Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Defence and Security

Issue 4 - Evidence

The Standing Senate Committee on Defence and Security met this day at 6:20 p.m. to conduct an introductory survey of the major security and defence issues facing Canada with a view to preparing a detailed work plan for future comprehensive studies.

Senator Colin Kenny (Chairman) in the Chair.

[English]

The Chairman: Honourable senators, I call the meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Defence and Security to order.

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Standing Senate Committee on Defence and Security this evening. Whether you are here in the room, watching on television or following us on the Internet, this evening we continue our study of major security and defence issues.

My name is Colin Kenny. I am a senator from Ontario. We have with us, on my far right, Senator Atkins, also from Ontario, Senator Cordy, from Nova Scotia, and Senator LaPierre, who is from Ontario.

The committee is somewhat smaller this evening than normal. It has been an exciting day in Ottawa with alarms and excursions. We are fortunate to be here in this building. It was only opened for our use 30 minutes prior to the start of the committee meeting. There was some uncertainty about whether we would be able to use the facility or have the meeting tonight.

Our committee is the first permanent standing Senate committee with a mandate to examine subjects of security and defence. Today, we continue our survey of major issues facing Canada. We will be reporting back to the Senate before the end of February.

Recently, Canadian troops have been deployed to assist the United States in its current campaign against terrorism. Questions have been raised about whether the Canadian Forces are operationally ready to undertake the commitments assigned to them by the government. This evening, we will bring together a group of highly qualified experts who will offer informed opinions about the state of the Canadian Forces.

Let me introduce our first witnesses. We have before us Lieutenant-General (Retired) Charles Belzile. He had an illustrious career in the Canadian Forces from 1951 to 1986, during which time he served in Canada and Germany and with the United Nations and NATO. Since retiring, he has continued his pace of activity. From 1987 to 1992, General Belzile was vice-president of business development for SNC Industrial Technologies; and since 1992, has been President of C.H. Belzile Consultants. He is appearing tonight in his capacity as chair of the Conference of Defence Associations.

The Conference of Defence Associations, with a current membership of over 600,000 was established in 1932 to study problems of defence and security and to promote the efficiency and well-being of Canada's Armed Forces. On September 27, the CDA released its newest study, entitled "Caught in the Middle," an assessment of the Canadian Forces.

General Belzile is accompanied by Colonel (Retired) Alain Pellerin, the executive director of the Conference of Defence Associations.

Welcome to the committee. Please proceed.

Lieutenant-General (Ret'd) Charles Belzile, Chairman, Conference of Defence Associations: Honourable senators, at the outset, the Conference of Defence Associations and I wish to recognize the outstanding devotion to duty and the professionalism of our men and women in uniform as they prepare to move into potentially dangerous operations as part of the U.S.-led coalition of allies, determined to do all in its power to stem the tide of terrorism in the world. I wish them well and Godspeed. I hope their families will continue to demonstrate the courage they have always displayed in the periods of separation from their loved ones.

Today, it is my pleasure to provide some comments to your committee on the operational readiness of the Canadian Forces. As mentioned, and coincidently, the CDA recently released a study entitled, "Caught in the Middle: An assessment of the Operational Readiness of the Canadian Forces."

Our aim in that study, and in accordance with our mandate, is to inform the public on matters of Canadian security and to make recommendations to government to improve the effectiveness of the Canadian Forces.

The study was done prior to the tragic events of September 11. While one hates to piggyback on such horrific happenings, they do make the study more relevant and timely.

I shall present a brief summary of the new document, and then my colleague and I will answer any questions you may have. Copies of the study have been mailed to each member of this committee. I also understand that the executive summary has been circulated today.

[Translation]

The Conference of Defence Associations, or CDA, is the oldest and largest defence association in Canada. The CDA is the leading national voice in defence and security matters. As you already mentioned, Mr. Chairman, it was founded in 1932 and currently includes 31 associations with a total membership of 600,000 members across Canada. We believe that credible defence and efficient armed forces contribute to the well-being and prosperity of all Canadians.

[English]

Questions have been raised for some time about whether the Canadian Forces are operationally ready to undertake the commitments assigned to them by the government. As stated in the 1994 white paper on defence, these commitments, which, according to the government remain the only valid document today, are grouped under the following roles: first, the protection of Canada; second, the Canada-United States defence cooperation; and third, contributions to international security.

Operational readiness refers to the ability of the Armed Forces to assemble people and material, within a set period of time, and their capability to execute missions successfully and within the time frame stipulated. Operational readiness may be broken down into a number of components, such as force structure, doctrine, manpower, equipment, training, logistic support and medical support.

All of these elements must be made effective individually and then be brought together to produce a fighting force. In this respect, the Armed Forces are not unlike a symphony orchestra, where a number of diverse elements are blended to produce harmonious results. If any of the parts are missing or weak, the results will be less than harmonious. That concept also applies to the Armed Forces except that the forces may well involve matters of life and death.

Previous studies by the Conference of Defence Associations have shown that the Canadian Forces have suffered from insufficient funding for almost 30 years with a critical drop of 30 per cent of purchasing power in the mid-1990s. Over the past decade, the quick solution to the shortage of funds has been to reduce the number of people in the Canadian Forces from 85,000 to some 57,000, of which only some 53,000 are effective. I have been told that the recent recruitment drive has brought the total in the services to some 59,000. The number of effective people, meaning trained and available, has not changed significantly.

The money added to the Department of National Defence budget over the past three years has been welcome. Please allow me to open a parenthesis here and commend Minister Eggleton for his efforts over the years to secure extra money for the Canadian Forces. These increases were, however, roughly only 50 per cent of what would be required merely to stabilize the system and provide a foundation for rehabilitation. The operations and maintenance account, which covers everyday items needed to run the Armed Forces, is creating an ongoing deficit of $1 billion per annum. This does not include $5 billion to $6 billion identified by the Auditor General in his 1999 report to replace equipment that will "rust out" over the next decade.

The introduction of a few new high-technology weapon systems, such as the Coyote reconnaissance vehicle and the light armoured vehicle, while welcome, creates only blips on the downward curve of operational readiness.

The most serious result of the underfunded DND budget is the unacceptable pressure that is placed on the dwindling pool of people in the Canadian Forces. They suffer burnout and many leave the service.

DND is trying to remedy these problems by the introduction of sustaining objectives related to maintaining current military capabilities, plus change objectives to meet the challenges of high-technology and new asymmetrical threats.

The trouble is that there is not enough money in the DND budget to implement either set of objectives. This is the situation we allude to in the title of our study. The Canadian Forces' current capabilities are in decline and new capabilities are unaffordable; hence, they are caught in the middle.

Our study concludes that due to insufficient funds in the DND budget the Canadian Forces cannot fulfil their commitments beyond a marginal level within the resource stipulations and time limits specified in current plans.

In the interests of time, I refer you to the text of the study for the methodology we used to reach these conclusions. I guide your attention especially to the excerpts from the level one business plans of the navy, army and air force - the results, in fact, of their own analysis.

Finally, although it is unfortunate to say, the terrorist attacks in the United States demonstrate a number of points made in our study. First, history has not ended. The interests of some nations and groups will continue to be advanced through violence. Second, recent events such as those in Kuwait and Kosovo and terrorist attacks in the United States are clear indications that threats can materialize with very little strategic warning. Third, there is a broad range of threats in the post-Cold War era. It would be a mistake to focus on only one of them. Hence, modern, multi-purpose, combat-capable Armed Forces need to be maintained at a state of operational readiness, which would allow them to respond to the entire spectrum of security. Finally, contrary to popular belief, technology does not replace people beyond well-defined limits.

In conclusion, the aim of government must be to protect its citizens and nurture stability and prosperity. It is at the heart of our democratic way of life and our congenial social order. Is this worth fighting for? I am certain that your answer, like mine, would be yes. In that case, the security inherent in the Canadian Forces must be assured by moving DND funding higher on the list of national priorities. Our recommendation is that it must be increased by a minimum of $1 billion in each of the next five years.

As a footnote, I would add that in addition to our concern over the operational readiness of the Canadian Forces we are also concerned that, notwithstanding the recent media interest in security and defence, the public remains generally unaware of defence issues. We hope this study and in time your own report will help Canadians to address this important point.

We are at your disposal to respond to questions.

Senator LaPierre: Thank you for your presentation. As always, you are very intelligent, but you scare us. I always read that I am not ready to fight. I know from history that I was not ready to fight in the First World War, I was not ready to fight in the Second World War, and I certainly was not ready to fight in the stupid war in Korea, et cetera. Yet, the capacity of the Canadian people to come up with the wherewithal and the means to be able to carry on a war effort much beyond their numbers has been proven quite well.

I am concerned, sir, about the appraisal of our lack of readiness. Readiness for what has happened since September 11 seems to be to be vastly different from the readiness that would have been required in the Gulf War. Is that possible?

Mr. Belzile: Mr. Chairman, our past war efforts are indeed very laudable. Our history has proven that somehow and in some way we have come up with the wherewithal, as Senator LaPierre mentioned. However, the problem is, as illustrated by the horrific attacks on the United States, that strategic warning and preparation time was always available. During the Cold War, for a long time we lived with the near certainty that we would face a nuclear encounter or a nuclear escalation and, therefore, we neglected such things as our reserves and our capability to sustain, in particular. We accepted that we would have to fight with what we had in the front window.

Those of us who served in NATO for many years knew very well that to a certain extent we could have become the hostages of the country placed before the potential Soviet hordes. As it turned out, it was a war that was never hot. However, I am still convinced that it was a war, and one that we won because we showed our determination to be ready to meet any threat.

The kinds of threats with which we are now faced are different in some ways. National Defence identifies 11 steps in the spectrum of conflicts, ranging from internal security and search and rescue operations all the way down to collective defence.

One of Canada's problems, due to its vast geography, is that there is absolutely no way that Canadians, on their own, can defend the territory of Canada. Therefore, whether we like it or not, we are forced into a situation of cooperation with allies and coalition forces, but this implies, surely, that a commensurate effort is given by our nation to those who may have more power, such as the United States.

Senator LaPierre said that we seem to have been ready to fight in the past. Other than the issue of time, it is safe to say that we are ready to fight now, too. However, we are ready to fight for how long? We are ready to fight with no capability to sustain. After five to eight months, as in our current United Nations operations, we have to turn the army upside down in order to be able to meet the next rotation. This is not an organization that shows much depth.

This is not unique to the army. As this is my background, I tend to speak more about the army than the air force or the navy, but the navy is committing one-third of its combatant fleet to Operation Apollo. It is using in this task force one of its only two supply ships, leaving only one in Canada once they are deployed. That ship must be on either the East Coast or the West Coast. The rest of the navy ships that are training on the coast where that remaining supply ship is not must surely immediately have their ranges reduced because they have to go back to port to resupply.

All of those things come into definitions of operational readiness. That does not mean that the people on those ships are not as good as any in the world. Some of our equipment, in fact, is at the leading edge of modern technology, and our frigates are a perfect example of that. Our fighter aircraft have been reduced in number. Only a small percentage of them have been armed with precision-guided munitions. To a large extent, our pilots are worn out. To be able to keep a mission for a long period of time, such as the one over Kosovo, drains them almost completely.

We are not trying to be only critical here. We are trying to say that you need to review all these things and ensure that not only you have depth at the front end but, perhaps, regurgitate, if you want, our plans to modernize the reserves and have something in the background that allows you to mobilize.

Senator LaPierre: I went to a conference several years ago in Cornwall. The suggestion was made that Canada, a small country of 30 million people, of small resources in many ways but with tremendous territory, should specialize in certain areas and put its money into those areas to which it can best contribute.Perhaps such an area would be in rapid striking actions. In other words, it may not be in hardware.

When I hear from your organization and others about our military capacity and readiness, it always seems to me it is hardware. One billion dollars, sir, will not buy you a hell of a lot. Consequently, you will hardly get what is necessary from your point of view.

What would happen to our defence system, to the security of our country - and I am not an expert, which is why you are here - if we specialized in certain key areas that would make it possible to fight what I am told is the modern war of the 21st century? This will not be like the wars of the 20th century, let alone those of the Middle Ages. Is it possible for Canada to assure the security of its people, the defence of its territory, and its participation in its various international responsibilities, with specialized actions of various kinds, whatever these may be, and the hardware be damned? How many ships do I need? How many aircraft do I need? How many tanks do I need? How many this and how many that?

Surely, the defence budget will have to increase by $10 billion to $15 billion a year to equip ourselves to the degree that the U.S. and Great Britain are equipped. Do we not have a special mission?

Mr. Belzile: Mr. Chairman, it is a good question and one asked regularly by many people. There is a certain amount of validity to it.

It is not quite correct, if I may, senator, to say that we are promoting in our report hardware and equipment. We are talking about people more than anything else. Specialization is okay if the armed forces of our allies and the coalitions with whom we are likely to work have everything else. The problem with specialization is that when we give up a certain capability, when we give up a certain ability to do something, whether it be mine sweeping for the navy in our coastal areas or parachute capabilities, it takes a long time to bring them back up, if we ever need to have them again. It takes time to relearn the process and relearn how to use tanks and other things.

It also assumes that the people with whom you will be working in a coalition have everything else and are prepared to provide it to you, with all of the difficulties that this may entail from the point of view of interoperability, the point of view of command and control. Suddenly, your forces are broken up in many ways that may not be in accordance with your own national government's desire. I think it could work in a short and very specific engagement. If anything drags on, as this particular problem could very well, we will enter a tunnel. We do not know what it will look like at the other end. It would not be prudent to try to specialize in one area at the expense of everything else. Although we are likely to, we may not always have the rest of NATO with us in our left pocket.

Having spent many years in NATO, I saw that interoperability and standardization was great. Everybody supported it as long as you specialized and interoperated on their kit. There are many organizations that come in behind this, including economics in the country. Perhaps Mr. Pellerin would like to elaborate on this. However, specialization scares me because ones does not have an ability to bounce back.

Colonel (Ret'd) Alain Pellerin, Executive Director, Conference of Defence Associations: For those who have worked in NATO, specialization was traditionally a password for doing less, and that is always of concern. In our case, we have tried to look at the white paper, which is the government policy document, and look at the task that at the time had been identified by the government and which, I would suggest, notwithstanding the events of September 11, are still valid tasks for an Armed Forces, which is the protection of Canada, Canada-U.S. defence cooperation, and contributing to international security. You then build the forces around these tasks.

I suggest that what we have in the white paper as a force is really a minimum required to do that. I would suggest for the first two tasks, which are in a sense being fused now after the events of September 11, we will probably require more. We start looking at counterterrorism. We start looking at critical infrastructure and the protection of that infrastructure in Canada. Quickly, we run out of manpower.

We look at the ice storm, where some 15,000 troops were deployed just for eastern Ontario and Quebec. We look at Oka, where 9,000 to 10,000 troops were deployed. If we talk about infrastructure and protection of infrastructure across the country, very quickly manpower will be required.

We also need to look at contributing to international security. Soon we will have some 4,000 troops abroad. I suggest that sustaining that will be difficult. We are also saying that the white paper calls for a minimum of the equivalent of a brigade to be deployed - 6,000 to 8,000. We have concluded that this would not be possible unless we have six months to a year's training. We are very short of logistics, medical engineers. It is really a minimum.

You are saying, sir, that we are a small country. After all, we are a G7 country. I think Minister Manley mentioned last week that we need to do more as a country. We are a rich country, after all, and a very rich trading nation that requires stability for our well-being. I think the Armed Forces have a role to play. Everyone recognizes the quality of our Armed Forces, but the comment is always, unfortunately, "We don't have enough."

Senator LaPierre: Why have we not developed a reserve force? The reserve force was destroyed by the department. We know that. We had the monitoring committee of the minister. We just have to ask John Fraser about it. Now it is in shambles all across the country.

Why could we not have developed, like the Americans, who are a great example of wisdom, a reserve force capacity that could have been used in the moment that we have just lived? Why did you allow that to happen, sir?

Mr. Belzile: That is a very good question, and I will attempt to answer it.

I talked about the Cold War as a response to your first question. During the Cold War, mutually assured destruction became for a long time the strategic outlook of NATO, of which we were and are a part. It was simply for the first time invoked now. Article 5 meant that if any of those 15 countries at the time was attacked it was considered an attack on everyone else. We also knew that the chances of escalation were great and that there would be massive confrontational armies having to fight over, we hoped, only the West European territory. If you were going to lose that first shock wave, if you were going to lose it all, there would be no time, as in 1939, to mobilize your reserves anyway. The army and the naval reserves had specific roles, such as the control of shipping, harbours, et cetera. They were specific roles for the reserves.

The army was literally turned into what we called the "ropes and ladders people." We turned everybody into a post-nuclear strike rescue organization, which would, in fact, enter cities like Granby in Quebec, in which I participated, where you have thousands of dead people, or people, as you went out from ground zero, who would be less and less hurt but salvageable, and all of those things that had very little military application.

The reserves in the "ropes and ladders" started to degenerate not because they were ordered to do so but because people left the reserves in droves. No challenge was left. There was none of what traditionally entices young people to join the army, a bit of excitement and the possibility that you may have something to do for your country, and no amount of explanation that this service was just as useful for your country was very convincing.

Part of the whole process in the last 30 years of reduction in funding went all the way down and kept on going down. I commanded the army and, therefore, the army reserve between 1981 and 1986. At that time, when I left, I had 45,000 people available to my command in one form or another, including the reserves. These 45,000 people now have shrunk to perhaps something akin to half of that, comprising both the regulars, which are still expected to react quickly as they are doing now, manning ships and ready to go, and the reserves, which have no way to be called and no guaranteed way they will be there, because of our tradition of voluntary service.

We submit that politically it will never sell. It was a disaster during wartime. It is not likely to ever be invoked again by the Canadian government. There is no job protection. Our reservists, even if they were three times what they are, can report for duty if called, if they wish to. We would like to be able to guarantee that we could motivate them. We hurt the reserves for a variety of reasons, but the major one was simply that for too many years they were just turned into rescue firemen-type people, and many just got tired.

Senator LaPierre: Surely, Mr. Chrétien cannot make a speech and say he will increase the defence budget by $75 billion. He has to have the will of the Canadian people, and the will of the people, since the days of Mr. Trudeau, has been less favourable of the Armed Forces and conflicts, et cetera, and has spent all its energies and great emotion in peacekeeping.

Have you assessed the will of the Canadian people to support the conclusions that you draw? If so, how will those who are responsible be able to convince the Canadian people to make the sacrifices necessary, to take the money, perhaps, from education, health or some other place, or to go into a deficit situation or increase the debt in order to achieve the kind of level that you are talking about? How feasible is that? Did you study that?

Mr. Belzile: We did not, as part of that study, look at it directly, but we had all sorts of evidence from outside our study. In the last few months, polls are showing about a 58 per cent support for increased defence expenditures and increased enhancement of the Canadian Forces. I submit, therefore, as humbly as I can, that the national will is out there. People realize, as my colleague just said, that they are members of the G8 or G7, whichever countries you count, and that we are one of the wealthiest and most prosperous countries in the world. We should stop being carried by someone else. We should pay our share. The burden of defence has to be shared by 19 nations in NATO, and, I submit, and our study justifies it, that we do not do as much as we should.

Mr. Pellerin: Perhaps because our study came out on September 27, just after the tragic events of September 11, a couple of polls that followed, one in the Toronto Star, were useful in showing that the population is much more ready to support more spending on defence. That was rewarding to see, in a sense. Also, in the last three weeks, we have received at our small office, which has three volunteers, at least 200 requests for interviews on radio, television and the press. This weekend I was reading the Toronto papers, and in the Toronto Star Graham Fraser had a long article on defence that quoted our paper. All of us were on television a number of times. With respect to radio programs across the nation, we spent hours on radio talk shows, and the people are more supportive of defence than ever before. In this case, unfortunately, the government so far has led from the rear. The population is in front of the government on the need to support strong and credible defence.

Senator Atkins: Senator Cordy leaned over to me and said that it is very difficult to follow a TV journalist with some of the questions we might have. It is good to see you, General. The last time we met was in France at the 55th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. You conducted a ceremony - I do not know whether you recall; you had the students with you - which was, in my opinion, a remarkable moment in those travels.

I was with veterans from Normandy. What struck me, and I have been on a number of these trips with veterans, was the incredible loyalty and pride our veterans have in the service to their country. I do not get the same sense these days from people who serve in the military. Sometimes they take pride in some of the vocations that they do and do very well. The military has done a remarkable job in difficult circumstances. My sense has been, going back to the 1960s, that the military has been nickeled and dimed, and we are now paying the price.

Whether you talk about reserves or the kind of equipment that we are providing our military, it seems we have not given people any kind of incentive other than in certain areas. I know the Air Force has the CF-18, which is more or less a state-of-the-art machine. The navy has the frigates. Apart from the fact that I think the military has been nickeled and dimed, so have our personnel. Why would young people want to join the RCMP and not the military? In a way, they come from the same kind of interests and ambition. We do not pay the military people the same amount of money as we pay the RCMP. We do not give them the reason to join up. I have not read your report, but they say 60,000. Is that enough for our military?

Mr. Belzile: We only have six recommendations in our report. The third one states that 60,000 would bring it in line with what the government expects us to do now, assuming they are all effective. We are recommending that we should progress that to 75,000 as a minimum. In the 1960s, we had 120,000. We are not advocating a return to that as a fundamental issue. We also fully realize that the priority on the front burner now will be on national security because of the kind of threat that exists there. We do not want to get drawn into a "specialty of the month," where, suddenly, there is counterterrorism and everything else disappears or it is all NATO at one time or, for that matter, all search and rescue. We come all the way back to this.

I now want to talk about recruiting the kind of people we need and whether or not we appeal to them. I will tell you a little anecdote. When I returned from Korea, I was a recruiting officer in Edmonton, Alberta. We had large quotas at that stage. My boss would visit my office at 101st and Jasper in Edmonton. He would be talking to a young man on a bench waiting for the next step in the process. He would ask him, "Son, how long have you been here?" If the recruit said more than 72 hours, I was in trouble.

We now take up to six months to enrol someone. It is all centralized and done through one system. We cannot even move people from the reserves to the regular force on an easy basis. There is a membrane that separates the two, and that membrane was there when I was still in uniform. People can look at me and ask, "Why could you not fix it?" You talk to the reserve units now who want to hire a former regular officer or a regular NCO with a lot of experience. Although he just came out of the regular force, it will take them months to enrol him and to gain his specialty and experience.

We do that for a variety of reasons. I say "we" collectively here. One involves security clearances, et cetera. We were not formerly too concerned with that. We trained an infantry soldier for the first three or four months and all the other stuff took place after he was enrolled. We enrolled some people who, perhaps, we should not have enrolled. Our selection may not always have been perfect because we found that, two or three years later, we wanted to get rid of them. The problem now is that a lot of potential reservists go to recruiting centres and leave fed up. After six to seven months of not being in or told why they are rejected, they walk out. They go to work for McDonald's or for somebody else.

Our recruiting approach is not what it should be. We should not try to compete with high-tech societies, or with the salary of our engineers, et cetera. We should not try to compete with the health system and how much we pay our doctors. We should be trying to recruit people by motivation and be appealing to them about a job of unlimited opportunities for the nation.

We should be approaching this as we would a vocation, not a job. Unfortunately, much of this has become a job, by necessity, through the intermixing of military workers with civilians. There cannot be two or three standards. People eventually get into the mood where they say, "I go to work at nine and I leave at five." My colleagues still in uniform would be unhappy to hear me, but I submit that, right now, their system is leaning too much toward simply salary, security, et cetera. Young people at 18, 19, 20 - that is, unless they were very different - did not care too much about that in those days. We wanted something exciting to do. I do not neglect the term "patriotism." We felt good about wearing a uniform. That is why we joined. If we were sent to a dangerous spot, either to Korea or to Cyprus in its early days, we felt good about it because we came back feeling that we had done something that helped the nation. I am not too sure we are asking our people now on the recruiting posters to do that.

We have been through a long history of people coming out of the nose of a 707 aircraft with a briefcase, trying to look like a successful executive. When they came to the infantry school, we threw a rucksack at them, snowshoes, a rifle and a whole bunch of ammunition and said, "Sorry, but for the next three months that is your briefcase." Some of them packed it in and left. We did not want them, to be honest. The veterans with whom you travelled were highly motivated. Some took a long time to get involved, but once involved it was their job and they accepted it. They accepted it as a calling much more than a way to guarantee that they would have a pension. In fact, most never did because they left the forces right after the war.

Senator Atkins: There was an element of excitement in it.

Mr. Pellerin: The Armed Forces that we have today are different in a number of ways from those when we joined 30 or 40 years ago. One big change, which affects the vocation aspect, is that 60.5 per cent of our military people are now married whereas when we joined it was maybe 20 per cent to 25 per cent. The forces have shrunk and there is a lot more commitment overseas, such as peacekeeping. There are soldiers who have been in the Balkans on six tours since we started in 1992-93. When that sort of rotation takes place - and you will see the same in the navy now if we sustain that commitment in the Gulf in the region - it is very hard on the families left behind. Wives have great difficulty working because their husbands are away for six months at a time. That affects the retention rate. It is difficult to keep people.

Today's soldiers are as good as those that we had in my time. Soldier for soldier, on the whole, they are well trained. The whole structure has changed over the years. It causes its own problems.

Senator Atkins: I suppose the technology has reduced the demands for human resources. That is to say, you probably do not need as many to do the same job as you did 40 years ago. When you talk about the military, you talk about pride. However, when you changed the uniforms - and I know that was not a military decision - do you not think that damaged the military?

Mr. Belzile: It certainly did.

Senator Atkins: In my opinion, it just wiped out a lot of the pride that people had. I do not think the military ever recovered from it. In terms of recruiting, I have said to a number of people that anyone who is being recruited should get the same kind of pay as someone who joins the RCMP. Why not?

You talk about specialization. I do not know that I would call it specialization. I think a certain amount of elitism in the forces is not a bad thing. With the numbers we are talking about, and the number of requirements that are made, I do not think we can broaden our base to the extent that we cannot rely on some of our alliance people. I cannot imagine the circumstances in which we would not be connected with the United States or Great Britain. It is important for us to reassess where we are going and, perhaps, put a little elitism into the services.

Mr. Belzile: I fully agree with you, senator. In answer to the specialization question posed by Senator LaPierre, I touched on this a bit. I will speak briefly about what we have come to call "the revolution in military affairs," which is in fact the high technology that you are talking about.

The high technology, to a large extent, can save a certain number of people. However, high technology is never any better than the men and women who make it function. We have not turned from the human resources aspect to where we can give the jobs to robots yet. Somewhere along the way, there is a finite limit to what technology will do for us. Any attempts to replace people with technology is almost invariably defeated by two problems: one, a lot more training is required to use such equipment, so the time to produce or train new people is longer; two, most high-tech equipment demands much more maintenance and repair. There are difficulties in sustaining and keeping such equipment at the optimum level of functioning.

Unfortunately, equipment still does not replace people. You will not control a piece of ground until you have people on their two feet standing on top of it. That is not necessarily "old think" or the ways of the past only. That is still so today.

Senator Atkins: You talk about a profile of the military. People read the papers and they see the debate over helicopters. Where is the enticement for anyone who might join the military when they hear about a force where a good part of the equipment is antiquated or not there at all?

There are other opportunities for those people. The military must rethink its whole profile and its ability to appeal to new recruits. The Americans are also having some difficulty in recruiting, but they need hundreds of thousands versus our less than 60,000. It is astounding to me that we cannot get 60,000 good human resources signed up for the military.

Mr. Belzile: With regard to the last remark that the military should rethink its profile, senator, let me voice the opinion that the Government of Canada should also rethink its foreign and defence policy. The military reacts to government directives. We are a democracy, an organization that responds to the civilian authority of the country. That is what we believe and that is how we serve. We have always served in that way. We have seen many troubled areas around the world where that does not apply.

The military will always do its best with the resources it has, as you have likely witnessed. Things were the same in World War II to a large extent; we never had enough kits. There is a difference between not having enough kits and not having enough to sustain a peace-time army in its few operations.

This is not only a problem for the military. It is a problem for the Government of Canada.

Mr. Pellerin: To follow up, the occasion presents itself now. We are talking about the support of the population, support that was not there a month ago or two months ago. There seems to be more support for our Armed Forces now. I suggest now is the time. The military is not the only focus. The military firmly believes in civil-military relations and the control of the military by the government.

Now is the time for the government to engage in debate with the Canadian public. What sort of armed force do we want for our society? The Armed Forces are an essential element of our basic democratic values. We have forgotten that in the past. We need to renew that debate and engage the population in the discussion.

Senator Atkins: We also need to debate the role that we can play.

Senator Cordy: I would echo General Belzile's comments on the outstanding job being done by military personnel, considering the resources or lack thereof that you mentioned in your comments. Certainly, we have heard that from other witnesses, too. I am from Nova Scotia. Starting this week, over 1,000 personnel will be deploying from Nova Scotia.

In your comments, you talked about burnout of the military. When I was flying to Ottawa today from the Halifax airport, I met a padre from the military. I never miss an opportunity to gain some knowledge, so we entered into a conversation about the military. I asked him what he felt were some of the bigger problems. He talked about the lack of personnel and the ramifications this has on military families.

You also mentioned that personnel are being redeployed after two or three weeks, without any chance to recoup from any effect on them or their families.

In the current war in which we are involved and certainly in the war against terrorism, no one in this room would expect to see a short-term battle of six months or so. This will not last forever but certainly for a long period of time. How will this shortage of personnel affect our capability to defend our country or to fight against terrorism?

Mr. Belzile: As I said at the outset, there is no doubt that we must cater to the difficulties that we see that are causing Canadians to worry. In line with your comments, we need more people. There is no question in my mind about that.

We must also accept the fact that the military is not alone. The RCMP and CSIS, and other such organizations that play a very large role, also have limited abilities to react. Hence, we must increase our light troops and special operations people who have a quick ability to deploy. That means air transport or shipping that can move troops and equipment relatively rapidly.

The sustainability, the backup, the logistics system and a good solid health care system - all these things show that we care for our people. The medical care has been severely stressed recently. Proper Air Force and navy capabilities are needed to support the troops and to back them up. Most people think now of counterterrorism efforts that may lead to a counter-guerrilla war that may take place on our own territory. We must have the ability to quickly react in a particular location.

I am not here to preach politics on whether we should have airborne troops, et cetera, but that is what airborne troops were particularly designed to do. At JTF 2, we still have a few companies of paratroopers, though they have never worked together. There are little pockets in Valcartier, in Petawawa and in Edmonton, so it is difficult to bring them together for common or collective training. The people still in uniform must put their brains to these issues. It would not take long to establish or enhance the nucleus that exists.

Sustainability and deployability are crucial. We do not have heavy-lift ability. We can take light troops over long distances, but not our heavier equipment. Our ships are not designed for that. We hire civilian ships and then we hear stories like the one about GTS Katie in the North Atlantic holding hostage about a third of our army's equipment. Those are the kinds of things we should be considering.

Mr. Pellerin: We must be careful not to fall into the so-called flavour of the day. I agree the government needs to address the issue of counterterrorism and better intelligence, et cetera. That needs to be done. As the general has mentioned, it would be prudent for the government to consider, as you correctly said, that this would not end tomorrow. It is bound to be a campaign of long duration.

Who knows what will be at the other end of this dark tunnel? Look at the regions in which our forces and the Americans and British will be operating: South Asia and the Middle East. Who knows what could happen there?

In the long term, it would be prudent for the government to address the basic conventional forces that are required by the white paper in fairly large numbers. That is not old thinking; it addresses the concerns of the day and of the future.

Going back to what Senator LaPierre was saying on the issue of the reserves, if we are serious about the tasks identified in the white paper, in particular the protection of Canada and the protection of critical infrastructure, we will need to seriously address the shortages in the reserves. The reserves have a footprint all across the nation, and they are probably better based for that sort of thing than the regular forces, which would be better engaged somewhere else because of their flexibility and mobility. We need to address the reserves in a satisfactory manner.

Senator Cordy: I should like to return to a topic that Senator LaPierre mentioned, and that is the will of the Canadian people. If we were to conduct a poll now, understandably, the numbers would be extremely high for financial support, tax dollars, et cetera, to fund the military. However, I think there was a change even before that because the condition of our Armed Forces was being brought before the public. Even in the last five years, I think there was a sense that we wanted a good military. However, how much money were Canadians willing to pay for a strong military? How do we maintain that feeling we have now?We do not want to keep the feeling by having wars, but how else do we maintain within the Canadian public the need or the desire to maintain a very strong military in Canada?

Mr. Belzile: We touched on this in our report. Without reading too much of the report, many people seem to be making a zero-sum competition between different capabilities of the government and different services the government must provide. We do not agree that one takes money from the other. They are now robbing Peter to pay Paul in the Canadian Forces. They are taking money from the people, because that is a fairly large expense, so that they can keep up with the equipment and some of our operations and maintenance and keep things rolling. It is like paying credit card bills, if you want to make an analogy, constantly. There is money added, but most of it is for things that have already been spent, such as the expenditures involved with Kosovo, et cetera.

We owe it to the people of Canada to point out that the military does not compete with the health services. You need both in some reasonable balance. Health services are better in a country that is prosperous, secure, and where people are leading a democratic way of life that we all enjoy and pray for. One is obtained partially by having a strong security capability. We have to be stable and secure so that our jobs and markets function.

We are a trading nation. We need some arrangement with the United States, with which 87 per cent or so of our trade is done, to try to harmonize our ways of getting our trucks back and forth without paralyzing everything. They will stand that much easier than Canada will with its more fragile economy. I suspect you know more about economics than I do, but this will cause us tremendous problems.

I am not talking about $25 billion a year. Our recommendations are more modest than that. We are talking about an increase of $1 billion over five years to help us turn the tide around, and then, as the Auditor General suggested, a special account should be set up to allow us to get to National Defence spending similar to most other nations, some 22 to 23 per cent of budget on new equipment to replace rusting platforms, whether they be helicopters or trucks.

That is an internal matter for the department. As far as Treasury Board is concerned, or the Minister of Finance is concerned, one has to be balanced against the other. If we were talking about tripling or doubling the budget, I would say this would probably increase the deficit, but we are not talking about that here. I do not think it would hurt the health programs in any way, shape or form, and we can certainly afford it.

Senator Cordy: Senator Atkins talked about the pride of being in the military and the pride Canadians have for their military system.

Mr. Pellerin: As a result of all the changes since September 11, we have recommended that the government undertake a major, comprehensive review not just of defence but also foreign policy, and, at the end, a white paper.

We could follow the Australian example. They went through the same trauma that we are going through in the sense of the Armed Forces and underfunding. They completed a white paper last year, and attached to it is a commitment of the government signed by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition and Defence Minister that they would commit an increase of $23 billion, which is equivalent to our dollar, over a 10-year period, over and above budget.

The problem with the white paper is that, while you can argue that it is a valid document, there was never any commitment on the part of the government from the start to support fully the commitments in the white paper. Therein lie the main problems. I think if there is to be a white paper there has to be a firm commitment on the part of the government to increase the defence budget accordingly.

The Chairman: Could you clarify the funding that you have given us? I heard $1 billion over five years, and before that I heard $1 billion a year for each of the next five years. Is that $5 billion, or is it a $1 billion increase and then another $1 billion increase?

Mr. Belzile: That is the basis. It would lead you to about $16 billion by the end of five years.

The Chairman: You commented about paratroopers. Is that the best way to deliver light infantry to a location?

Mr. Belzile: No, it is not, but it may sometimes be the only way available. People feel that, with the advent of large fleets of helicopters, you can deliver people anywhere. Given the geography of Canada and internal security matters, I submit to you, and you can ask the question of Air Force experts, that helicopters do not have that kind of range. You can put a bunch of paratroopers in the back of a Hercules and leave them there. After five hours, they will have a few kinks, but they can straighten themselves up and drop wherever you need them and prepare an airstrip. It is just that the parachute is an added capability. It is not necessarily the one that you would choose to use all the time. It is an added capability. It happens to have also some of the things I was discussing earlier. The troops like it. It is a great feeling to be able to put your jump wings on and say, "I have tested myself. I have dropped into nothing and felt good about it." That is a little fight against themselves. I have been there, and I can assure you it is a thrill.

The Chairman: I am sure it is, general.

Senior officials, who have come before us, have assured us that the Canadian Forces are more combat capable today than they were a decade ago in the Gulf War. Do you agree with that assessment?

Mr. Belzile: If you had talked to me a few months ago, Mr. Chairman, I would have said that I do not agree; but I have come to realize that, perhaps, it is a bit of a futile argument. There is no doubt in my mind that we have some capabilities now that we did not have 10 years ago. The frigate fleet is a perfect example, as well as army equipment such as the LAV III and the Coyote, which are state of the art, and the added capabilities to some of our fighter fleet through conversion to modernize. Those are undoubtedly better than they were. However, in line with what I said earlier, it is nice to have all of this, but there are not enough people to use them properly, to their optimum, or to sustain them for any period of time beyond a few months.

If you can argue that this is combat capability, it deserves a great deal of discussion. We talk about operational readiness and make it almost the equivalent of combat capabilities, because of the generality or the non-specialist organization we are talking about. In some ways, the forces probably are in the overall picture and I doubt very much whether this would be a statement that I would make.

Having said that, we have had this argument back and forth between the retirees and some of our people who face this problem while in uniform. We have come to believe that it is a discussion that does not produce very much. There are too many definitions of what you mean.

Mr. Pellerin: I fully support what the general said. We have tried, in our study, to stay away from this issue about whether we are more combat capable than we were 10 years ago, or 50 years ago for that matter.

It is more important to answer the question of whether we are combat capable for the missions of today and tomorrow. That is what we have tried to address. A comparison with our combat capability 10 years ago, in a sense, does not provide a constructive argument. It does not really answer the issue of whether the forces are now operationally ready for the missions that the government will submit them to.

The Chairman: You have seen a common theme this evening, general: the first three senators asked you questions about the disconnect between our defence policy, or our defence needs, and the Canadian public. I will be the fourth so it will be unanimous. It is obviously on our minds a great deal.

We begin in the position of beneficiaries of one half century of peace. We have three oceans and a friendly neighbour to the south. The Canadian public are rational people, who have drawn certain conclusions that they have conveyed to their elected representatives.

September 11 has caused people to refocus, but that may only be brief - it could be a long refocus, but we do not know. However, there is a disconnect. Setting aside the events of September 11, which have focused us more seriously than before, cast your thoughts back to August and the mindset of Canadians. What are we missing in respect of how the government is communicating with the public? There are 600,000 members affiliated with your organization. What is missing in the way that those 600,000 communicate that there is not a broader sense of concern reflected in the ballot box?

Mr. Belzile: That is the same problem that we face all the time, and it is the very purpose of organizations such as ours, which are often accused of being lobby groups. I do not accept that term because we are more an outreach, or advocacy, group. We believe that the Canadian Forces must have the human resources they require with the right equipment and the proper training to perform the missions that the Government of Canada designates to them. We do not dream up those missions.

The public has been lulled, to a certain extent, by the fact that we have had 50 years of peace, except for the odd situation that occurred in some of our peace operations that turned sour for a few days. We have been lulled into a sense of security because of that and also because our neighbour to the south has been tremendously helpful. We know, without too much studying, that if there is a problem controlling Canada's air space and if our Air Force is not big enough "big brother" has many more airplanes. Hence, we have associations such as NORAD and NATO, et cetera.

Inside the department and amongst ourselves, we do not have too much trouble with that. We run a seminar each year where we promote outreach. Two years ago, the goal of the seminar was to reach parliamentarians. We had about three who attended and were guest speakers. We decided that next year we would have the seminar when Parliament is in session so that we could invite everyone. Last year, we postponed our annual meeting and seminar, which has exactly the intention of producing suggestions for discussions on what you are talking about.

The Chairman: Did you invite them all to speak?

Mr. Belzile: No, but we have many more. I regret to say that most of them were from the opposition. I am not a politician and I am not familiar with the machinations of Parliament. The fact remains that our message is sent to our 600,000 people, and it is not easy to mobilize 31 associations, some of which have their own axe to grind. We always run seminars for post-graduate students in universities where we ask for papers; we talk to civic clubs; and, to a certain extent, we try to mobilize all our capabilities. You will never mobilize the 600,000 individually, but the organizations they represent can be mobilized.

The Canadian Legion, for instance, which is the largest group, is very active with their involvement in veterans' issues such as benefits. They also promote the well-being of the forces, and they have a defence committee per se, which prepares papers as needed.

Another organization is the Federation of Military and United Services Institutes of Canada. I understand that you will be talking to Mr. Clive Addy, who is the former President of FMUSIC. There are numerous organizations. You cannot speak successfully on these issues with only one person and so we continue to volunteer to speak at civic clubs and social clubs. We believe, quite honestly, that we are making a difference. It will become easier if the uncertainties that are floating over us now continue for a length of time. There is a nervousness that will generate more discussion by the public and will, in the long run, influence the public's election choices to govern the country.

The Chairman: I wish there were an easier way to make a difference, that we did not have to face a crisis to effect change.

Senator Atkins: I would like to comment on the question that you just asked. The government and the military communicate with the public, but it is the wrong message that they send. The only positive message they get is if there is a crisis in the country such as an ice storm or a flood. Otherwise, there is often a negative response that the public hears and they do not like what they hear. That is my reaction.

Senator LaPierre: I do not need answers. I would like to tell you that we did not lull ourselves. Since the recession of 1982, Canadians have done an astonishing amount of creative work to come out of the depression and create a world of free trade and globalization in which their essential responsibility as a nation was to save the safety net. Canadians essentially felt that their security and their participation in international affairs was done through this magnificence of peacekeeping, about which they were prepared to do something.

Consequently, we must remember that. The polls that we are suggesting today are convoluted questions. Like most of us, Canadians confuse national defence with national security. I would think that in a few months from now the emphasis will be on security rather than on the military hardware or anything else.

As far as the young not being able to take great pride in the Canadian Armed Forces, it is not surprising that they do not. They do not for the sole and simple reason that they are not welcome. Their culture is not welcome. Their way of seeing things is not welcome. For a long time, women have not been welcome, and the discrimination against women continues to this very day. The discrimination against gay people in the Armed Forces continues to this very day. Consequently, that is part of the bad news with which we must cope.

Also, in the final analysis we come to the conclusion about the structure of the Armed Forces itself and its regimentation of command. Speak to Des Morton. He has written about this at length and he has talked about the negative reaction of students at the university level who might be interested in the Armed Forces. Lastly, I would say to you that the Somalia inquiry, with its libel, did more things to harm the reputation of the Armed Forces. Why should a young man or woman go into the Armed Forces after the Chief of Staff and everyone down the line have insulted the Armed Forces?

This is not yet over. Young people who have any semblance of imagination will think about this. The army, navy and air force have a hell of a lot to do as part of their rejuvenation of the Armed Forces, and it is not only a question of hardware. It is an esprit de corps that you understand only in the traditional sense.

Furthermore, one of the great problems we have is that there are too many retired generals, colonels and captains who are forever insulting Canadian people and their contribution to the Armed Forces. I would like to hope, with all my emotion and my passion, with all my creativity and charm, that you put an end to it quickly.

The Chairman: Senator LaPierre did not ask for an answer, but you are entitled to the last word, general, if you would care to respond.

Mr. Belzile: There is nothing I would like to add to that.

The Chairman: On behalf of the committee, I would like to thank you both. Your testimony has been instructive and useful. We are grateful to you for coming, first, on short notice and, second, on a particularly difficult day, to provide us with the information you have presented. We hope you will come back again, and we look forward to hearing from you in the future.

We are now joined by Major General (Retired) Clive Addy from the Amoured Corps who served from 1961 to 1996. He has served both in senior command and staff positions, including Chief of Staff Canadian Forces Europe, Chief of Personnel at Land Forces Headquarters in St. Hubert, and during the deployment in Somalia.

Since his retirement, he has been involved in the Federation of Military and United Services Institutes of Canada, most recently as national chairman of the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires.

The FMUSIC is a national group of retired military personnel, academics and interested civilians who provide input into the national defence and foreign policy issues debate. In February 2001, the FMUSIC released a policy position paper entitled "Canada's Strategic Security 21" and a national strategic appraisal into the 21st century.

Welcome to the committee. Please proceed.

Major General (Ret'd) Clive Addy, Past National Chairman, Federation of Military and United Services Institutes of Canada: Honourable senators, to confirm what Lieutenant-General Belzile said, I am here to grind my axe.

[Translation]

It is with a great pleasure and a heightened sense of duty that I stand before you this evening as a proud Canadian, to testify about my analysis of the operational capacity of the Canadian Forces. I just came back from the Shearwater base where I had the pleasure of meeting Admiral MacLean and the base commander. I am proud about the high quality of all the personnel that we will shortly be sending overseas. My presentation will be in English, but if you have any questions in French, I will do my best to answer them in the language of Molière.

[English]

Mr. Chairman, to say that things have changed since late summer is an understatement. Like many others, I was approached at this turbulent and risky time by media buffs for advice, comment and opinion on the state of our military. Having participated and watched others, it appeared to me that our country might have more advisers than soldiers. This alone is seriously troubling to me, as it should be to you.

September 11 has indeed focused the minds of most Canadians on the question of security and how basic and vital a foundation this is to our prosperity and to justice in our country and abroad. Many have compared investment in security, and the defence portion, to fire insurance. Everyone is against fire, but every responsible citizen invests in enough insurance to mitigate the possible effects of loss to fire. I believe this is close, but I would prefer the image of an investment in a solid foundation of security to house a nation upon which peace, order and good government can be built and our citizens then prosper.

Security is not an option but an obligation for a responsible nation. An important part of this security is the maintenance of viable and efficient Armed Forces. In our case, suffice it to say that the operational state of our Armed Forces and, more important, the pertinence and past funding of the 1994 white paper are matters that are indeed of current and vital interest to Canada and Canadians and, therefore, to your committee.

In my musings sent to some of you around September 16, it was my intention to share with you some of the early thoughts as to where we might be going in this war against terrorism. I outlined the three phases - reassurance, retribution and reconstruction - that we would have to follow after such a violent and criminal attack upon the people of the United States of America, North America itself, which was a shock to us all, and democratic countries everywhere.

If I am to interpret the televised preachings of the despotic perpetrator and visionary of a misogynistic and diabolical theocracy, this gentleman is indeed the impersonation of evil. I am not necessarily saying that it is a battle between good and evil, but it is certainly a battle of evil against our less-than-perfect and more tolerant democracies.

It was my original intention to go through a rather academic analysis of operational readiness, combat effectiveness, combat capability, operational capability, multi-purpose and general purpose - terms often used with such authority without anyone knowing fully what they mean, including the military.

I will forgo this now seemingly futile exercise, but I must underline that much of the debate revolved in the past around the selective use of vaguely defined and unmeasured concepts. The basis of one speaker's selective definition over another's is no longer worth pursuing, in my view. I agree with Lieutenant- General Belzile that what we were 10 years ago is of no relevance whatsoever. We should be focusing on what we are today and what we should be doing in the next 10 years.

Having listened to our Minister of National Defence attempt to define exactly what we could produce and watching people scramble throughout the Canadian Forces to cobble together what was in essence a white paper commitment is testimony enough for me that change is necessary, that our forces are underfunded, undermanned, overtasked and, in many cases, ill-prepared. Do not get me wrong: This is in no way reflects upon those who are serving. Our Canadian forces will do the best they can with whatever we have given them.

Again, I remind you that I have just returned from a weekend in Shearwater where I met the commanders and other personnel about to deploy by sea and air. They will operate professionally and selflessly and face the unlimited liability that their profession demands. In their normal manner, it will be done in a far better way than we deserve for the support we Canadians have given them.

Whereas the aim of your committee was originally to clarify what was indeed the state of our forces, it remains so now for the much more substantive reason of establishing the real baseline for our present and future national defence within a broader and better coordinated national security policy. Therefore, I have decided that my approach should deal with the following four key topics: the need to measure operational capability as best we can; the need for a national security review; our present capability wanting; some cautions, and then, hopefully, a conclusion.

With regard to measurement of capability, you have all heard the following words: more than ten years, less than more, more than this, and that vehicle is better than the others. Let me begin by saying that, henceforth, in whatever form the Government of Canada wishes to define the operational capability of its Canadian Forces, it must do so in a manner such that this capability is exercised and measured. Trying to get an idea of what is expected is rather difficult in the present white paper. For instance, in chapter 3 of that document it is stated that the maintenance of "multi-purpose, combat-capable forces is in the national interest." The authors then skittishly spend more time defining what it is not than what it is. They thus initiated, seven years ago, an inherent source of confusion and constant debate wherein various personal and contradictory agenda would be more easily achieved.

There has been a plea for some time from the Auditor General for us to clarify and measure our capabilities. This has always presented a challenge in the past to military hierarchies of all services when various methods were tried. It is not an easy thing to do. The present size and overtasking of our forces largely exacerbates this as well. The difficulty is always what to measure and our capabilities in respect of any given agreed standard. That standard is best derived, in my view, from operationally researched scenarios based on a clear defence policy and possible threats. I believe that achieving an objective, agreed measurement is essential, no matter how difficult it might appear to some, and how mundane a topic to begin with.

The alternative has been to leave this solely to the judgment of senior commanders and, at times, senior politicians or even bureaucrats. I do believe that any measuring system must include the written judgment of senior military commanders, but insist that it must not be limited to such. Once the measurement is made, then the politicians can decide what to do with these facts.

I do not, however, normally consider bureaucrats qualified to comment. One of my reasons for this apparent lack of objectivity can be taken from testimony from a high-ranking member of the policy branch of DND who appeared before your committee this spring. I will not bore you with his hollow words on battalion-sized commitments and his selective ignorance of 4 Brigade and 1 Air Division during the Cold War in Europe, and the two battle groups sent from Europe to the Balkans in 1992. Yet I must reflect on how childish yet dangerous such unfounded, inaccurate, circumlocutional, vague and seriously delivered pronouncements now appear.

No, we need to measure our capabilities objectively, to reassure Canadians, because they ask. Any stock market trader will tell you that security begins in the mind of the investors - in this case, the citizens of Canada. They should know what they get for their security dollar. In order to do that, we should be able to measure it and tell them.

My next point is the need for a national security review. Let me start by saying that the 1994 white paper as it now stands is, in the opinion of my federation, in need of review in its own right, but that, more important, when we published our paper in February, we requested a national security strategy for Canada. We find this is more vitally needed, a strategy that involves, indirectly and directly, the Departments of Foreign Affairs, National Defence, Solicitor General, Justice, Immigration, Finance, and indirectly most of the others.

Our paper, entitled "Canada's Strategic Security 21," does not purport to provide all the answers or even raise all the questions. However, it does state that national security goes beyond DND and requires intelligent reflection, coordination and guaranteed resources at the national level. Its only formal recommendation is that the government charter an independent blue ribbon panel of experts to quickly craft a national security strategy for the 21st century. Its mandate would be to find maximum feasible conversion on issues of paramount importance to the security of Canada. This strategy would guide future foreign, defence and even finance policies. This panel should report to Parliament.

The federation proposes as well the creation of a national security office, to coordinate this strategy at the national level, better than the present PMO/PCO combination that we have seen does not work too well these days, and certainly as a support to the special cabinet committee under Minister Manley at this particular time.

It may be that the present white paper with some modifications would meet this strategy as a national defence policy. However, it is beyond doubt in the view of the federation that proper funding and better use of allocated funds would be required regardless of what policy is taken. For instance, on the latter point, it is evident that Canada, as a G7 or G8 member, could do with much improved strategic lift. However, if this lift costs such a large portion of the budget that it limits the deliverable force to only one location in very limited numbers, one must ask if this is indeed a sound national security investment.

In this same vein, the federation looks forward to receiving the responses on the procurement system that were requested by SCONDVA and have yet to be presented to them, and its comments on these. It is our view that more can also be done to save money.

Finally, it is our view that only in a national security context can the true role and perspective of our reserves be adequately understood and defined and thus properly funded.

You might know that we are not alone in suggesting such a review. At the University of Calgary, Dr. David Bercusson, assisted by a number of other well-known advisers on things military, Dr. Granatstein, Lieutenant-General Belzile himself, and not the least of which, Senator LaPierre, is producing a similar but more detailed study along these lines.

My next point is this: What is the state of our forces now and into the future, and is this state as it should be? You will hear statements normally couched in a plethora of qualifiers that we can meet the commitments of the 1994 white paper. The difficulty is whether these forces are trained and ready at the necessary level and whether they are sustainable over the duration. Some are. Most individuals know what their trade demands and can perform it well. However, like a football team or an orchestra, success depends on more than the sum of its individual parts. It relies on practice and teamwork. From statements of the leaders of the navy, army and air force we find that funds preclude in large measure the attainment of the levels of teamwork deemed necessary for operational preparedness.

The most telling of these are found in the latest version of what are called the level one business plans for the commanders of the navy, army and air force, and can be found in the CDA study, which I encourage you all to read. I have a list of those deficiencies here. Suffice it to say that all of them are deficient in funds to train properly and to be prepared for battle. They are always skimming the surface and putting the shop window forces up first and running like mad to catch up behind them in order to meet the next rotation.

All branches are short in their ability to maintain the white paper commitments. They do their very best to achieve as close to it as they can. However, they are all on a slippery slope. By the time that the ships and the planes arrive in the Gulf, the Canadian Forces will have deployed over 7 per cent of all available Armed Forces. That is the highest level of available Armed Forces that any country has deployed in a long time.

Do not flatter yourself. It is easier to get a higher proportion, the smaller the number that you have. This 4,000-plus force is equivalent to what the white paper of 1994 called the vanguard. Little or no serious action is yet taken to prepare the main contingency force of this document, of a force of about 10,000. There has been an aversion to call this operation war. The land force would be very hard-pressed to provide and sustain one more battle group of 1,000 people.

What plans have we if it does expand? What will be our contribution if it does expand? Do you know? I do not.

We have had our strategic warning, which everyone before said would take five years for us to get. We had it on September 11. Are we any more ready? I do not think so. Are they working hard at it? I can tell you they are. Where I went to see them, they are working hard. However, they would love a plan that they could bite into and get resources for.

I have not covered the operations and planning branches at National Defence headquarters. However, I can tell you that the intelligence branch of our Armed Forces and the Joint Operational Centre continue to operate at untenable levels of understaffing. On the logistic and medical support side, there is no joy either. I ask you to have a look at that in your various visits and testimonies. See how our medical support is at this particular time, particularly in operations. More important, you must consider what the future 12 months and five to ten years from now looks like where an additional $5 billion to $6 billion is required just to replace worn-out equipment, if we want to do so, let alone provide the increases in operating and high maintenance budgets and the investments in high-tech that new technology demands to replace the very few people we are supposed to have. A detailed and interesting analysis of this equipment placement, which I recommend to you, is found in the magazine On Track by Colonel Brian Macdonald, and coincides quite closely with what the Auditor General said two years ago.

To attempt to answer these questions is relatively easy. Some say that this is a significant amount of money, this amount of money that Lieutenant-General Belzile was calling for, $1 billion per year. "Surely it is too much." "Do we need Armed Forces in those numbers?" Canadians are asking that today, even with all the enthusiasm and patriotism.

To attempt to answer these questions is relatively easy, providing the listener recognizes the role of his or her security in relation to his or her well-being, and that the Canadian Forces get a relatively high operational capability for the forces available.

To assist you, Senator Kenny, with the question you ask, this is not easily done, when the Minister of Defence himself clouds the issue when he says, in response to Ambassador Cellucci's call to arms reported in the National Post August 2 of this year, that

...more than $3 billion has been reinvested in the past three years...Canada has the seventh largest defence budget in NATO.

To a similar CDA letter in the spring, his response dated three weeks ago states that this amount was $2.3 billion in 2000 over the next four to five years, along with $170 million for quality of life the year before.

Therefore, the figures are somewhat confusing, as are the time frames. The truth, however, is found in the way our Allies and friends in NATO look at us, not our political spin. The fact is that we spend, on average, $265 per capita on defence in Canada. The average in NATO, including the new arrivals who cannot spend that much, is $589 per capita. When we said we are a rich country, we are indeed, but we are not seen as paying our own share.

The fact is that percentage of GDP has been used as a measure in NATO because it caters to such major differences as conscription in some Allied countries and reflects both the ability and resolve to support one another better than a straight number of pure dollars on a constant U.S. number. By the way, Holland is number 8, with 60 per cent of our population and one-thirtieth of our size. It faces one ocean and yet it contributes more to the UN today than we do; and it contributes only slightly less than we do in U.S. dollars to defence.

Ambassador Cellucci, Lord Robertson and Mr. Bruce Roberts, the British Labour MP who chairs their defence committee, have been as clear as friends can be. Without a clear mirror, it is through the eyes of our friends that we find out that we are bald.

As to the number of forces, we do not get as much per defence dollar as most NATO countries, and the cost of our infrastructure over our vast and cold country as well as the competitive cost of labour for our volunteer force are reasons for this, but there are others.

In summary, as a member of the G7 and a nation so dependent on trade, a nation that believes and relies on multilateralism for a better world, Canada must be seen to contribute to its own security by its citizens and to do its share by its Allies and friends. Some 1.2 per cent of GDP for defence, no matter how you cut it, does not meet that responsibility.

I will now proceed with some cautions. A question about specializing was asked. I would be very cautious about what I called the flavour-of-the-month organization program for the Armed Forces. My two colleagues who preceded me were very careful not to plagiarize me. Right now, our threat is terrorism. That is what we saw on September 11 with the World Trade Center. We are obviously involved in countering terrorism on one piece of geography, Afghanistan. We do not know if that battle will go farther. We do not know if it will lead to a land battle similar to what the Gulf War was. We have no idea whether we will have to, want to or should take part in it. I will tell you right now, honourable senators, that we could not, even if we should or wanted to. Those are the facts of life. Is that what we should be as part of a coalition? I do not know. I leave that for you to decide. I leave it for the Canadian people to think about.

We have done this for years. We focused on NATO in Europe while ignoring everything else. Peacekeeping, soft power support, Canada 21, peace enforcement, terrorism, homeland defence - these are buzzwords that signify that people want to specialize. There is a serious risk in that.

In my view, the answer is to look at something that gives you the greatest amount of flexibility as a country. We call it general combat capability. You can call it whatever name you want. However, be careful when you attempt to specialize - be very careful. There is a tendency to predict the past and not the future when one specializes.

Then there is the challenge of space, which I bring to your attention. There is much discussion about armament in space and disarmament in space. There is talk about the ABM treaty and so on. Let me ask the committee what our reliance for information is in space in this day and age.

There is then the challenge of how we exchange intelligence. We were rocked into doing better on September 11. I would ask you as a committee to have a look at how we do that at the present time.

Our security policy should mitigate the damage caused by conflict in any way. It cannot prevent the occurrence. Some people ask: How do you stop terrorism? I do not think you can. However, we can certainly mitigate the damages and limit the numbers of practitioners better than we have in the past.

Posture our forces at home by national need, not necessarily by political riding. I have a bugbear and I am not ashamed of it. The third largest province in Canada with the highest level of probability of disaster has no army base on it. It is called British Columbia. I think that is a sin. I do not know why we pulled it out, but it is a sin. The theory is that in a moment of disaster we can fly in everything we need. I would suggest to you that if you look at the types of disasters that we are talking about that deduction is somewhat specious.

Look to joint capabilities in technology for efficiencies and economies, but beware of giving up personnel and equipment on a promissory note of future performance of technological purchases. The Canadian Armed Forces - all three services - have been burned by that in the past. It is something about which they are leery.

One of the things that the western countries are leery of is committing troops -because there may be casualties. Do not think that commanders, no matter what rank, are not sensitive to that. They do not take lightly going into these things. By the same token, as a country, not committing them may cost more to us all.

I might be so parochial as to say fix our army first, the rest will follow. I ask you to be bold in your recommendation. The country needs it.

Our organization concludes that Canada's security needs go beyond the defence policy and must be addressed and coordinated better in this broader context. We still believe that the security of our nation requires Armed Forces. We believe that the Canadian Forces must be structured, tasked and funded to do what Canada needs. Look at the Australian example, for it is one of the best ones. These needs are now expressed in the 1994 white paper and the Canadian Forces are unable to meet them to the best of their expected ability, and they know it. This is due to the lack of funding, reduced size and constant consequent and consistent overtasking.

The present is sad, but the future is bleaker. Money alone cannot fix fast enough all of these problems. We must rebuild and we must expand. It is time for a new and broader national security strategy, leading to a revised defence policy that must be funded appropriately.

Senator Atkins: You did not contradict our previous witnesses, sir. Have you had a chance to talk to Professor Wark?

Mr. Addy: No.

Senator Atkins: Your testimony was pretty consistent with a large amount of the testimony that he gave to this committee several weeks ago. The bottom line is that you and I are very much in agreement. We all agree, of course, that September 11 was a wake-up call. You clearly believe that this country should have a coordinating agency, which was the first thing the Americans concluded from the experience they just went through. It is obvious that they had a certain intelligence, but it fell between the chairs. I would be interested to know more about how you see such an agency operating.

Mr. Addy: I am not an expert in intelligence - armoured officers rarely are. The intelligence input we got was from commander Ted Heath, who was a deputy intelligence director at NATO. It was very comprehensive. I am a good reader so I will tell you what he talked about. He spoke not only about the coordination between the various nations and the various agencies of nations, let alone our own agencies, but that it requires someone to funnel all of it. We have the RCMP and Interpol information going over the other side of the Rideau Canal. You have information coming into the PCO. You catch it in DND and Foreign Affairs through various attachés.

Somehow, it is all supposed to end up in the PCO and PMO, and now they have a committee to look at this various intelligence. He sat on that committee years ago, and he says it does not work.

What is needed is for the exchange of this information to be procedural, regulated and expedited with all the means of communications that exist in this day and age. That is the recommendation that we have. We did not feel, in this day and age, having been away from the machinery, that we should recommend how. However, we certainly recommended that the process was vital. That was just on the intelligence aspect.

When the Department of National Defence started cutting and reducing, intelligence was cut equally with everything else. One must ask if that was an intelligent thing to do; in other words, to ensure knowledge of an impending threat this instrument should not be reduced because it is extremely valuable. That is one of the aspects.

The other one is plans. Coordination of information between the police, the military and the provinces is extremely important. We can see that now with the absolutely frightening reactions that citizens have to this anthrax envelope situation going on. It is almost folklore right now. It is dangerous to see that kind of a human reaction. Those asymmetric threats have that kind of impact on people. We have to know about the types, the capabilities and the possibilities. That is important.

Being able to brief Canadian citizens with accurate information as soon as it happens is vital on all of the aspects. If one looks at what happens in Canada, one minister in Canada stands up and talks a little bit about this and that. There seems to be a more coordinated way of passing on that information in the American system, be it only by the presidential press conference in the daytime. He is only the source of furnishing the information. How is that information collated and selected so people feel reassured? I think that kind of an office would perform that role.

Senator Atkins: What powers would you give that agency and how would you report it to Parliament?

Mr. Addy: I do not know. As a soldier and an ex-military man, I would suggest that is more in the domain of the relationship between the politics and bureaucrats.

Senator Atkins: Would you agree that the agency would have very significant powers?

Mr. Addy: It would indeed.

Senator Atkins: Would it be at arm's length from government?

Mr. Addy: I do not think that something that relates to the executive as closely as national security could be totally at arm's length.

Senator Atkins: Would there be members of that organization who are private citizens?

Mr. Addy: I would suggest there would be. I would suggest that the image we had when we designed this thing would be something like the American executive branch's selection, not from a given political party, but chosen - probably more affiliated with it than a member - for the capability in that specific function as opposed to other things.

Senator Atkins: It is clear that President Bush has given incredible powers to the chair of that agency. One suggestion made to this committee in a previous sitting was that perhaps that agency should report through the Deputy Prime Minister because he would be seen to have a significant influence in terms of any reporting process.

Mr. Addy: I see the advantages of that kind of recommendation. However, I must beg off because of my lack of experience and naiveté in that domain.

Senator Atkins: You talk about general combat capability. I assume you are speaking about conventional military as opposed to nuclear or high-tech?

Mr. Addy: The general combat capability is a concept that says you have to be able to fight on the ground, in the air and on the seas. In order to do that, you fight with the best technology that you have and you possess as many of the capabilities in each one of those realms that you possibly can. That is what it means.

The Canadian navy does not have an aircraft carrier, for instance. There are a number of things we do not have - and that can be said for all of our forces. We do not have zonal air defence. Those are capabilities that we have opted not to have in the overall types of capabilities by working with our Allies. Generally, the types of capabilities that we have now I would suggest.

Senator Atkins: You commented that you are very proud of the human resources that are going overseas.

Mr. Addy: Yes, I am.

Senator Atkins: Are you confident in the equipment that they are going with?

Mr. Addy: It is a good question, and I asked that question of a major who used to be a captain working for me in Europe. He pilots one of those things. He said, "Sir, if anyone can get anything out of those birds, we do, and we are very proud for what we do with them. Do not ask me if I would like another bird. I would love another bird, sir. However, do not be ashamed. If we go down or they have a bad maintenance role, it will not be the fault of the pilots, the maintainers or the navigators."

Will there be a higher level of risk because we are sending in Sea Kings rather than a new aircraft? Obviously. Is the risk acceptable? Obvious for the crews, for the ones I talked to. They had mixed happy hour that Friday night with their wives and children. I was there and I talked to them, and one mother had no qualms about her son going. She did not want him going, period. However, it was not the Sea King that was the problem.

Do we need new aircraft on those ships? You are bloody right we do. Should we have had them before? You are bloody right we should have. However, I do not think that Admiral MacLean or Admiral Buck will send people in aircraft that are not safe. They are safe. I will not be the one to stand up, nor do I think anyone else who has looked, watched and studied what goes on calls them "unsafe "at this time. However, they are not the aircraft we want. They are a higher risk.

Senator Atkins: We are talking about helicopters.

Mr. Addy: That is right. Every time they go out, they are a higher risk, and there is a greater chance of them going down. Going up, they are safe.

Senator Atkins: In this security agency, how do you see DND fitting in?

Mr. Addy: National Defence would fit in, and the military portion of its intelligence-gathering aspects would be primarily involved in that. It would also have a pertinent planning function, particularly for homeland defence. I also see a role for representatives from provinces in this organization.

Senator Atkins: You do not see a problem with overlap?

Mr. Addy: There probably would be somewhat. However, a bit of overlap would be inevitable in this. The inevitable overlap would be particularly in the homeland defence aspect of it.

Senator Atkins: In terms of the financing, you agree with Lieutenant-General Belzile.

Mr. Addy: What Lieutenant-General Belzile described to you is the amount of money to stabilize what we have now while we are looking at what we need for the future. I certainly agree with that amount. That is the minimum that would be required just to stabilize it.

Senator Cordy: I would like to follow up on the suggestion of the national security office. You spoke about collating all the information. You are speaking about information within Canada. Would you extend that to collating information coming from international areas?

Mr. Addy: Absolutely. In this world of globalization, you cannot be collecting just what is going on in your sandbox. You must know what is going on all around you.

Senator Cordy: I was at a NATO conference last week, and most of the people spoke about that need for cooperation between the agencies and the different NATO countries.

We also heard an FBI agent working for Interpol. She said you heard all these people talking about cooperation. It is extremely difficult. Because of the nature of the beast, the investigative person tends to be somewhat suspect about giving out his or her information to other people. It has been very difficult to get true cooperation and sharing of information. Someone made the comment with respect to the events of September 11 that probably a number of organizations had bits and pieces. Had they come together sharing their information, possibly it would not have happened.

Mr. Addy: You are trying to change the nature of the beast, recognizing it will take a while. The alternative is to do nothing - and that is not an alternative in this day and age. I cannot tell you how to do it, from the purely human perspective. You are absolutely right, there is nothing more suspicious than an investigator. That is part of his job. That is why he or she is a good investigator. However, that coordination is vital these days.

We must also get over the sort of "Cold Waritis," for example, where the type of lead in your pencil is a confidential matter because it relates to the amount of lead in the world and it can be related to basic minerals and you are expending them at X rate. There are things that are less secret that should be exchanged more rapidly than they have been in the past. That is one of the large questions that we have.

Senator Cordy: As much as we have all looked with shock and dismay at what happened, perhaps if something good comes of it it will be that people must do more than verbalize the cooperation slogan.

Mr. Addy: You should talk to the commissioner of the RCMP, who will quite clearly tell you that there has been an empirical leap in cooperation since September 11 in all of these matters. The problem is, as you said earlier, Mr. Chairman, that we must be careful that things do not return to what they were previously, where people go back to their rice bowls and hide everything from everyone else. That is part of our dilemma.

Senator Atkins: If I may make a comment, neither the former commissioner of the RCMP nor the former chairman of CSIS was in favour of a central agency.

Mr. Addy: I know that. I called it a rice bowl. I am sorry.

Senator Cordy: Witnesses that we had this evening, yourself included, and certainly other witnesses, have talked about $1 billion and each year adding another billion so that in five years it would be $15 billion. What would be the priorities? Would one know where to start in spending the money or would that just be to maintain what we have?

Mr. Addy: I do not want to extrapolate too much on this. However, in this study, all that does is bring us up to what is required in the white paper of the main contingency force of the brigade, the number of people in order to sustain it, the aircraft for the F-18s to be bombed and equipped properly. There is a new truck that actually works and replaces the broken one that they have at this present time. That is all that it does. There is nothing creative in this and there is no change in priorities from the white paper. It is just funding the white paper to keep it going.

Senator Cordy: Is the combat capability equal in all three services? You mentioned in your comments that if we were to fix the army first, the rest would follow. Could you expand on that?

Mr. Addy: I may be accused of playing in my own rice bowl right now; however, objectively, if you look at each of the services, vis-à-vis equipment and manning at the present time, they are all suffering. The one that suffers the most is the army. As you go around, I would ask you to make up your own mind. That is my deduction on that. They are all suffering.

Senator Cordy: We certainly have determined that over the past few months. Your sense is that a stronger army should be built?

Mr. Addy: It would give you more flexibility around the world.

Senator LaPierre: I have been struck by two things that happened since the cataclysm of September 11. The first one that I have been struck by has been the incapacity of the armada of the United States, with all its national security money, the CIA, the this and the that, to be able to predict the time and place or even to prevent the events of September 11 from happening since most of the people who hijacked these planes were landed immigrants in the United States, legally. Most of them were trained in Florida to fly 747s, which is not a Cessna. Consequently, I am told that I am somewhat dubious about the comparison of Canadian preparedness with that of the United States preparedness. Furthermore, I also see that when they declared this war - or whatever it is that it is - they were not fully combat ready. However, they had the capacity to become combat ready in a short period of time. That is the first thing that strikes me.

Second, when the coalition was built by President Bush, aided by Mr. Blair and other people - and the contributions of Mr. Chrétien history will only tell - it seems to me that you minimized or ridiculed the specialty process. Yet it would appear that the United States sought help from people specialized in delivering what it is that they themselves could not deliver - for example, bases in the Middle East, the British base in the Indian Ocean, the capacity of the nuclear submarines of Great Britain, et cetera. They asked us for the things in which we were specialist in more than anything else, knowing that we do not have an immense army and we will never have an immense army. Stop dreaming in colour, I beg of you. Consequently, it seems to me that they move from specialty to specialty, and they will continue to do that with the Germans, with the French, with the Australians, and with other people who will join them.

The third thing that I have noticed is that the czar that you are all considering to be the saviour of mankind from Philadelphia is not even of cabinet rank.

Senator Atkins: Oh, yes he is.

Senator LaPierre: No, he is not. With all due respect, they decided not to put him at cabinet rank for the simple reason that it would demand legislation to do that. Consequently, he has access to cabinet but he is not of cabinet rank. I would like to think that his capacity to be able to tell the defence secretary or the director of the CIA or these other people what to do is particularly limited.

We have opted for another possibility, namely, the possibility of bringing together the elected of our country to come together and to be able, as elected people, to be responsible to the people and to the Parliament of Canada to ensure our security at the present time. The committee is headed by Mr. Manley and contains a list of various ministers elected by the Canadian people in order to bring together all this paraphernalia that is necessary. What is wrong with that?

Mr. Addy: Absolutely nothing.

Senator LaPierre: Thank you.

Mr. Addy: However, it does not have the mechanisms that bring the information to that particular cabinet efficiently in times when there is not a crisis on which they can focus at all times.

Senator LaPierre: This is my trouble with you guys, with all due respect. You have served your country, and I appreciate that. However, you expected us to be gods and create the world in one moment. This crisis, which has awakened the world, which was asleep, regardless of what they were, has taken time. The resources that we will put in place will be immense. We have already committed $250 million here, $50 million over there, et cetera. Today, the government introduced a terrorism bill, which may affect the rights of individual Canadians down the road. The sacrifices will be demanded and it will be made, no doubt.

Consequently, people like you, with your expertise, do not want to give us time to achieve what it is that you want us to achieve. You want us to come out on September 11 at 10 o'clock in the morning and by 11 o'clock in the morning to have all these things created. This will not happen. Do not give me that pained look because this is an entirely new situation. You tell me.

Mr. Addy: With all due respect, I will go back to the armada and I will ask you about preparedness and combat readiness. I made no reference to the American's combat readiness or preparedness. I was referring to the Canadian combat readiness and preparedness alone. There was no parallel made at all and your inference from that is quite inaccurate.

The second thing you said was that in respect of coalition building and so on we should specialize, that everyone else does. They are specializing on a specific requirement in a specific event. At the same time, if we have, for example, an Oka-type situation taking place in Alberta and then two hours or six hours later an East Timor situation in which we wish to contribute because it has an effect on us, we are now at zero. I am not asking for a large army. I am suggesting an army of the size that the white paper was asking us to provide.

That is what I was asking for and that is what the government of today has not provided.

Senator LaPierre: That has not been provided for reasons that may be very valid. You speak about our contribution to NATO and you speak beautifully about Holland and other nations. These nations have lived in the crucible of war for centuries and centuries, and they all hate each other. Consequently, they want NATO to protect them not from the terrorists of the Middle East, or wherever they are from, but essentially to protect them from each other.

One must look at it in that way more than anything else. I have nothing against NATO; it is a marvellous club. However, in the final analysis, how can we plan the future without knowing our history and how we got to where we are? In the end result, we will be doomed to failure.

Democracy implies that the people are ahead of you, not following you. That is what democracy is all about. I think I know Canadian public opinion. I have travelled this country endlessly, up and down. The feeling in Canada now is a great sense of incapacity, not incapacity brought forward by the unpreparedness of our Armed Forces but by the very fact that, everyday, more and more pundits tell us that we are lousy and that we are a small, little people incapable of moving ahead. That is no way to encourage the Canadian people to bring forth the sacrifices that are necessary and to make the right choices.

The general said it is not a question of health or anything else, but I think it is. Very severe choices must be made. We are being asked for the first time in our history to draw a distinction between our collective rights as Canadians and our individual rights. To protect the collective rights of Canadians, we must give up some of the dimensions of our individual rights.

This is an astonishing tearing apart of the very fibre of Canada. We will go through it because we have the courage to go through it. However, you should encourage the Canadian people, perhaps by telling us every now and then that one of those Sea King helicopters can fly at least five feet without falling down.

Mr. Addy: You are being overly dramatic and I must stop you. I mean really.

Senator LaPierre: Of course, I am being dramatic, but so are you guys.

Mr. Addy: No, I am not. I said those people will fly those aircraft better than anyone else. They will do their jobs. Now you say that they may fly five feet. I apologize, senator, but that is an unfair comment and I will not take it, with all due respect.

Senator LaPierre: You misunderstood me. What I was trying to set out to you, sir, is that essentially you are telling us everyday that we are putting the lives of our young men and women in danger because of the crumminess of the Canadian people for not supporting them with equipment. That is what you are saying in the long run. That is devastating and negative and destructive of the goals you want to achieve.

The Chairman: Do you have a question?

Senator LaPierre: What do you think of that?

Mr. Addy: I thought it was dramatic, sir.

Senator LaPierre: People tell me this, and I have done this for 40 years.

The Chairman: Is there a question coming?

Senator LaPierre: Yes. I have done this for 40 years. What happens in the final analysis is that there is some validity of proof in here. Do you think sometimes that you exaggerate the danger in order to propel us to act?

Mr. Addy: No.

Senator LaPierre: Thank you.

The Chairman: In your presentation, General Addy, you spoke about the importance of measuring our resources. How much effort and how much time should we spend in measuring?

Mr. Addy: That is a very good question. We have gone through several iterations. Many of the people around here have gone through operational readiness, TAC evaluations and who knows what other systems. The option is to sit down and set out our facilities, our resources, to make a judgment call on the accuracy of those figures, and then to set out what we can do given this amount or that amount of time.

Your researcher General MacDonald can tell you about the enormous amount of time spent for TAC evaluations of 4 Wing in Baden. Part of that time includes buildup to become more effective, which is also a requirement.

The Chairman: It is a dilemma, though. On the special committee in 1994, the buzz phrase was "tooth to tail." It sounds as if you are saying that we do not have enough tail.

Mr. Addy: No, I am saying we have not measured the sharpness of the tooth.

The Chairman: Does it not take a tail to measure the tooth?

Mr. Addy: Not necessarily. A tooth can measure a tooth. In fact, all the measuring personnel were operators.

The Chairman: You gave us some broad comparisons to other NATO countries - per cent of GDP, expenditure per capita. Are those figures not enough to communicate a message to the public?

Mr. Addy: They are.

The Chairman: The committee has been grappling with the question of a national security policy. Our name is somewhat different than other defence committees. It may yet be even more different before too long. Can you help us by, first of all, defining national security?

Mr. Addy: I spent a year at National Defence College debating that. We are running somewhat short of time. Let me say, it is far greater than the police forces and the structures that the public sees. It includes the concept of sustainable community that people know about across Canada - wealth, health, a good ecology, the rule of law, but protected from aggression. All of those are parts of security in the philosophical definition.

The debate on security grows deeper when you examine the means to protect our values and rights and principles. Are you protecting those values against internal forces? Not necessarily. External ones? Perhaps. Mainly, we protect against people who threaten and who do not agree with our principles, our values, the way we do business, when we are not being aggressive toward them. That is the important aspect to security.

How broad can it be? You can have security from the viewpoint of foreign affairs, national defence, trade, or immigration - because we do not rejuvenate our own population any more - and all those aspects are part of security. What part do they play and how you want to narrow your specific terms of reference? That is your responsibility. You can be as broad as you want to be, but all of them contribute to security.

Security in its essence is the sustained well-being of yourself and of the next generation in the same way. That is how I see security in the global sense. What do I mean by security in this particular domain? I deal more with the realms of policing, national defence and the physical protection of the community.

The castle is the best image we can use - the city state before the nation state. People had to eat and to live, and they were protected by the castle. You are with the castle now, but the availability of food and water is also required. The people would not turn to a castle where drought occurred frequently.

The Chairman: In discussions of national security, people move fairly quickly to the need for an apparatus, for a supporting mechanism. Recent comments tend to be critical of the PCO/PMO structure. Essentially, we are talking about the prime minister's office here. Prime ministers structure their offices according to their own needs and interests. Are you talking about having prime ministers change the way they structure their offices?

Mr. Addy: No. That touches somewhat on Senator LaPierre's comment. Please understand that this is a civil servant type of organization. These people are experts in their field and they would respond to a minister. The question of the deputy prime minister is a good question on which we have not come to any conclusion, although we do pose the question. We have not provided all the questions here, let alone all the answers.

We were not envisioning just homeland defence, for instance. That was not even a part of the thing. That was not even a consideration in February. It was a consideration of coordinating those elements that we consider the castle part of security at the national level. We feel that that part is not well coordinated. It would be more of an office than an authority.

The Chairman: You have been around Ottawa for a while, as have I. I have never seen a crisis where the Prime Minister did not decide that he would run it. The Prime Minister moved in, no matter which department faced the crisis. At the end of the day, all pieces of string went to him.

Is it sensible or reasonable to set up a structure that does not go to him if, we both agree, at the end of the day the Prime Minister will call the shots in any emergency?

Mr. Addy: You are asking me to answer something that really should be answered by the politicians. As president of a federation making this recommendation, I was concerned that some office must coordinate those aspects of security. We said it would report to Parliament. How does it report to Parliament? What does it say to Parliament? Is it an ombudsman-type function? We said that that Parliament must get a report from this group annually. Who does it work for and who does it report to? I do not wish to recommend that at this time because I do not have enough knowledge, nor do the people who put that report together.

The Chairman: General Addy, thank you very much. You were very helpful to the committee. I understand that you have just stepped down as of yesterday.

Mr. Addy: That is correct.

The Chairman: I am hopeful that you will be available to the committee in the future. For tonight, thank you very much.

Honourable senators, before we adjourn, I ask your concurrence in a motion. I am advised by the clerk this is a relatively straightforward matter. The motion is that a study on health care provided to veterans of war and peacekeeping missions, referred to the committee by the Senate order of 4 October, 2001, be referred to consideration and report pursuant to the rules of the Senate to the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs.

Senator Atkins: I so move.

The Chairman: Is it agreed?

Hon. Senators: Agreed.

The Chairman: Carried.

I repeat our thanks to our witnesses this evening. You have helped to give us a good base of knowledge. This committee meeting has been part of a survey of major security and events facing Canada. This evening we have focused on the state of the Canadian Armed Forces and we have heard from a knowledgeable group of witnesses.

We shall continue on October 22, when we shall hear from a number of government officials and some academics about the development of a national security policy. Those of you following our work can visit our Web site at www.senate-senat.ca/defence.asp. We post witness testimony as well as confirmed hearing schedules. Otherwise, you may contact the clerk of the committee by calling 1-800-267-7362 for further information and assistance in contacting members of the committee.

The committee adjourned.