Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank the honourable members of the committee for making the accommodation of letting us testify by video conference, which has certainly been much easier for us, and I'm very honoured to be able to participate in your examination of the future defence needs of the United States and Canada, and of North America.

Obviously, we are facing new threats as well as old threats. We have to defend not just the continent against traditional military attacks, but we are facing cyber-attacks, the danger to our citizens from pandemics like the Ebola virus, and homegrown terrorism, something which Ottawa knows too well. I know many of you experienced that just a couple of months ago. Our own citizens turned by a foreign ideology can become dangerous to us.

In many ways the idea of national defence has really metastasized to cross the line between what we traditionally think of as expeditionary or overseas military activity, and connected that to our traditional law enforcement and peace officer operations here at home. Everything from our border security guards and the Department of Public Safety to the RCMP are linked to the challenge of providing security and safety for our citizens and the businesses that they have and their interests both here and abroad. Particularly in the highly interdependent world that we live in, where the economy, the livelihood that we have, is linked by financial networks, linked by the movement of people, and linked by very dynamic supply chains, we really can't be indifferent to the things that are happening in all aspects of our domestic and international spheres at once.

In that regard, if there's one takeaway that I would leave with you, both the United States and Canada need to confront this by being willing to spend more on national security. I know that's never easy. There are many priorities for budgets, but both our countries have taken a kind of peace dividend without having the peace.

We've been cutting back on our security spending at a time when our security threats are mounting. That doesn't mean we have to go back to the old spending. We can spend smarter. Technology allows us in many ways to get a bigger bang for our defence dollar. I know as members you're very keen to make sure the taxpayers' money is well spent, but I do think that we are on the verge of a need to really reinvest in national security, both in the United States and in Canada. I think there's an opportunity to do so together, that is, to coordinate the improvements that we both need to make in our security, so that not only is the Canada-U.S. relationship stronger, but our ability to work jointly around the world in responding to these threats is also strengthened.

I want to talk about three particular areas, to call your attention to what I think are some of the priorities that we should have for our future Canada-U.S. defence relations, Canada-U.S. defence investments. The first is to improve our domain awareness. The second is to improve our capacity to work jointly. The third is to improve our ability to add capacity by making smarter investments and making improvements to our procurement systems. I'll talk about each of those briefly, and hopefully will be able to give back some of the time that you've generously offered me.

First, in the area of domain awareness, increasingly the war on terrorism has become an intelligence war, where it's extremely important for us to know what's happening with individuals who often do a good job of hiding their tracks. At the same time, because of the nature of cyber-threats we're often trying to operate in cyberspace to track down the fuzzy fingerprints of hackers who may be state-sponsored from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, or elsewhere.

Also, when we're talking about pandemics, they may not be weaponized attacks, weaponized viruses. They can simply be a threat like the Ebola virus, which can come through because an aid worker has come home or someone who has been travelling to visit relatives comes home infected. The challenge is to learn when they enter our countries whether they pose a risk and make sure they get the help they need, but also to make sure that the public is protected.

When we're dealing with threats like homegrown terrorism, the kind of intelligence we need will come from trusting communities that are willing to work together with our law enforcement to alert us early that a young man or a young woman has been radicalized or may be thinking of committing a violent act, to try to catch them before they can do harm to themselves or to anyone else.

In this environment it's very important that we rely not only on traditional intelligence gathering, but we also rely on our domestic police forces and develop new capabilities to operate in cyberspace and elsewhere in order to know much more about what is happening in our space and to identify the threats before they become actual dangers.

This leads to the second point I would make, that we need to improve our capacity for jointness. As some of you will remember, in 1986 the United States enacted the Goldwater-Nichols act to reorganize our defence capabilities. In that act we focused on the importance of jointness. At that time that meant the navy works with the air force, the air force works with the army, and they all work with the marines, so we could coordinate attacks, coordinate the use of resources, equipment, and ammunition to enable us to operate in a more cost-efficient manner, with all forces of the United States working in a coordinated fashion.

That mission is as important as ever, but it's now extended. It's extended in two important ways. One is the need to coordinate between our domestic and our international forces. The setting up of U.S. Northern Command after September 11 was an important step in that direction. It remains a second responder in many domestic circumstances in the United States and is there to provide support for Canada and for Mexico, when requested. Particularly in the area of logistics after a hurricane or an earthquake, this can be crucial. It's also a coordinating mechanism to reach out to local first responders to make sure they get the information and have the resources they need to respond to anything from the Vancouver Olympics to the Superbowl when it was held in Detroit, whether the attack or the threat is on either of our sides of the border.

The jointness therefore goes in two directions: the importance of our ability to work across the Canada-U.S. border, not only at a top level but throughout our security systems, and also the ability to work with domestic resources and military resources hand-in-glove. This is about getting more by working together, more bang for every dollar that we spend, rather than duplicating effort or creating deliberate redundancy. There's a lot we can do to support each other in this regard.

I think members are aware that in 2006 the United States and Canada invested in a renewal of NORAD, but also in extending NORAD's surveillance mission to include maritime. At the same time, or in subsequent years, we've developed something called Shiprider, where the RCMP working together with the U.S. Coast Guard, the Canadian Coast Guard and the Canadian navy working together with the U.S. Coast Guard, have put officers on each other's ships so that when pursuing a threat or investigating a situation and they cross an international boundary, there's always a sovereign officer with arrest authority, investigation authority, even seizure of goods authority, to be able to act. This is the kind of jointness we need to see going beyond NORAD maritime surveillance, going into this action function.

Interestingly, those two initiatives are stovepiped. One is on the military side and the other is on what we would call homeland security in the United States, public safety in Canada. The need to link these two areas is an illustration of the challenge we face in the years ahead.

That leads me to the third area I'd like to highlight, and that is the need to acquire new capabilities. One exciting thing about the time in which we live is the amazing technology that's come forward, technology like drone surveillance, satellite reconnaissance, and of course, cyber protections that we've developed really through bringing hackers in from the cold and having them work with our governments to try to protect domestic systems.

There is a huge set of new resources coming on stream that are going to require us to add capabilities to our current military. Senator John McCain, who is the incoming chairman of the Senate armed services committee—he served in that role before—said in Washington this week that one of the key priorities for the United States in the years to come will be acquisition reform.

The United States certainly spends a lot of money, but like Canada, we face a shrinking, in fact shrunken, defence industrial base. With fewer companies able to compete for contracts, those companies are often coming forward with low bids on cost-plus contracts, so that we sign an agreement for something that looks affordable but when the cost-plus kicks in, we realize that in the end we pay quite a bit for the technology we're acquiring.

We have to make smart choices. Defence dollars will not multiply indefinitely, and as you know, there are other demands on our budgets, so we have to spend those dollars wisely.

As the U.S. undertakes fundamental acquisition reform and process reform, this is an opportunity to renew the principles of the Defence Production Sharing Agreement of 1956, in which Canada and the United States agreed to coordinate procurement and dip into each other's production bases to provide the defence needs that our military has. There's a huge opportunity for us to approach acquisition reform together to make sure our systems are mutually well informed, and that as the U.S. makes gains in its reforms, Canada is able to learn the lessons from what we've been able to do, and perhaps teach us a thing or two about how to spend wisely. That's something which I think Canadians are quite good at.

With that, sir, let me thank you very much for your attention and cede whatever is left of my time.

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