind closed doors for a long time. What would you say is the best thing the government could do in conveying to people how important this threat is?
Locally, Mr. Popik, what can communities do to protect their grids at the municipal level?
Mr. Popik: Thank you very much for that question. It's a question that I've given considerable thought to because my wife and I actually have three children — our youngest is just 12 — so we're very concerned about the safety of our family, especially in the context of the knowledge that we have about these threats, which are very real. I've done quite a bit of soul-searching.
There are people in our societies who have given up on the government and are trying to make their own preparations for some kind of infrastructure event. The conclusion I've come to is that the best solution is a government solution that protects all elements of the society. It's really important that individual citizens, constituents, understand the gravity of this threat. That's why the kind of work your committee is doing today is so incredibly valuable. It really is a situation where we need to prepare for the common defence. Individual preparations may be good, but there is a certain time frame that individual preparations wouldn't be effective beyond. Again, it's this kind of public awareness that's very important, not only at the national level but also at the community level.
The Chair: Are there any other comments from any other witnesses? I thought you had two questions.
Senator Beyak: It was about how we could make our citizens aware the way you have in the United States, and how important it is to do that.
Mr. Pry: Maybe you need a novelist. I'm a little ashamed and disappointed to have to admit that, despite all the congressional hearings we've had. The EMP commission was around, during its first lifespan, for almost a decade. We had congressional hearings and we put our reports out. We tried to televise some of those hearings. The commission is coming back. There have also been other groups — Tom's group, my group, several other non-profit groups — that have been trying to raise public awareness and education.
There was a novel called One Second After, written by Bill Forstchen, a professor at the University of North Carolina. That novel probably did more to raise people's consciousness about EMP. There have also been a couple of movies made where EMP was featured. I think the recent version of Godzilla includes EMP. Unfortunately, people don't read anymore. They seem to get their education from movies and entertainment. Some kind of public education program, if it finds its way into people's entertainment, will raise their consciousness more.
Perhaps for that 10 per cent of the population that still studies reports and reads and follows the news, the same thing you'd do for any — how did climate change become so that everybody is aware of it now? There were hearings and reports. I think the thing that brought that to public awareness, frankly, was a lot of the entertainment got out there so that actors and figures took up that cause and became aware of it.
I wish I had the magic answer to that question, because we're still struggling to raise enough public awareness about this. As soon as you say "EMP," people's eyes glaze over. People assume this topic is so technical. It's sort of a turnoff and people don't want to listen to it. But in my view, and in the view of the commission on which I served, this is the biggest existential threat that our civilization faces right now. It can come from the sun; NASA estimates 12 per cent per decade. It can come from nuclear weapons and from non-nuclear weapons, some of which in fact are not even weapons. There are devices that can be purchased on the Internet. You don't even need a licence to buy them. They can be used as a non-nuclear radio frequency weapon. If you attack those nine key EHV transformer substations, you could cause the blackout that would last 18 months and kill most of our population. Even though we've been saying this for a long time, most people are still not aware of it.
I'm in the same place you are. I don't know what more to do, except those things that I've mentioned, to raise public consciousness.
Senator Beyak: I did have another question for Ms. Ayers, if I may. I made an asterisk during your presentation about the black electricity and the malware. I wonder if you could elaborate a bit more. "BlackEnergy" — I haven't heard that term.
Ms. Ayers: Unfortunately, the specifics of BlackEnergy are classified, as far as I understand. But it is an open source, and there are some specifics in ICS-CERT on their web page for the more technically minded.
BlackEnergy is a Russian-made piece of malware that was originally supposedly for intelligence gathering, and it kind of sits on a lot of ICS systems waiting for something. This is kind of an open-source description. We're not sure what it's waiting for. There are several variants, and they're more or less plug-ins. You add these plug-ins to the original BlackEnergy malware, and it can do many other things associated with whatever you want it to do. It's a bit difficult to describe, but I believe it's the BlackEnergy 3 malware that we're most worried about at the moment, and it's been found in our own systems.
Senator Beyak: We should probably be relying on our current risk management systems.
Ms. Ayers: It's tough to find a lot of open-source information, unfortunately, in regard to specifics. Although ICS-CERT does a good job of keeping track of these things, they don't necessarily publish everything, and that's due to classification.
If I could, I'd like to add a little bit to what Dr. Pry was saying. I found personally, from looking at it through the eyes of the war college, the book that Ted Koppel just wrote, called Lights Out, has been an enormous influence on many people who would not pay attention to this before. His is a voice that people seem to want to believe.
The other point is that many times when I've talked to people specifically about EMP or cyber issues, they say, "If this is such a hard thing to deal with, if this is such a big threat, then why doesn't our government tell us?" Really, that's their only issue, that the government has never said anything about it. Until the government tells them, they're not going to worry about it.
I think it's very important that the government tells us, and perhaps it should come from the Department of Defense. I think the Department of Defense does know, and they've been studying this issue for years.
I don't know if that helps.
Senator Beyak: It does. Thank you.
Senator Lankin: I have two questions I'm going to put together. Mr. Pry, I was unnerved about your comments about NERC in that we shouldn't believe they have an expertise in this area, or that they claim to have an expertise that they don't have. Many people who are involved, and at regulatory levels, have some faith that if a utility is living up to the standards — for example, here in Ontario, the transmission and distribution utility, Hydro One, commits to meeting those standards — that we think we have some level of protection around our reliability.
I wonder if you could speak a bit more to the standards, and where the standards fail with respect to the issue of EMP.
Mr. Popik, you wished for a stronger regulatory structure than FERC in the U.S. I'm thinking, "What do we have here?" when we're looking province by province with disparate generators at various levels, utilities at municipal and provincial levels, transmission and distribution — a patchwork. In the province of Ontario alone, there are 70-some-odd local distributers that are connected somehow to the larger transmission grid. From your point of view, as an observer looking at this country, what do you think we should be considering as a committee and recommending around a regulatory structure that can bring a standard level across the country?
Mr. Pry: First of all, NERC is not a government agency. The North American Electrical Reliability Corporation used to be a trade association, representing the 3,000 electric utilities that contribute to it, that pay its salaries and keep it in business. In effect, that's what it still is, except after the great blackout of 2003 — the great Northeast blackout — NERC became the designated partner to work with U.S. FERC to provide for the security of the electric grid.
Historically, that has not worked well. If you just take the original thing that moved us to turn to NERC, the great Northeast blackout of 2003 was caused because a tree branch sagged into a power line, and that started cascading failures that eventually blacked out 50 million people. The federal government went to NERC and said, "This is unacceptable. We can't have a small incident like this where the grid is so unreliable and so unsafe that you can black out 50 million people." Even though people didn't die and it only lasted half a day, people still had to walk home in New York City across the Brooklyn Bridge. The subways didn't work. Manhattan was blacked out.
It took NERC a decade to come up with what's called a vegetation management plan that would be an approved plan to protect the grid from tree branches.
This behaviour — this slowness to respond and sometimes not responding at all, and a willingness to create junk science, frankly, to argue that threats that people think aren't threats are not threats — is reflected in the cyber areas and the EMP areas, as well.
As an excellent example, let's talk about the nuclear EMP threat from the sun. In the past, NERC didn't even want to look at that. Basically, their initial response to Congress and to those concerned about EMP threat from the sun is, "Well, we know about natural geomagnetic storms." They knew about the Hydro-Québec storm, and "Don't worry about it; we're on top of it. We can handle that." In effect, they basically denied the idea that they should have to think about a Carrington-class geomagnetic storm — something 100 times more powerful than the 1989 Hydro-Québec storm — that could happen. It's a once-a-century phenomenon, but like I said, 12 per cent per decade is the likelihood of that occurring now, because it's been over a century since Carrington, which was back in 1859. We're well overdue for a recurrence of Carrington.
NERC was dragged kicking and screaming. Initially, they basically said they didn't want to have to deal with geomagnetic superstorms at all, but U.S. FERC did order them to come out with a standard. They had initially put out a junk science study that claimed that they could recover the grid in a matter of 24 hours — I think they said it was 24 hours that they would be able to recover the grid from a Carrington-class geomagnetic storm.
I think it was within one or two weeks of when they put that out that the United Kingdom did another independent study that agreed with the EMP Commission findings that the recurrence of Carrington would be catastrophic, and we aren't ready for it. Then there was some kind of a weather event. I can't remember. It was some kind of a heat wave or something that happened, and it caused a blackout in the Washington D.C. and Virginia area. In some places, it lasted two weeks. It showed they were not ready to deal with normal, pedestrian, terrestrial kinds of weather that happen all the time. People had to say that their claim that they could deal with a Carrington-class geomagnetic superstorm in 24 hours couldn't be right.
We had a technical conference. I was there. We brought in some of our best scientists to go up against the NERC people. They had their day in court, and it was revealed that there was no good scientific or engineering basis for their claim that they could deal with this. They basically lied in their 2012 report. In fact, a good part of my book Apocalypse Unknown, which you cited, describes this episode with NERC in more gory detail than you probably want to know.
In any case, they were dragged kicking and screaming by the U.S. FERC into having to admit that they weren't prepared to deal with this, so they needed to come up with a standard. FERC can require NERC to come up with a standard, but they can't tell them what the standard has to be. So they spent years spinning their wheels. Recently, within the past year and a half, NERC finally came up with a standard that sets the bar so low that the standard is virtually useless.
I guarantee that when you guys go and talk to NERC about these problems, they're going to say "Well, you know, we've worked with the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. We're all on top of this and we even have a standard in the works, so go back to sleep, don't worry about this anymore. We the NERC are on top of it."
Why is it that industry is that way? It seems so counterintuitive. Wouldn't it be in their interests to protect their assets? I think this is why we have government. The invisible hand of Adam Smith in the free market is the best way society has ever come up with to organize the provision of goods and services to people. But when it comes to providing for the public safety and security against the once-in-a-100-year storm, a North Korean EMP attack or the possibility of a terrorist attack, the merchant, when he has that dollar in his hand and will decide to protect against the 100-year geomagnetic storm, will always put that dollar in his pocket.
Every industry has gone through this. There was a time before the muckrakers came along when the food industry and the drug industry — not to put cocaine into Coca-Cola. That's why it was called cocaine cola. They put cocaine in it. You're killing your customers; it's not in your interest to do that, but they did. Thumbs would show up in cans of peaches. Meat being produced was so bad that people would die from eating it.
That's why we have government: to come in and regulate these guys to do the right thing.
Look at the zeppelin industry. If they had spent a little more money, they could have used helium instead of hydrogen to fly those zeppelins. But they convinced themselves and the flying public that their operational procedures were so great that they would never have a Hindenburg-type accident that would put their whole industry out of business, but it happened.
That's the situation we're in today. NERC is basically the captain of the Hindenburg, flying to rendezvous us with another Carrington event. That's why we have government — because government stands up for public safety and national security. That's its legitimate role to come in and determine that "you do have to spend that little bit of extra money." That's why we have a Federal Aviation Administration — to regulate the airline industry. We don't trust the airline industry to tell us why a plane crashed. The FAA drags the pieces of the plane into a hangar and puts it together, because you can't trust industry to regulate itself on matters like this.
It's the same thing with the electric power industry, except, as I said, right now they exist in this 19th-century regulatory environment. At least in the United States they do. I don't know what your laws are here in Canada. Hopefully they're more robust so that you can order these guys: Yes, you are going to put the surge arresters, blocking devices and Faraday cages in because 90 per cent of the population of Canada is dependent on survival and you want to be ready for the geomagnetic superstorm, or the nuclear EMP attack, or the cyberattack when it comes.
Mr. Popik: There were a couple parts to your question. I will give you an example of how deficient the NERC standards are.
NERC developed a standard for physical security of critical electric grid facilities at the direction of FERC. When that standard was set, there was absolutely no requirement for physical security of master control rooms. There were 16 master control rooms within North America; there was no required physical security. My group fought that. We fought it in the initial rule making; we also filed an administrative appeal and we lost on that.
I'm not going to go into the details of why that is so important and the specific vulnerabilities here in a public setting, but if I were to explain it in a closed session, I think you would understand the gravity of this situation. These standards are really deficient, and they affect not only the United States but also Canada.
In terms of what the solution would be, my group has given a lot of thought to this. We've developed a proposal for what we would call an electric reliability commission. The problem with FERC right now is it's essentially an economic regulator that has had this electric reliability role grafted on to it in a 2005 piece of legislation.
FERC, the U.S. agency, doesn't set standards by themselves. They rely on a group which is dominated by electric utilities. In fact, NERC is governed by a vote, and 70 per cent of the representatives who vote at NERC are employees of electric utilities. You can see it's a bit of the fox guarding the henhouse situation.
Also, in the U.S. law FERC has to defer to NERC on matters of technical analysis. We've proposed that a separate commission be set up that would be able to set standards on their own, much like other standards set for food safety or for aircraft safety; and that this independent commission also have technical expertise.
It turns out that because FERC is primarily an economic regulator, their commissioners tend to be lawyers. Of the FERC commissioners right now, not a single one has a technical background. We contrast that to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States where the majority of the commissioners actually have a background in nuclear engineering.
My organization has recommended a number of specific things, and if your committee would be interested, we could actually send some additional background material to you on that proposal after the hearing.
The Chair: That would be helpful. Perhaps for the record, for the viewers, could you clarify NERC and FERC, the two acronyms, so that they can understand the conversation that's going on here?
Mr. Popik: That's very important. North American Electric Reliability Council was a trade association of electric utilities. After the 2003 blackout, where there was a joint Canada-U.S. task force, that trade association was converted into a self-regulatory body and the name changed slightly to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. Within the U.S., the regulator is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which we call FERC. In Canada, you folks don't have an equivalent; you have the provincial organizations. For example, in Ontario it's the Ontario Energy Board.
Senator Lankin: Right. Our utilities here, like Hydro One, are members of NERC.
Mr. Popik: They most certainly are. As a matter of fact I've gone to many NERC meetings and interacted with the representatives from both Hydro One and Hydro-Québec, yes.
The Chair: I'd like to ask a couple of questions.
We've had a number of witnesses, not unlike you, saying clearly and unequivocally that this electromagnetic pulse is definitely a threat. One can argue to what degree that threat actually exists.
Is there anyone out there that says it isn't a threat?
Mr. Pry: You can always find people who will say that the moon landing was a conspiracy.
The Chair: I don't mean in that context, Mr. Pry, but somebody that would argue on what they feel is a science-based or public security position.
Mr. Pry: NERC has argued that geomagnetic storms are not a catastrophic existential threat. They argued that in their 2012 junk science report, which was then exposed as being such. They never really, to this day, have ever backed off of that, although they don't make that claim loudly.
I don't know of even NERC claims that a nuclear EMP attack would not be a catastrophic threat. For that one, they say it's not our job to defend the country against a nuclear EMP attack. That's the job of the Department of Defense. So they try to wash their hands of it that way. But the Department of Defense has no jurisdiction over the electric grid. We can't send the DoD in to harden the electric grid, unless we were to nationalize it or something like that.
Every congressional commission and major U.S. government study has been looking at nuclear EMP phenomenology for 50 years. We've got EMP simulators; we've got test results from nuclear tests. Russia actually conducted very aggressive nuclear tests during the late 1960s. In the last series of nuclear tests, they set off nuclear weapons at high altitude over their own country, over Kazakhstan, an area larger than Western Europe — deliberately destroyed it — just to make sure that they could use these effects in warfare. They have probably the best database on nuclear EMP effects — which they keep secret — in the world.
Where nuclear EMP is concerned, there's no controversy about that. I'd say that where the geomagnetic storms are concerned, maybe NERC would still argue today that it won't be that serious.
I saw some claim that came out of NERC or one of the utilities that said that a nation-wide cyberattack might be able to cause a blackout that would last two weeks or no longer. Let me put it this way: trustworthy, credible authorities that are affiliated with the intelligence community, or the U.S. government, or independent scientific bodies, all agree — there's a consensus among them —
The Chair: Time is coming to an end here, so to follow up on that, is this debate taking place in places like Europe or in other areas in respect to these possibilities? Do you know?
Mr. Popik: If I can elaborate a bit, my organization has researched this. It is a puzzle. First, I agree with Dr. Pry completely. I don't think there's any debate over whether EMP is a technical threat. The physics of the threat exist. The debate is about the strategic implications of that threat. Some people would say, "Well, EMP is really a subset of overall nuclear threat, where we could have blast effects of nuclear devices." However, I think that argument falls down because it would just take one device to cause a cataclysmic effect with nuclear EMP, whereas with heat and blast effects of conventional nuclear weapons, you would need many more devices to cause a continent-wide effect.
My organization actually did a qualitative survey. We emailed several hundred foreign policy experts, if you want to call them that, and asked them what their position was about electromagnetic pulse, because we didn't see a lot of journal articles in foreign policy circles and that kind of thing about EMP.
The answers we got were very interesting. We found that, first, EMP had been classified for so long that the unclassified foreign policy community hadn't developed strong opinions; and, second, we found that most people from foreign policy backgrounds did not have technical backgrounds, and because EMP is a technical threat, the technical details are important. They didn't understand it and so oftentimes they wouldn't address it.
Then there is a school of thought that mutual deterrence, so-called mutual assured destruction, was operative for high altitude nuclear EMP.
But I think that that argument probably falls down because we could get leaders that, as Dr. Pry has pointed out, are unstable, and it would only take one launch or one device for a catastrophic event to occur.
Again, it's a very interesting foreign policy question, and we've done a little bit of research about it. But more research needs to be done on that particular issue.
The Chair: If I could just go to one question to you again, Mr. Popik.
Earlier in your statements, I think you referred to a price tag of $350,000, and I'm not too sure if it was per station. Then, I think your numbers were 200, if I'm not mistaken. Some retrofit would be done, and that would put us in a better position than we are in today. Where did you get those numbers? Who provided those numbers, and do you feel they are credible numbers?
Mr. Popik: Certainly. It's a very important question. There are multiple vendors for protective devices for nuclear EMP effects. One of the vendors has a device that has been tested by the U.S. government at Idaho National Labs. It passed the test. It is currently installed in an operational electric grid in Wisconsin. The vendor quote for that particular device, on a per installation basis, is $350,000.
Then you can just do the math. Within the United States, there are about 2,500 extra-high voltage transformer locations. For Canada, my estimate would be that there would be approximately 10 per cent more. So we're talking about maybe 3,000 for Canada. You can just do the math from there, $350,000 times somewhere around 3,000 devices. You get a figure of a little less than a billion dollars.
That wouldn't completely protect against a nuclear EMP. It would only protect against what's called the E3 pulse, but it would establish a very significant nuclear deterrent, in our opinion.
For more comprehensive protection, my organization has actually done a cost estimate, from the bottom up, where we tried to get counts of the number of locations and types of devices that would need to be protected. We went to vendors to get quotes for how much the protection would cost, and we did all the multiplication in an Excel spreadsheet and actually have made that Excel spreadsheet public on our website.
That's at least a methodology. I will say, for complete EMP protection, it would be very expensive, and it's something that would be done over a period of time. But to get that first level of protection to establish a nuclear deterrent, that would be very affordable. We're talking about in the range of $1 billion, and it could be done quite quickly, with commercially available, off-the-shelf equipment that has passed U.S. government testing.
The Chair: Before we conclude this, I have other questions, if I could, colleagues. I just want to go back to the SHIELD Act and the other legislative measures, at the federal level, in the United States.
What exactly are those acts going to do with respect to moving this file forward and being able to ensure that the necessary steps are taken to mitigate the threat?
Mr. Pry: The SHIELD Act provides legal authorities to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission so that it could order —
The Chair: Oh, so that will give the authority to them then?
Mr. Pry: Yes. That's what it's intended to do anyway. Although, as Tom pointed out, are the FERC commissioners themselves competent to do that? They're mostly attorneys, and we think something like regulatory capture has happened so that U.S. FERC tends to carry water for the NERC.
If they had the competence and the will to do it, they could, but will they actually take advantage of those laws?
Because we were concerned that maybe the U.S. FERC wouldn't take advantage of those authorities, the Congress has passed what's called a Critical Infrastructure Protection Act out of the House, and it's waiting for action in the Senate. It has the support of Ron Johnson, who is the Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. This will require the Department of Homeland Security to add a sixteenth National Planning Scenario. We have 15 canonical National Planning Scenarios for the Department of Homeland Security: a terrorist nuclear weapon goes off in a city, hurricanes, earthquakes, cyber, biological attacks — 15 canonical scenarios. There's nothing like an EMP attack among them.
All of our national planning, training, and resource allocation at all levels, federal, state and local, are based on these 15 canonical National Planning Scenarios. By adding EMP, as the sixteenth National Planning Scenario, it will be a huge sea change in the way we approach this. It will put it on the radar screen for all the emergency planners and responders and for doing resource allocation.
So those are just two of the things. There are other things that have passed in the energy bill. There's a provision to require the electric power industry to start having spare parts, spare transformers, spare SCADAs, so that these things could be replaced in an emergency.
This is a better than doing nothing. It's an optimal solution because the commission would recommend that you protect these things in the first place so that you don't have to engage in replacing them, but having these spares is better than nothing.
Then, of course, the EMP Commission has been reconstituted. I think that this is a huge signal, and not just a signal, to the industry and to everybody. The purpose of bringing back the commission is to advise Congress on how we get the country protected on a rapid basis, move this ball forward.
They thought that they had accomplished that back in 2008, when the commission gave its recommendations to Congress. Now the reason the commission is being brought back is that there is a majority view that not enough is being done quickly enough, and the job of the commission is going to be to move it forward.
Part of the reason I'm here in Canada is because it would be in the interests of the United States. It's not only in Canada's interests to protect itself but also in the interests of the United States for Canada to protect itself.
If we don't move quickly enough down in the States, if we fail, but you keep the lights on in Canada, it would enable us to recover too. Just as an individual state can island itself, you can island yourselves. You partially islanded yourselves already after the 1989 Hydro-Québec storm so that you were protected from the great Northeast blackout of 2003 and didn't suffer as seriously as we did. It put Canada in a position where our society would be able to be recovered as well, in more timely fashion, if Canada did the right thing and protected its people.
Senator Day: I just wanted to confirm because a number of us have visited NORAD and Cheyenne Mountain, and we know that the policy has been to move out of the mountain. It's still there. Did you suggest to us that they're moving back into the mountain? Is that a suggestion you made to us?
Mr. Pry: Yes, in April 2015, last year, Admiral William Gortney, who is the Commander of NORAD, at a press conference at the Pentagon. They're not moving the headquarters away from Peterson Air Force Base. The headquarters is still going to remain there, but, because Peterson is not hardened against EMP but the mountain was, they're moving critical command assets out of Peterson back into Cheyenne Mountain. Moreover, they are further hardening the mountain against EMP threats. They're spending almost a billion dollars, $700 million, to further harden the mountain and many other command and control and early warning assets against EMP. NORAD is not the only one. There are other military commands as well that want to move into the mountain.
Senator Day: That's interesting.
Mr. Popik, this is the other half of that question. We started talking about cybersecurity, and we morphed into almost exclusive discussion on the electrical grid. Can we tie those back together? I understand surge control mechanisms in the electric grid; this is electrical equipment to prevent a surge of electricity moving on and burning out transformers and a lot of the control mechanism. But another aspect of the control mechanism is the cyber aspect, the computers that control switching, et cetera. Is that the other vulnerable portion of the electrical grid, the computer controls aspects that will all get burned out? Is that what we were talking about, in part?
Mr. Popik: Certainly. That's true. Actually, I'll give you two answers to your question.
Senator Day: That makes it three questions then.
Mr. Popik: Right. It turns out that for a high altitude nuclear EMP burst, there are three wave forms: the so-called E1 or short rise time pulse that burns out computer chips. The E2 pulse is very much like lightening, which most systems are already protected against. The E3 pulse is the long pulse that burns out these extra-high voltage transformers.
The other part of your question, which was very insightful, was about the connection with control systems and how control systems are vulnerable to both electromagnetic pulse and cyberattack. It turns out that within the cyberattack world there's a specific vulnerability called the Aurora vulnerability, where substation breakers can be switched on and off remotely very rapidly. This was a classified threat that was leaked. Then through an accidental release of information by the Department of Homeland Security in the United States, much more information became known. With this Aurora vulnerability, if the power to any kind of rotating equipment attached to the electric grid, and this would include both generators and motors, is switched on and off rapidly, it will cause these devices to self-destruct. That's a very good example about the connection between cyberattack and electrical surges that can damage equipment.
[Translation]
Senator Carignan: I have looked at the website of your organization, and I see reports on the U.S. and also one on the U.K. To your knowledge, with the exception of Canada, have other governments consulted you and are they studying the electromagnetic threat? For transparency purposes, given the issue raised by my colleague Senator Mitchell and the fact that you are a non-profit organization financed by private funds, as well as the fact that a part deals with the recommendation and purchase of equipment, could we have a report listing the members of your organization and the members of the companies or the main financiers from your respective organizations?
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Mr. Pry: The EMP Commission will be funded by the Department of Defense. It doesn't accept private monies. My EMP task force is a not-for-profit. It's funding can also come from Congress, although we have received no congressional money. Most of my people work on a volunteer basis and receive nothing. I wish that were not the case. I wish I could pay them. My deputy director, for example, receives not a penny from this. We're doing this because this is the right thing to do. What little money we have on the EMP task force comes from another not-for-profit foundation. We have not accepted any and don't have any money that comes from industries that would profit or make money from these things.
You had asked also if we have consulted with other governments. I've often gone to Israel as the Government of Israel has had me there a number of times to talk to them about the EMP threat and what they could do about it. We have received no money from Israel or anything of that sort. This has all been done on a voluntary basis. Israel has made a political decision to harden its grid. I don't know if they've actually started doing it yet. They may actually have started doing it, but two years ago, as a result of our consultations, they made a political decision to move forward with hardening their grid.
Most countries of NATO Europe are in better shape than we are here in the western hemisphere because they have a European technical commission that sets standards, so they have an EMP standard. It's not as good as I would like, but at least they have some kind of standard that addresses the nuclear EMP. Obviously, it's been on their radar screen.
The United Kingdom has been very interested in this and concerned about both geomagnetic storms and solar EMP. An organization called the Electric Infrastructure Security Council has meetings that alternate between Washington and London. Congress hosts it one year and Parliament hosts it the next year. The EISC will meet this July in London and be hosted by Parliament. They've been trying to educate the nations of the world and mobilize other countries to start protecting themselves against both the natural and manmade EMP threats.
I participated in that as well. They usually have me as a speaker — although I won't be going this year. In the past, I've spoken almost every year at the EISC on a volunteer basis.
Mr. Popik: Senator, thank you very much for asking that very important question. I appreciate your diligence because it's important for all of you to understand the motivations of the witnesses as they come before you.
My organization is funded by foundations and by individual contributors. We've deliberately made a decision to neither solicit nor accept funds from commercial enterprises that would benefit from any of the positions that we advocate. For example, we have not solicited the vendors of the protective devices for funds. We have not accepted any funds from them and we have no intention of doing so. In terms of a specific list of our contributors, we would have to get their permission before we would release that publicly.
Let me also say that I've been doing this work for five years. For the first four years of this work, it was self-funded out of my personal family budget for travel within the United States, Canada and internationally. It came out of my family budget, which is quite limited. I know that situation was also true for other principals in my organization. The people who were advocating this kind of protection are personally committed to this work. I think it's true for all of us that we don't stand to make any significant financial rewards from it.
Ms. Ayers: I just want to bring up two other organizations that have been very active in this aspect. One of them is a group called InfraGard, which is a private-public partnership between the FBI and anyone who can pass a very light security clearance and background check. Most of them have cyber backgrounds but not all. This has become such a big issue with InfraGuard that they have their own special interest group for electromagnetic pulse or critical electric infrastructure issues.
Another one is called EMPact America, which Dr. Pry and I were both involved with. It was established right after the EMP Commission report came out around 2009. The gentleman that funds EMPact America is Henry Schwartz, who does so completely on his own. He does it because he saw a need for the public to be aware. He understood that nobody was telling the public at that time and believed that he needed to do something. He has funded the entire thing and has spent a few million dollars doing so.
Many people that I know of, like Dr. Pry, have literally spent a lot of their own money doing this, to their detriment. That speaks quite a bit to the importance of this topic in all of our minds.
The Chair: On that note, we thank you for spending your time with us. It's been very informative for each of us in respect of the issue at hand, one that faces both Canada and the United States.
We hope that this public conversation helps to bring forward a further discussion on what could be done in the future to deal with it.
(The committee continued in camera.)