NDVA Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON NATIONAL DEFENCE AND VETERANS AFFAIRS

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE LA DÉFENSE NATIONALE ET DES ANCIENS COMBATTANTS

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Monday, November 19, 2001

• 1546

[English]

The Chair (Mr. David Pratt (Nepean—Carleton, Lib.)): I'd like to call this meeting of the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs to order. After much deliberation and much procedural advice, I've been advised that we do, in fact, have a quorum, so we are pleased today to welcome Professor Denis Stairs, who is McCulloch Professor in Political Science at Dalhousie University.

Professor Stairs, I'm sure you're well aware of the work we've been involved in over the past couple of months on the study of operational readiness of the Canadian Forces, and we've produced an interim report. We're looking forward to your comments, and I understand you have a presentation to make.

I should advise the committee as well that we do have some motions we are going to have to deal with whenever the sponsor of those motions attends the committee. In the meantime we'll hear from Professor Stairs.

Professor Stairs, you have the floor.

Professor Denis Stairs (Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It is, of course, a pleasure to be here and an honour to be invited to speak to the committee, and for that I would like to thank you.

I want to begin by expressing my considerable admiration for the committee's recent interim report, with which on almost every count I agree, so much so that I'm not sure how usefully I can contribute to your deliberations from here on in. I strongly support your recommendation that the government initiate a major review about defence and foreign policy and that Parliament play a significant role in the processes involved.

On the substance of the matter before you and in the very broadest terms, I think it's profoundly important, not only for security reasons, but also for self-interested diplomatic reasons, that Canada maintain a credible conventional military capability. This is essential, in my view, to secure the confidence and in some measure, the consideration of the United States in particular, but of other powers as well. It's also essential for the preservation of such political influence as we may have acquired in the United Nations and elsewhere as a result of our contribution over many decades to international peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations, a contribution that is now far less unique to Canada, however, than it once was. Above all, I think it may be essential as a defence against American help, against the latent insistence of Americans that unless we make useful contributions ourselves, especially in the North American environment, they will make them for us, whether we like it or not.

I am not, as I think you know, a specialist in the technical or the guns-and-ammo aspects of defence policy. Keeping that in mind, let me nonetheless make the following points.

On the conventional military side, it seems to me the top priority by far should be the resuscitation of the army, or land force command. I say this even though I come from Halifax, a naval city, and even though I think the problem with the Sea King helicopters has reached the point of national scandal, and even though if I were a member of cabinet, I would be having sleepless nights in response to the thought that any one of them might soon go down with loss of life to its crew.

Clearly, as well, we're in serious need, if we have any desire to operate independently and autonomously in the international environment at all, of a decision to begin the replacement of our small fleet of support ships. But in other respects and leaving problems of personnel recruitment aside, maritime command is in impressive shape, and its recent mobilization demonstrates, I think, a readiness to respond of which we have good reason to be proud.

• 1550

Similarly, in the case of the air force, my sense is that our transport capacity is hopelessly inadequate and our air refuelling capability for the CF-18 is non-existent. This again is a serious matter, unless we're prepared to forego any possibility of operating, even in the context of a coalition-based campaign, in a stand-alone capacity. With respect to the CF-18s, my understanding is that a considerable upgrading of high-tech communications and other gadgetry is also necessary if they are to be fully interoperable with allied aircraft under current combat conditions, but on this I would be the first to admit that I'm dependent on the judgment of those who are far more technically knowledgeable than I. In any case, the refit process seems already to have begun.

But my sense also is that it's the army that most needs our immediate attention and it is the army that is carrying the bulk of the burden that comes from the constant expectation of the political leadership, and indeed of the public at large, that Canada will be there to be counted every time we're called upon to fly our flag, whether the call comes from the United Nations, the United States, or NATO, and no matter where the flying of the flag is expected to occur. Experts in the subject indicate that there is simply no possibility that the troop contribution we are now contemplating sending to the theatre in Afghanistan can be sustained for longer than a maximum period of six months, and every other signal I get from the literature and other sources would seem to me to make this a reasonable prognostication. The army needs help, therefore, and quickly too, unless we're going to downgrade our international presence very considerably.

Mr. Chairman, all this, I realize, implies an expenditure of substantial sums of public money, an expenditure we have been putting off for years. This is not, obviously, an attractive prospect, particularly at a time when the economy, and hence public revenues, have taken a downturn—for how long, of course, none of us knows.

The DND's response to this, apart from simply living with the inevitable equipment and personnel rundowns, has been to talk more and more in terms of a technological fix, the so-called revolution in military affairs, or RMA, fix, which it hopes to use in a way that enhances what it calls interoperability with allies. This is certainly the central message of the Strategy 2020 document, and recently it has been repeated by the minister, the CDS, and others before your committee. The premise of this response, however, is that Canada will always be operating militarily abroad in the context of a U.S.-led military coalition, and hence that we can piggyback on essential components of the American armed forces, while we specialize ourselves in specific areas of activity that complement theirs and meet, of course, their operational standards.

This is a perfectly rational response for a professional armed forces establishment that lacks the resources to maintain a sophisticated stand-alone capability of its own and fears the de-skilling and other problems that would result if it fell back into a simple constabulary role. The problem, it seems to me, with pursuing an option of this sort, however, or at least pursuing it too far, is that it may seriously diminish our capacity to operate independently and could conceivably over time lock us into an American-dominated set of operational arrangements.

I want to be very clear about what I mean by this. Obviously, there is no serious difficulty in making use of communications equipment and protocols that make it possible for Canadian forces to work smoothly and effectively with American forces when this is required. Indeed, it's essential, and much the same can be said of other forms of equipment standardization and the like. The real problem comes when we cease to maintain certain operational components in a way that makes us dependent on others, usually, but not always, the United States, to provide them when we need them. It seems to me that this could be embarrassing in two ways.

First, it is conceivable that it could prevent us from responding, for example, to deployment requests from the UN or from other quarters unless the Americans happen to share the Canadian view of what constituted an appropriate response.

Second, and perhaps more serious, it could set up a range of expectations on the American side that could make it very difficult for us to refuse to participate in a U.S. operation that we found inconvenient or regarded as ill-advised. In effect, the integration with the American establishment would have made the price of abstention too high for us to contemplate.

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The most obvious example, it seems to me, of this sort of what I call component dependence is probably the one that relates to transport, and to airlift capability in particular, and in some kinds of cases to sealift capability too. Another example is provided by the problem we face in not being able to provide our own air refuelling services to our CF-18s when they need to be deployed overseas.

My own view is that if we are dependent on others for the projection, in particular, of our ground forces abroad, we have effectively lost our autonomy in the use of force as an instrument of our security policy, and more generally, as a support for our diplomacy. It can be argued, of course, that the abandonment of this sort of capability has been unavoidable for financial or other reasons, but we then need to understand that the practical consequence of what we have done is a significant diminution of our freedom of manoeuvre.

Perhaps I could make one final point. While I understand that there has been a spirit of interest in joining the armed forces since the September 11 attacks on American cities, the fact remains that the problem of attracting recruits to careers in uniform has become very grave. There are, I think, many reasons for this, and the difficulty can be explained only in part by issues related to their terms of employment.

Your committee has recommended that the current personnel strength of both the regular and reserve forces be reviewed. That review should include, I think, not merely an examination of what force levels are appropriate, but a careful assessment of what needs to be done in order to attract able, dedicated, and public service oriented young people into military careers and to keep them there once they've joined up.

Mr. Chairman, those are the few points with which I thought I might begin. I have made a slightly longer commentary available to the staff for the committee, but in the meantime I'd be happy, of course, to respond to questions, if you have them. Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you, Professor Stairs.

To lead off, we'll have M. Bachand

[Translation]

... for seven minutes.

Mr. Claude Bachand (Saint-Jean, BQ): Thank you for your presentation, Mr. Stairs. I can see here that you're currently McCulloch Professor in political science at Dalhousie University. I have several questions for you. Since I am the only opposition member present, I think I will have a little more time to consider the issues.

My first question is about Afghanistan. For some time, we've been hearing that military resources are extremely stretched. We're talking about Afghanistan. Tomorrow, I am going to Bosnia with two of my colleagues to visit the members of the Royal 22e who are on the 9th tour of duty.

So, we already have 2,000 troops in Bosnia. We have a naval tactical group that is out with another 2,000 troops. I am surprised each time the minister says we're sending more troops. I was surprised when he announced that we're sending 1,000 more troops from PPCLI to Afghanistan. I have no doubt there is a need. The international community has to rely on a number of countries sending troops there to help in the transition, increase security and to bring food and supplies to civilian populations.

Don't you reach the same conclusions as I do? Given the personnel situation, don't you find it surprising to learn that 1,000 more troops are being sent to Afghanistan? It is difficult to understand why the minister is doing this and why he says that we're going to send more if needed.

I think it's impossible to send more than 5,000 troops at one time. Even with that number, we'll probably need faster rotations.

Do you share my view on the human resources situation?

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[English]

Prof. Denis Stairs: Yes, sir, I share your surprise. I must say, I was taken back to see the announcement, particularly given that the numbers are so high. I'm quite convinced, as I think most people who look at these questions closely are, that we can't keep them there for very long, even under relatively benign conditions. To be perfectly frank, I'm not at all sure that the conditions are going to be benign, and I would hope that we will be looking at the circumstances on the ground very carefully before we actually deposit them, as it were, in the field. I suspect that this is going to be a relatively short-term engagement, and if it isn't, there are going to be serious problems right through the system.

There are, of course, indications that the rotations had been occurring too frequently already. There are signs of various forms of depression, psychological difficulty, and so on that come from being posted too frequently abroad, sometimes under harrowing conditions. Frankly, I'm quite concerned that some of our troops may be feeling more pain than they should be asked to experience in a context in which we, after all, are not formally at war. This is not like World War II or World War I. These are voluntarist enterprises for us.

My suspicion—of course I don't know—is that we're there very largely to deal with political cosmetics as much as anything else. I don't mean the troops aren't effective at doing their job, but I suspect the reason they're there is that the United States wants to have as many players in the game as possible, and since they've asked, we've been willing to supply.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: Thank you, Professor Stairs.

I agree with you that we've again stretched our resources the last time we sent more troops and that there is a limit to how much we can stretch these resources. Moreover, the last group was light infantry. Even if the mission is not yet clear, since—if what I read was accurate—it's Tampa Bay that will decide on the exact mission of our troops, the minister basically wants them to protect the roads that will be used to bring humanitarian aid to the civilians who need it. I think we're somewhat relying on luck. Of course, Taliban forces have been weakened by the bombings and by the Northern Alliance attacks, but I think we're relying on luck when we send a light infantry group without armoured vehicles or with very little heavy equipment to face an attack.

Do you agree that whatever the mission chosen by Tampa for the PPCLI, the government will eventually have to say that we can't send these troops to face heavy enemy fire or to launch an attack? Many experts say that they can't sustain an active offensive directed against them.

Aren't we taking chances when sending the PPCLI which is a light infantry regiment in a country where the theatre of operations is still open everywhere?

[English]

Prof. Denis Stairs: Normally, an advance team goes in ahead of time, and we're in that process now. One would hope that if they concluded that the situation was not sufficiently stable to ensure reasonable security for our troops, some second thought would be given to the decision. At this stage I'm not prepared to go quite so far as to say we're playing with our luck, because the government seems to be moving with deliberate speed, as they say. But clearly, if there is a fairly prevalent hostility, even among some bands in Afghanistan, to the intervention of forces from overseas, we're not in a strong position, without the company of a large number of troops from other countries too, to defend ourselves in that environment. PPCLI, as I understand it, do their job very well and they're exceedingly well trained, but they haven't had a lot of combat experience in a long time. This could be a very violent and rough theatre.

So I would share your concerns, but I have the sense that we're going to look fairly closely before we actually deposit them on the ground and that we'll be doing so in the company of others. In one sense the number is very large, larger than I would have expected. On the other hand, of course, it's very small, given the number of armed troops and so forth wearing other Afghan colours in the environment.

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The Chair: Thank you, Monsieur Bachand.

Mr. Price, seven minutes.

Mr. David Price (Compton—Stanstead, Lib.): Thank you Mr. Chair. Welcome, Mr. Stairs, it's nice to have you here.

I found your brief comments quite interesting. Although they're different from what we're used to hearing, you're actually talking of a real conventional military capability to do all things for all people, whereas we seem to be heading in another direction, as you said. When I say we, I'm not talking just about Canada. If we look at our NATO partners, we definitely see that right across the board. The example I use all the time is the Dutch, who are going to concentrate on air-to-air refuelling, while the Germans are going to take care of their airlift capabilities. We can look at all the other countries around Europe that are doing the same thing. They just can't afford it any longer, and I think we're in roughly the same situation. We want combat-capable forces, but not necessarily able to do every single job right across the board. We have to rely on our partners.

You mentioned the fact of dollars in there, but very lightly. If you want to go to conventional military capabilities, and I know you specified a little more on the ground force side and you didn't really mention the naval or air, how are we supposed to pay for this?

Prof. Denis Stairs: Obviously, the price could be very high. Of course, I understand that there are degrees of all-purpose capability. If you were to ask the armed forces, in the absence of any political constraint or civil service obligations or whatever, what they would like, the sky would be the limit, because they're naturally protecting against potential threats, not against a probable prospect. I realize that, in a sense, it's open-ended.

My feeling would be that we should be in a position, when we're operating abroad, whether alone or with others, to have self-contained units and to be able to deploy them in a self-contained way, for the reasons I've indicated. If we can't do that, we're basically saying we will never operate except in the context of coalition. But not all the coalitions are necessarily coalitions that would include the United States or be with NATO. One can imagine cases in which we might be called on by the UN to intervene in some other part of the world, and the Americans might feel they didn't want a U.S. aircraft on the tarmac, thank you very much. That would create a problem for us. I think we should retain that sort of capability.

As to extent, of course, it would be nice if we could have the 1994 white paper kind of prospect, in which we could have a brigade group stand alone abroad. That may be asking too much. What I'm really concerned about is having sufficient capability with sufficient dimensions that we can deploy abroad more or less autonomously, so that we're not totally dependent on other forces for vital components.

I would point out, again going to the question of cost, that we are a G-8 country, or at least we claim to be—we may be hanging in there just barely, perhaps largely because other countries don't want to go to the the diplomatic embarrassment of saying, aren't you folks out of your league? I think if we're going to make those sorts of claims, we have to pay our dues.

There is an alternative. We could state, as a country, flat out that we are simply not going to do this sort of activity any more, and then you can adopt the sort of constabulary option the Canada 21 Council advocated some years ago or some variant on that. That's an option. But then I think you have to downgrade the rhetoric. You have to downgrade your foreign policy ambitions. You can't then go around claiming that Canada is a foremost power or principal power or even a leading middle power in the world. There's a trade-off to be made. My concern, I think, in part is that I don't see the trade-off—the response, the objectives, the ambitions are always kept the same, while the instruments are being wound down. It's not, incidentally, just peculiar to the defence establishment, it also applies to development assistance in other areas.

Mr. David Price: I'll come back to the fact that you talk more about the ground forces, that we should have a very strong ground force. Obviously, what's happened as of September 11 really comes back to make things a little clearer, the picture of what Canada has to look at. We didn't look at our homeland security too much in the past. If we're going to look at homeland security here, I think we've got to look more at the naval side and the air force side, since the size of the country just insists on that as the priority. How would you answer that?

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Prof. Denis Stairs: I agree with you on the naval side. The only reason I didn't give them a lot of emphasis is that I think they've actually done relatively well, that is to say, relative to the other two forces, over the past decade or so. Their turn came up in the nineties, and they have benefited from that. I still think there are components in their apparatus that are missing, and that to some extent undermines the effectiveness of the whole collection. But they have done quite well, and they play extremely important roles abroad, some of them not purely military ones, some of them having to do with sales of Canadian technology, supporting diplomacy, promoting confidence building in a variety of environments through naval cooperation arrangements of various sorts, and so forth. So I don't mean to diminish their significance. I recognize the size of our coastline and the assets it contains, and these need clearly to be protected as well.

My colleagues in Halifax will probably give me a hard time if they discover that I made that comment earlier, but my concern is for the army simply because it seems to me that they're the ones who are routinely put, as the Americans like to say, in harm's way, and they're the ones I think are overstretched and tired out. The navy is not quite so badly off. That's really the principal response.

Mr. David Price: You didn't mention anything in there about the reserve forces. Do you see a larger role for the reserve forces in buttressing our army?

Prof. Denis Stairs: There's certainly a larger role to be played for the reserve forces if we take them seriously. In the case of the navy, my sense is that the reserves actually work very well, because they have a specially designated coastal patrol function, which they appear to perform very well. They're now being used, for example, for guard duty in Halifax, which frees up regular force personnel to go abroad in ships and so on. I think they're being used very well and are quite effective. I have a similar sense in the case of the air force, that they're being used for ground maintenance kinds of functions and so forth.

In the case of the army, it seems to me there's been a long history of them getting the short end of the stick. We keep saying that we will build up the reserves. I understand there are all sorts of controversies about colonels of local regiments, a couple of dozen people, trying to make too much of what they can do and so forth, but when all that's put aside, the reality is that quite understandably, the regular force has tended to favour its own with equipment, training, and other resources.

I agree with you on the reserves, but the consequence of that position is that we have to take them much more seriously than we have in matters of supply and so forth. It may be that other kinds of help are also needed, employment guarantee legislation and so forth, so that people will be more attracted to going into the reserves, without fear of loss of employment if they're called to active duty and that kind of thing.

So I have no objection to it, but it involves serious training commitments and serious equipment commitments, and you can't always give them last year's boots simply because they're in the reserves.

The Chair: Thank you, Professor Stairs.

Thank you, Mr. Price.

Mr. Benoit for five minutes.

Mr. Leon Benoit (Lakeland, Canadian Alliance): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Professor, I apologize for being late. The plane left an hour and a quarter late, made up a little bit of time, but not quite enough. But I'm happy to be here now.

Testifying before the Senate foreign affairs committee last year, you said:

...we simply must recognize that our military contributions to NATO activities...have now reached a point at which they can hardly be expected to significantly reinforce our diplomacy, not, at least, in ways that matter.

You've talked a little bit about that since I've been here. Could you also tell me whether you've heard from any of your colleagues in other NATO countries that this is the case? What are you basing that type of statement on?

Prof. Denis Stairs: You get two different kinds of stories, depending on who you talk to and what the context is. If you're talking to uniformed personnel in other NATO countries, then, of course, they always say polite and courteous things. And I think they mean it. I don't mean to disparage what we're doing in Bosnia or what we did briefly in Macedonia and so forth.

Mr. Leon Benoit: We send good people.

Prof. Denis Stairs: We're sending good people, and they do the job professionally, so this is not an attack on them. What I'm really thinking about there is whether or not the contributions we're making are sufficient to give us diplomatic clout in the councils of NATO and in discussions with our allies, and my suspicion is that it's probably not. There is some anecdotal evidence to sustain the view, I think, that we're listened to with courtesy, but not necessarily because our assets are giving us presence in the room. It's that kind of concern I have. It's not a comment on the calibre of what we're doing.

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Mr. Leon Benoit: You've made comments that we have to start backing up our talk as a middle power with some hard power, some military might. Were you at the conference in Fredericton about three weeks ago?

Prof. Denis Stairs: No.

Mr. Leon Benoit: An Irish gentleman at that conference asked the panel there how we could with a straight face project the idea that we're a middle power, considering how run down our military has become. I thought that was a really interesting comment. The answers from the panel, I'm afraid, weren't there. They said we're getting by on borrowed time now, but we're going to have to do something very quickly, or we're going to lose that stature amongst nations that we've somehow managed to hang on to. That was, I thought, an interesting question, with interesting responses. I sat there listening with interest.

Prof. Denis Stairs: I think there is a sense in which we are living on a reputation that we began to build in the 1950s and brought to fruition perhaps in the sixties or early seventies, but has now faded away a bit. Originally, of course, it did have to do with deployments in Europe, and I'm not suggesting that we need to keep standby forces in Europe all the time any more. There's not that kind of security threat, and the Europeans are not in the weakened condition they were in during the 1950s, so I wouldn't necessarily advocate that. But a lot of the reputation, I think, comes from, for example, peacekeeping. This has become a bit of a national myth. It's become a myth, I suspect, partly because it's been politically rewarding for leadership in the country of whatever stripe to make a lot of it. It's a kind of nation building mythology, but it is a mythology to a very large extent now.

I amused myself a little this morning by looking at our ranking in the UN list of peacekeeping contributors. By my calculation, we now rank 33rd on the list of countries contributing peacekeeping forces to UN operations. It distorts things, because it doesn't include the Bosnian operation, which is under NATO auspices, and it doesn't include what's now happening in the Afghanistan context, but even so, it's sobering to realize that for many years now countries like Nigeria, Jordan, and even Nepal have been contributing more troops than we have.

Mr. Leon Benoit: You're calling for a fairly broad and substantial rebuilding of our military. Canada now spends about 1.2% of GDP on our military. The NATO average is 2.1%. It would take a substantial increase in funding to even approach the NATO average. Do you believe it is a reasonable or an unreasonable goal for this country 10 to 15 years down the road to be spending the NATO average?

Prof. Denis Stairs: I think it would be a reasonable target, a reasonable aspiration. I don't like to talk 10 years ahead, because it's hard to predict economic consequences, and I wouldn't want to suggest for a minute that the government doesn't have other problems, keeping up with the costs of health care being an obvious example. I don't want to advance a program that looks clearly pie in the sky. But I do think this is now becoming a bit of an embarrassment, and I do think our diplomats are probably feeling it when they operate abroad in any kind of political security context.

The Chair: Mr. Benoit, we're going to have to cut you off there and go to Mr. Bachand for five minutes.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: Mr. Stairs, I find your views very interesting. We're losing part of our operational independence and of our capacity in the presence of the United States. You're also including the whole diplomatic issue. Ambassadors probably feel not resentment, but some loss of interest because Canada isn't up to the job. Given the poor state of our forces on a worldwide basis, would you say that there is a loss of sovereignty for Canada?

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[English]

Prof. Denis Stairs: If we take the interoperability with allies argument so far that we're basically doing niche work in the context of an allied military structure, I don't know that I'd call it sovereignty, but we've certainly lost freedom of manoeuvre, autonomy, if you like. I do think Canadian sovereignty is being eroded on a great variety of fronts, and this is only one of them. It's happening to a lot of countries, but it may be happening with particular vigour in our case because of our proximity to the United States and our growing dependence on them for our economic welfare and so on.

The short answer is, yes, we're losing autonomy. It's not entirely due to our lack of military assets, but I think that's a contributing factor, and I do think it's having a major impact on how we are perceived in Europe. If you talk now to diplomats, at least privately, they might be willing to say they find it increasingly difficult to persuade Europeans to think of North America as being composed of two countries. They think of the United States, and they simply assume we're in the same package in some way. It's very hard to get them to focus on an independent Canadian interest or an independent Canadian argument. I think this has to do in part with the decline of our foreign policy assets.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: Do you think the only way out for Canada would be to spend more on the forces? Of course, we're now sitting on the fence. We're trying to gain political capital with our actions but we invest very little.

I was surprised to learn at the last NATO meeting that out of 19 members of the Alliance, we're in the 18th position. Almost at the bottom. Only Luxembourg, with 0.8%, spends less. Do you think an injection of funds will do?

I will continue with my second question. Is Canada now at the crossroads? Do we have to decide to invest in a particular aspect of our forces? You seem to say that the armed forces were always left behind. Are we saying that all available funds should be used to improve our specialized capacity in peace missions, that we need a well-trained army and that we're going to get under the US umbrella in the Air Force and Navy areas? Do you think we've reached that point if we don't inject more funds for the army?

[English]

Prof. Denis Stairs: I certainly do think we should inject more money. I don't see how we solve the problem in any other way, except by reducing our aspirations. We can always do that, but I don't think we can have it both ways. I think we've come to a crunch point.

As to whether we might go the other route and have a kind of constabulary niche as the benign peacekeepers, it's a little difficult, because not all these operations are just peacekeeping now, as you know very well. There's a peace enforcement element, and sometimes they're very dangerous operations for the people concerned. We could do that, but I don't know that we would have armed forces by the time we were done. Canadians are very good at this for a variety of reasons, but I think I'm persuaded by the military argument that the best peacekeeper is one who is well trained militarily and is, in fact, a good soldier. And increasingly, as these have peace enforcement characteristics, that seems to me to be essential.

If we go the other route and buy into a sort of social engineering argument, that these are basically social workers in uniform, that's a decision we could make. But I think once we make that decision, we're basically saying we are not a power of substance, and it will be noticed by other countries with whom we have traditionally worked. Maybe that doesn't matter, and you could make that decision, but what I don't think we can do is claim to have larger ambitions on the one hand and not spend the resources on the other.

The Chair: Thank you, Professor Stairs. Thank you, Mr. Bachand.

Mr. Wood, five minutes.

• 1625

Mr. Bob Wood (Nipissing, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Stairs, I just going over some of the little bullets you had here, and it says fixing the military is going to require substantial allocations of public funds. In your mind, how much? You must have thought of this.

Prof. Denis Stairs: I haven't done the number crunching, but the estimates I hear, ones that strike me as reasonably persuasive, say you need an operating increase of something in the neighbourhood of $1 billion a year. In addition to that, we need to put a fair amount of money into capital procurement programs.

Some of this doesn't have to be the disaster that people seem to argue. This is an old argument, and I'm sure you've heard it before, but in the case of naval replenishment, for example, I've never understood why we simply don't sustain a shipyard and lay a new keel every two years or every one year, whatever seems to be an appropriate rate, in order to maintain the skills. If you're concerned about local economic development and this sort of thing, then put it somewhere where you want the local economic development. I understand that's a political problem, but it could be in Quebec or it could be in Saint John, New Brunswick, or some other place. You just lay a new keel every year. It doesn't always have to be a naval keel. It could be a coast guard keel, it could be an icebreaker, or whatever. That would seem to me to be a far more rational way of dealing with the particular problem of naval procurement without creating these enormous bumps that we get every now and then when we let a whole fleet run down or a whole species of aircraft run down, and then suddenly have to make a big leap. I think it would be much easier if we could build up a procurement response in that kind of way, but we've never done it.

Mr. Bob Wood: On our state of readiness, where is Canada, on a scale of 1 to 10, in your mind?

Prof. Denis Stairs: Readiness for what?

Mr. Bob Wood: Readiness to participate in various countries we get into.

Prof. Denis Stairs: For small-scale operations we're perhaps not too bad. If I had to rate it, I imagine I'd give it a 6 or 7, something of that sort. With large-scale operations, I don't think we're in a state of readiness at all. I think you're looking at months to be properly prepared for a major operation abroad.

Mr. Bob Wood: You also talked about the recruitment crisis needing to be addressed. I think most of us on the panel are led to believe that it started to be addressed at the moment when... Human Resources was here a couple of weeks ago and said there were roughly 6,000 new recruits, 4,000 people joining the reserves. Do you think offering bonuses is a good idea to get people into the armed forces? I know they're starting to do that now with the high-tech trades to entice them. How do you feel about that?

Prof. Denis Stairs: I was a little depressed when I saw that, but clearly, they have to do something in some of these high-skilled areas. The competition from the private sector is simply making it difficult, I guess, to attract people in any other way. I don't think that's a long-term fix. You can get people in, but I'm not sure you can hold them with that. They'll spend the money, and then be looking for higher salaries elsewhere before too long.

This is a very complicated problem, and I have a lot of sympathy with the recruiters on it. It's partly a question of competition in respect of salary, employment emoluments, and all the rest of it in the private sector. It also, I think, has something to do with whether or not life in the armed forces is perceived to be a dramatic and interesting life. I think one of the reasons we've had a bit of a spurt since September 11 is that all of a sudden it looks interesting and challenging and colourful, and it excites people who want to have some adventure in their lives. I don't think that's going to last. I think that's a very short-term phenomenon, and it will dissipate, in my view, quite quickly.

So you have to get to underlying problems. And that, among other things, has to do with, of course, terms of employment, but also with how the armed forces are viewed in society, whether they're respected as an organization. If you think about it, we've had nothing but critical press coverage of the armed forces, almost unrelieved now for a very long period of time. So if I were thinking, as an 18-year-old, of the armed forces before September 11, I would probably dismiss them fairly quickly, because it doesn't look like exciting work. I don't think we've been very supportive of them in that kind of way, and I think a lot of attention needs to be given to that problem.

• 1630

Mr. Bob Wood: Since September 11 the United States, obviously, has tried to improve its relationships with Pakistan and some of the neighbouring countries. Do you think they've tried to create a new world order, compared to the international system that was developed, I guess, in the nineties, or is the coalition against terrorism only going to be a temporary one?

Prof. Denis Stairs: I think it could be very temporary. On these matters I'm pretty much a hard-nosed realist. The United States is a superpower. It has been attacked on its own territory. It's not used to that. The last time it happened, in a sense, was Pearl Harbor, but even Pearl Harbor was way out in the Pacific. The Americans haven't had fisticuffs on their own territory since the Civil War, and they did that to themselves, so this has come to them as a big shock. I think their reaction is very visceral. There's nothing strategic about this, in one sense. From the point of view of executing the response, they're thinking very carefully about it, but the response is essentially visceral. Nobody does this to the United States. You're with them or you're with us. It's a very black and white kind of response.

So when you ask if they are creating a new kind of world order, my response might be that in a sense there is one. They are the superpower, they are a hegemonic power, and they aren't going to take this kind of guff from anybody. I think the rest of us simply have to live with that. That doesn't mean to say they don't need our help or will not cultivate our help or the help of others. They certainly needed to get lots of political help in the Middle East and Central Asia when they got into this one, but I think there are some issues in which they are going to have to act alone and not be constrained by multilateral institutional mechanisms. I think that's just the way great powers are.

Mr. Bob Wood: Thank you.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Price): Thank you, Mr. Wood.

Ms. Gallant, five minutes.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, Canadian Alliance): Can you comment on the sustainability of the commitments we've recently made to the military effort in Afghanistan? How long can our naval task group situation be sustained? As well, if our ground troops eventually get there, how long can we sustain those troops in Afghanistan?

Prof. Denis Stairs: Most of the expert opinion says about a maximum of six months, and I have no reason to disagree with that. I emphasize that I'm not in the armed forces, and I think this is very much a manager's judgment, if you like. The people I respect who comment on this say six months would be about the maximum, and even that presumes a relatively benign environment and not a combat environment. I think that's about it. After that it's not quite clear who we would rotate in, if we had to rotate them out.

One point might be worth making about this. There has been some discussion—and I believe some in this committee—about the early-in, early-out, or first-in, first-out, kind of option for Canada to respond in this sort of situation. That's very attractive, in the sense that it means we don't necessarily get bogged down over a long period of time, and it looks in some ways like a cost-saving strategy. The problem, of course, is that being first-in requires very expensive airlift and sealift capability, depending on the context. It also means you're going in when the situation is least stable most of the time, certainly when you have an environment that's still relatively disorderly, as the Afghani one appears to be. So it's not a cheap option in that sense. If you think, we'll be the ones who'll get there first, we'll stay six months, and then we'll let other folks less well-equipped take over, that's fine, but it's not a cheap option.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant: With the rapid response, early-in, early-out, we'd need the armoured attack helicopters, and we don't have them yet. Do you see it as being achievable in the short-term without the attack helicopters?

Prof. Denis Stairs: It depends entirely on the circumstances. There are some cases in which you wouldn't need attack helicopters, you could get by with less than that, so it would depend on the particular environment. All I'm suggesting is that if you want to act quickly through rapid deployment and firm deployment, with a capacity to make sure that things are orderly, so that people less well equipped to deal with them than you are can take your place later, then you're going to have to be properly set up to do the job.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant: So we weren't prepared to do that for Afghanistan? We just aren't equipped to do that?

• 1635

Prof. Denis Stairs: We talked about this a little earlier. I am a little nervous about the Afghan operation precisely for that reason. We're sending roughly a thousand lightly armed infantry into an environment that is very tough and where there is no sign of stability. We don't know who we're going to be working for, and we don't know exactly what we're going to be doing. If the purpose is to protect a warehouse loaded down with wheat, well, that's probably okay, but it depends an awful lot on what the host attitudes are to the presence in their midst of foreigners. In particular, you can imagine that political developments might occur. The Americans might start getting firm about how they ought to organize their political affairs. If there were a lot of resistance to that, and Canadians were linked to the Americans, we were supporting the intervention and all that kind of thing, it could get quite dicey. So I hope and assume that we're going to look very carefully before we actually deposit those folks on the ground in Afghanistan.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant: The government is looking in the direction of expanding JTF2 from its current approximately 200 to perhaps 1,000. What are your thoughts on taking that road, as opposed to having a separate rapid response team to go in?

Prof. Denis Stairs: Of course, they are a little quiet about what that force can actually do, but it sounded pretty much like a SWAT team in military uniform, basically aimed at dealing with domestic problems of one sort or another. It wasn't conceived, I don't think, as a kind of substitute for the Airborne particularly.

If you then ask whether we should have a substitute for Airborne, should we expand it, give it an overseas capability, and all that kind of thing, there's certainly a case for it, because it adds to the arrows in your quiver. On the other hand, it still would be a relatively small unit, and you would be looking at quite carefully confined operations. They might be unpleasant ones, but relatively confined. It's not the sort of thing you want to do without having backup, without having other troops to follow, as it were, the U.S. marines. You can make an argument that we should be the U.S. marines of peacekeeping or something.

You could make that case, but it's not cheap, not if you're going to do it responsibly. I take this to be blindingly obvious, but while they're volunteers, they're professionals, they don't have to be in the armed forces, we are asking them to put themselves in harm's way for an exercise we don't have to be a part of. It's not even like Korea, but it's certainly not like World War I or World War II. It seems to me, if anything, that increases our obligation, since we are simply using them as a pragmatic instrument of foreign policy, to make sure they are properly equipped and properly supported and are operating in a reasonably secure environment before we do that.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Price): Thank you, Ms. Gallant.

Mr. Peric.

Mr. Janko Peric (Cambridge, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Professor Stairs, you mentioned that $1 billion would be adequate for government to spend from now on. That is the exact figure we recommended. I guess you got that figure from our report and you read our report. I am glad you did that.

From your presentation I get the message that you're not too happy with our performance. You are comparing us to our southern neighbours. As you know, there are over 300 million of them and only 31 million of us here. I was in Sarajevo, with the RCMP officers and our military force there, and let me tell you, it's not only from our soldiers and police officers that I hear comments, but I hear from others, from Germans and other Europeans, very positive remarks about Canadian peacekeepers.

My question to you is, do you think, and for how long, $1 billion will be adequate enough? Where would we put that additional $1 billion per year in Canada? Would you compare Canada to any other NATO countries, European countries? Never mind the United States, would we be still falling behind NATO countries?

• 1640

Prof. Denis Stairs: I'd have to go back and go through the numbers again and do some comparison analysis. I don't know how far it would take us up the NATO list. As everybody knows, we're near the bottom. As to whether or not the billion dollars would put us in the middle, I'd simply have to go back and look at the numbers. So the short answer is, I can't give you a response to that, although it would be quite easy to get you one, I would think.

I want to emphasize, incidentally, that I understand the argument about Canadian peacekeepers. My comments, my concerns about the armed forces are not about the professionalism of the personnel, certainly the ones I've encountered. This may be going a little too far, but they're a sector of the Canadian public service that is really still strongly dedicated to public service. There is a sense of duty in the armed forces that is quite refreshing, and it's not universal. So I have the utmost admiration for them, although I think they are underequipped, and in some cases maybe the training is getting wound down.

Would the billion dollars be enough, and for how long? I'm talking about increasing the base budget now. That's very difficult to say, because it depends on changing conditions in the international environment. I would assume that it would be a reasonable target for the next five years.

Mr. Janko Peric: Was it your feeling before September 11 or just after that we need to spend more money?

Prof. Denis Stairs: This has nothing to do with September 11. I can show you things I have written in the past that would establish that.

Actually, the one mildly critical comment I would make of your interim report is that it makes a great deal of September 11 having changed the environment. We thought we could have peace dividends and so forth, then all of a sudden, along came September 11, and the whole world is transformed. That's a North American perception, not, I think, a European perception. It's a North American perception for an understandable reason, but I'm not sure it's well founded. We might now have another period of 40 years without a major assault of this sort on any North American target. It might well be that if we had any, they would be from mad Americans from Montana or something, not necessarily something launched by a parastatal force abroad.

So I'm not sure this is that fundamental a change. What it has told us is that there are bad folk out there and they do violent things. We need to be ready for that sort of eventuality as best we can. We have an obligation, not only to our own people, but to our allies, to take reasonable measures to deal not specifically with that kind of thing, but with other kinds of military challenges too. I simply don't believe the world could become so safe that we could get by without a reasonable defence capability. We argue about what's reasonable for us, but that's a basic premise. I just don't think the world is benign, and I don't think we're anywhere near to making it benign.

Since you've got me rattling on about this, I might make one other comment, if I could. There is, of course, an alternative view, which has to do with a root causes approach to dealing with these sorts of challenges. I made comments on this in the somewhat lengthier brief I gave to the staff. I have no problem with that in principle. In any case, dealing with the miseries of the human condition that lead to violence is something we presumably all want to do in the end. It's just that I don't think it's a very reliable strategy for protecting our security or the security of our friends and allies. The reasons for that are fairly straightforward, I think.

Even if one assumes that those kinds of human miseries, societies that aren't democratic, societies that are poor, constitute a cause of war—that's a big question mark—our capacity to do the social engineering to get those realities turned around is extremely limited. Even if we knew how to do it, we almost certainly would not put the resources into place that would be necessary to accomplish the objective. I just think that's a reality.

So with those kinds of approaches to preserving our security, however strong a case may be made for them on other grounds, it's not a case that can be built, in my view, on security grounds. That's a problem for generations to think about.

The Chair: No. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Peric.

• 1645

[Translation]

It's Mr. Bachand's turn for the third time. This is unbelievable.

Mr. Claude Bachand: Fine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Professor Stairs, nobody has said anything yet on the beginning of your presentation, when you talked about the Sea King helicopters. I have to tell you that here you share somewhat the opposition's stand. We find that the helicopter has become totally unsafe. In fact, I understand that for each hour it flies, 30 hours of maintenance are necessary. Our Liberal friends, our friends from the government, don't see any problem.

I would like to have your opinion on the whole Sea King matter and in particular on the government's letter of intent, which divided the contract in two parts, one for the platform and one for the integrated system. This could delay the activation of the helicopters. Do you share the opposition's opinion that this letter of intent is going to delay the availability of a much needed helicopter?

[English]

Mr. Denis Stairs: First of all, it wasn't intended as a partisan comment, it was intended to reflect what I think may be the case. It is true that the maintenance people who work on the Sea Kings insist that they're safe when they let them go, they wouldn't allow them to fly unless they had fixed everything they thought needed fixing, and I'm sure that's true. I can't imagine that they would allow a vehicle they knew to be unsafe to fly.

On the other hand, those helicopters have been under enormous stresses for a very long period of time, and you place a great deal of faith in the mechanic's capacity to predict what may go next when you say that. I don't know whether any of you have seen one of these things being winched down onto a ship, but I'm sure you know what happens. They get a hook on the deck, and then they rev up the helicopters so that they can come down, and they're literally winched down against the force of the engine, and there's a great deal of shuddering and shaking that goes on. If you go on doing that for a long period of time, I can't believe you're going to be able to predict every possible source of metal failure in that piece of equipment, so I'm very nervous about it.

However, with the comment, which was half tongue-in-cheek, about the cabinet minister staying awake at night thinking about this, in a sense I don't think it matters. If one of them goes down now as a result of a mechanical failure, they will be crucified anyway. That's a comment about their political vulnerability, but it wasn't intended as a partisan comment.

On the question of the division of the contract, the answer to this is always the same, it seems to me. If you want good equipment quickly and cheaply, you buy it off the shelf and you buy it essentially in one block. On the other hand, if you want offsets, it gets complicated, because then you obviously want to get jobs for Canadian industry, profits to come in to shareholders, and all that kind of thing, and that's clearly part and parcel of what's going on here. Looking at it from the purely military point of view, I'd say this is daft. Looking at it from the governmental point of view, with the need to maintain some sense of legitimacy for your acquisitions with the public and, in some sense, businesses, accruing to Canadians as well as to foreigners, it may make political sense. That's a political judgment. But it seems to me that first, it's too expensive, second, it's far more time-consuming, and third, it's going to take you longer to get the animal in the end.

The Chair: Mr. Bachand.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: So the armed forces say that we could wait until 2005 and the divided contract could delay this until 2007. If you think that the Sea King is now in a very poor condition, and that we should almost stop flying it, it's unthinkable to wait another four to six years before replacing it. Don't you agree?

[English]

Mr. Denis Stairs: The short answer is, they will try to keep them flying in the interim. That's what will happen. I don't think they're all going to be grounded, unless they discover some fundamental flaw in the airframes or the like that forces them to do that. So I think they will continue to fly them. If you're asking whether I think there are actually going to be new helicopters on Canadian warships by 2005, my guess is that they probably won't be there in 2005.

• 1650

The Chair: Okay.

Merci, Monsieur Bachand.

Mr. O'Reilly, sir.

Mr. John O'Reilly (Haliburton—Victoria—Brock, Lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Professor Stairs, for coming to the committee and filling us in on your opinions, some of which I agree with, some of which I disagree with, but keep in mind, I'm the parliamentary secretary, so I may be privy to a little more than I should be.

I agree with you on the budget. Naturally, I want everyone on this committee to lobby Paul Martin for at least $1 billion to the A budget, nothing else. We're certainly all in line with that.

I have to comment briefly on the Sea Kings. I've been on one, and I didn't find it a fearsome experience, because they've just had a $50 million upgrade, they have more powerful General Electric motors and drive shafts, the airframes are regularly inspected, and the pilots who fly them tell me they're safe, and I take them at their word—they have no reason to tell me otherwise. So for the immediate future I think beating up on the Sea Kings, if the opposition has nothing else to do, is good for them, and certainly, we don't want to discourage them too much, because we do want new helicopters. But every time I see the President of the United States land on the White House lawn, he is in a Sea King. You can do a lot of amazing things with a Sea King. They're still being made and they're still being flown by some pretty powerful people in the world. So beating up on the Sea King is something I always have to react to.

However, I'll go to the speech the minister made in the House today after question period that indicated a 1,000-strong immediate reaction force on the land, which is members of the 3rd Battalion Princess Patricia's Light Infantry and 2 Company out of a battalion from Winnipeg. So we have two western groups that are ready to go over there now on 48 hours notice.

If we take the general rotation of our troops, as in Bosnia right now, it's six months. That's basically what we've been doing, rotating every six months, making sure there are fresh troops. The troops who are there right now are out of Quebec, and the last group who were there were out of Petawawa. So there always is that six-month rotation, with a break at the one-third mark, and then a break in the middle, and a break near the end, for people who are deployed. I think it's a big worry sometimes that they are over there for too long, and I don't necessarily agree with that.

We're talking about a stabilization force in Afghanistan to secure entry points and corridors for delivering humanitarian aid. We're not talking about a full-scale battalion going to war. The forces going there tell me they're ready and able and can do whatever they're asked to do to restore safety and security in the country. Once again I take them at their word.

I sometimes get distressed when all the doom and gloom comes out of various sources. I'm not saying yours is all doom and gloom, you have some very good points, but more on the negative side than on the positive side, which is good at budget time, so it's not all bad. I'd ask for your comments on that.

Prof. Denis Stairs: With respect first to the president's helicopter, I don't know when that one came off the line or how old it is and all the rest of it, and I don't know what kind of duty it's performed. But I understand that's what the mechanics will say and that's what the officers will say. And I'm sure the pilots wouldn't fly them if they thought they were putting their lives in jeopardy every time they did it.

Mr. John O'Reilly: They're not allowed to fly them unless they're safe.

Prof. Denis Stairs: Yes, I understand that. On the other hand, I also hear from people who have left the armed forces, experienced pilots who know the machinery very well, that they are gravely concerned. And so, if you'll forgive me, it doesn't surprise me that that's the story you will hear. Every time I talk to military people, again, I'm struck by the extent to which they're loyal to their brief. They really do desire to serve, and even when they're asked to do the impossible, they try to do it. That doesn't necessarily make me feel entirely secure about their position, but I understand the point, and I've heard the same sort of commentary from people in uniform as well.

• 1655

With regard to the rotation, that's fine, except that it seems to me it assumes a benign environment in Afghanistan, one that's going to be reasonably stable. It assumes that the corridors aren't going to be attacked. It assumes that whatever berets they're wearing, they're not going to be the objects of enmity among local warlords, bandits, and so forth. I'm just not sure that's true. That's why I said earlier that I have confidence that people are going to conduct a very careful investigation in advance of actually putting them on ground.

I'm sure the young folk of the PPCLI feel they're ready to go and want to go. That's what they're there for. They want to serve the country. But I'm a little concerned that this is a pretty violent environment still, a very long way away, without a heck of a lot of backup. So unless there's every evidence that if we can't provide the backup, other people are going to be there to provide it, I'm a little nervous. All these operations have elements of uncertainty, but in the case of Afghanistan, it's a little rougher than most situations, I would have thought. It may change dramatically over the next while, but that's what makes me a little bit nervous.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Price): Thank you, Mr. O'Reilly.

Next on the list I have Mrs. Gallant, but she hasn't come back. So we go to Mr. Anders.

Mr. Rob Anders (Calgary West, Canadian Alliance): I've read through your summary of comments, and I appreciate the fact that you've provided a brief one-page commentary. That's the best way often to do these things, and I think you've done well by that.

You mention in point 2 the Sea King replacements and air refuelling capacity. I'd like to focus on the Sea Kings. I'll list off a number of questions and then have you respond.

First, do you think the EH101 is the best replacement for the Sea King?

Second, the government right now is engaging in what I think is the very problematic concept of a split contract. That way they and the taxpayers will be the ones holding the bag if there doesn't seem to be a meeting of the minds and these things don't work exactly the way they should. Could you comment on the feasibility of the split contract and what you think the problems are for the taxpayer there?

You also mention, in point 4, a substantial allocation of public funds. I'm wondering whether or not you think that should be $2 billion or in excess of $2 billion over what has currently been the situation for the armed forces.

You also mention, in point five, interoperability. During the Gulf War we borrowed, as far as I understand, from the Australians forward-looking infrared guidance systems for some of our CF-18s. My sense so far is that we still don't have those systems. I'd like you to comment on whether or not we should have those in order to be interoperable, rather than borrowing them off the Aussies.

Prof. Dennis Stairs: I guess it boils down to money and trade-offs, but clearly, you're going to be more effective if you have them. I understood, actually, that some were being installed, but I may be wrong on that.

On the matter of public funds, we went around this a little earlier, without enormous confidence, because it's a question, it seems to me, for defence managers to deal with. My sense from what I've gleaned out of various testimony, both here and in other reports, is that about a billion dollars a year for the next five years might be a reasonable start. If you went with more than that, it might not be a feasible enterprise, for reasons having to do with the downturn in the economy and other demands on the public treasury. So it seemed to me a billion dollars was not a bad start in the way of a fix. That's for all current annual operating; it doesn't deal with some of the capital procurement questions.

On the Sea Kings, we talked a little about that earlier. The advice I get is that these airframes are now getting very old. They've been under stress for a very long period of time, and even though mechanics think they're reliable when they're taking off—they wouldn't let them go unless they did—they may be unable to predict where the flaws could arise from here on in. So I think it's troubling.

• 1700

On the question of the replacements and the split contract, again we talked a little about this earlier. I think it's really very simple. It's a question of trading off the cheapest and most efficient way of doing things with economic development and other political considerations. The cheapest and most efficient way to do it is to buy off the shelf holus-bolus from a supplier. That way you get a fast decision, faster delivery, and a perfectly effective product. If you go this way, obviously, you're into very complicated negotiations involving multiple suppliers who have to integrate their work, and it can take a very long period of time. On the other hand, there are economic benefits, presumably, to come from that. My sense would be that most military people would say, look, militarily, buy it off the shelf, don't do it this way, but in the real world of politics and economics maybe you have to do it this way. That's a political decision, and I would have no more comment than that it's inefficient from the military point of view.

On the EH101s, this is a very hot potato. My understanding from just about everybody who talks quietly about these things is that the best decision had in fact been made at the tail end of the previous government, and it was unfortunate, the way the political campaign developed, that the new government felt obliged to do this. That's not intended as a partisan comment, but that's my sense, that it would have been better to have continued with the original purchase, and I think that would be most quiet military opinion as well.

Mr. Rob Anders: Thank you.

The Chair: The last question will go to Mr. Bachand.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Professor Stairs, I have here a document that you wrote for Policy Options. Its title is: “Canada in the 1990s: Speak Loudly and Carry a Bent Twig.” You say in this document:

Success prompted further requests for our help. A lengthening record of achievement made peacekeeping politically popular at home, and it eventually came to be seen as a principal means by which Canadians could express and, most recently, even impose their values on others. But the gradual evolution of peacekeeping into peacemaking and society building raises serious problems of both credibility and philosophy.

I know that you only have five minutes to answer and that it takes time to explore philosophical issues, but could you try to summarize your thoughts? Why would these peace missions philosophically lead to some loss of credibility and legitimacy?

[English]

Prof. Denis Stairs: Increasingly in the last decade or so—this is not just an attempt to be non-partisan, but it was true at the tail end of the Conservative government as much as it has been true of the Liberal government since—there has been a kind of change, in my view, in Canada's aspirations in these matters. In particular, we are now increasingly saying that we think other countries would be better off if they lived more or less as we do, that is to say, if they had a representative, democratic, parliamentary system of government, if they had a free enterprise economic system, if they honoured all the human rights we think it appropriate to honour, and so forth, and that's affected a lot of the things we've done. It's affected our development assistance policy, or at least the rhetoric surrounding it, and so we have a lot of conditionalities surrounding that now. Increasingly, I think, we're getting into the game with the sort of social engineering human security argument that says, we really know how you ought to make changes in your society to make things turn out better.

I have a couple of problems with that. One of them is that I don't think we know how to do the social engineering. I think there's an enormous optimism about our technical capacity to do that. Second, I don't think, if we take that mission seriously, we are prepared to spend anything like the resources required. And third, we're not prepared to do it over a long enough period of time to make a dent. In most of these cases you're talking about two or three generations to make those sorts of profound cultural changes. So I think there's a lot of easy talk about objectives that are perfectly honourable taken at face value.

• 1705

Where I think this is different is that in the old days—now I'm showing my grey hair—the argument was always that Canadians don't tell other people how they ought to run their lives in development assistance or in other areas. If you have a problem and you think we can help you with it, please let us know, and we will see what we can do. It wasn't for us to tell them how to develop their own societies and so forth. One of the consequences of that was that Canadians were differentiated, for example, from Americans, who were regarded as constantly propagating the American way of life. And indeed, we rather smugly thought, well, we're a little bit better than them, because we know there are many roads to heaven on earth, or as close as we ever get to it in the human condition. Now I think we're rather more as the Americans were in the heyday of the Cold War. We're the ones who are propagating the notion that we know how to live. We're being pushed into this by NGOs and Canadians' interest in propagating their values abroad, but we used not to propagate our values abroad, that's not what it was about.

So I think there's been a sea change, and I think some other countries are finding it a little irritating if the sense is, well, you have to change the way you do things. And others may think we're trying to do it on the cheap. That was probably a longer answer than you wanted.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Price): Thank you very much.

I just have one comment, a little clarification before we do close up. You mentioned that in peacekeeping Canada was around number 33 in commitments. I just wanted to clarify that, because it goes on the record. It sounds as though we're not really putting forward as we should. In actual fact, we have to look at some of the countries. Let's take the Ukraine for one, which has the largest commitment of any country in the world, but their reasons are quite different from ours. They have a huge military industrial complex that they have to feed, their manufacturing operation, and if we look seriously at it, they also have to feed their army. And there are many other countries that are doing that too, and that's why their commitments are much larger to UN peacekeeping than ours.

I just wanted to make that clear on the record, because it's an important thing. We're not down the bottom of the row by any means.

Prof. Denis Stairs: I don't know that I would have corrected myself in that way. What you're saying is that many other countries contribute larger numbers of personnel because there are foreign exchange or other returns they get from doing so, and that's absolutely true. I did try to make it clear that I went from the UN list this morning. I think we've got 317 in UN operations as of November, and that ranks us about 33rd in their list. But of course, that does not include operations that are under other auspices, notably of course the Bosnian one and what's going on in Afghanistan. If you do that, I think we get up to around, I would guess, nine or ten, somewhere in that range.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Price): But as I say clearly our reasons are always much more humanitarian, much more totally peacekeeping than many of those others are.

I want to thank you very much, Mr. Stairs, for coming. It's been a very interesting exchange, I think. We've got information back and forth, and I think you've even picked up a bit from us on our feelings on different things.

Prof. Denis Stairs: Yes I did.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Price): So thank you very much, and we hope to see you again soon.

Prof. Denis Stairs: Thank you.

The Vice-Chair (Mr. David Price): The meeting is adjourned.