FAIT Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE

COMITÉ PERMANENT DES AFFAIRES ÉTRANGÈRES ET DU COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, November 29, 2001

• 0909

[English]

The Chair (Mr. Bill Graham (Toronto Centre—Rosedale, Lib.)): Colleagues, I'd like to bring this session to order.

We have with us Professor Doran and Stephen Randall, from the University of Calgary. I understand Professor Doran has published a new book on Canada, his 912th or something like that, and, unlike other academics, he never cites a previous book in his subsequent books.

Thank you both very much for coming. Professor Doran has come from the United States and Professor Randall has come from Calgary.

• 0910

This session will go only until 10:30 because we have another session following immediately. We're also going to—with the cooperation of members when we have a quorum—deal with Bill C-41, the act dealing with the commercial corporations.

Perhaps I could start with Professor Doran and then Professor Randall. We'll open for questions when you've made your presentations.

Mr. Charles F. Doran (Senior Associate and Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies, Center for Strategic and International Studies): Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the committee, it's a great pleasure and an honour to be invited to speak here and to participate. It's not often people show interest in academics; I commend the members for their courage.

To start, I would like to loosely paraphrase the comments of your ambassador to Washington. He made a speech recently to the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States in San Antonio. In it he said, in effect, that we all have concerns these days—and he mentioned Germany, Britain, and the United States and then he mentioned Canada—regarding questions of security; we have therefore to recognize this reality and deal with it. I think acknowledgement of this is a very important beginning.

The second thing I would emphasize is that there seems to me to be a kind of an ideal in dealing with this in the context of the North American framework and the border. The ideal is that we would like to be able to cope with our problems of security effectively, efficiently, and fairly, while at the same time not impeding the flow of goods and services north and south and without challenging or undermining any of our rights and freedoms in either of the two countries. Now, this is the ideal, and it's a large order.

There are lots of fairly practical things that can be done to become more effective. There are a lot of new technologies available to deal with security matters, some of which are coming into play. What happened recently in the United States exemplifies the problem with all of these things: the U.S. Congress mandated that within 60 days of the decision being made all of the baggage at airports had to be examined; but the problem, explained the next day by the Secretary of Transportation, was they didn't have the technical capacity to do it in that period of time. We're all finding ourselves in these kinds of constrained situations.

The bottom line is that the word “harmonization” comes up again and again, and I'm not quite sure what this word means. Canada and the United States have different routes, different ways of doing things, different institutions, and this is the way it should be. But at the end of the day, the one thing that has to be similar is the effectiveness of the new techniques and procedures and institutions that are put into place. I stress this because I am a great defender of the notion of free movement back and forth across this border. I lived in Minnesota as a child, and it was just a norm for us.

If this issue of standards and effectiveness is not addressed—although I think it is being addressed—the people in the United States who don't hold the border dear might in fact take steps that would not be helpful along the border. This is what I worry about. We don't want to face this kind of situation. Not everyone in the United States understands what it's like to have trucks backing up, for example. Congressman LaFalce in Buffalo certainly understands this, but not everyone else.

It's important to get this message out. We need to have standards and outcomes that are similarly effective so pressure is not placed on the border to be this screening device, which in the end I think it can't really be completely.

• 0915

I conclude with this observation. This is a time for looking forward at a new era in which terrorism is acknowledged as a phenomenon now striking at home, as something different from anything we saw in the 20th century. But it's also a time to acknowledge that in some ways we really ought to move forward with a more open border.

I just rode up on the airplane, and my seatmate happened to be a leader of one of the labour unions here. He said to me that they had a problem: workers can't go back and forth across the border for a week or two at a time because there is so much red tape it's impossible to do this; somebody ought to figure out a way to make it possible for them to move back and forth when they need to. And I had to admit he was absolutely right.

We need to see what new areas exist for us to make this border even more open. Much of this, it seems, is going to fall in the area of the movement of people back and forth. I think this can be done at the same time as one puts into place measures that are more effective in dealing with terrorism and its consequences. That's where I would like to place my emphasis.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Doran.

Mr. Randall.

Mr. Stephen Randall (Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Calgary): Thank you very much, Mr. Graham. It's a pleasure to be here with you now, as it has been on previous occasions as well.

Thank you very much for including, as Dr. Doran has indicated, an academic perspective on some of these issues. I don't know what an academic perspective is any more, how to distinguish between it and a professional political perspective.

Let me be somewhat longer than Dr. Doran, if I might. The basic thesis I'd like to advance is that when we look at the events of September 11 in a larger political and historical context, they have intensified rather than really altered the pressures toward North American harmonization and integration. These pressures have intensified rather than changed, in other words, and I think compressed the process in a time sense. I want to touch briefly on military security issues, economic issues, and if there's time, on cultural issues.

We know that for a very long time the U.S. administration's view—certainly under Clinton and during both of the Bush administrations, under Bush Sr. and more recently—has been that the Canadian military capacity is inadequate. There are many Canadians who would argue the same.

If you look at the document recently produced by my Centre for Military and Strategic Studies by David Bercuson and his colleagues, you will see there has been a good deal of anxiety about the capacity of the Canadian military to deal with terrorist threats at home, or for that matter to gather intelligence information internationally. I would strongly recommend that the Canadian Parliament look at this area of our capacity to deal with the military and terrorist issues.

Of course the other issue is that pressure has existed for a number of years for Canada to get onside, so to speak, with the National Missile Defense System. The events of September and the war against the Taliban have underlined the accuracy of the U.S. critique and the concerns of many Canadians that not only is our military not adequate, but the notion of rogue states has once again taken on new coinage. This was something many Americans and Canadians did not accept for a long time. Whether we are dealing with rogue states or rogue organizations, of course, is another matter.

I think there will be continued pressures in the military area for us to be more fully integrated into North American defence, whether in a National Missile Defense System or for that matter in having our traditional military forces, including the navy and air force, as fully integrated as possible into a North American environment. And as I've noted in my written presentation, the fact that we can send a naval group to the Middle East to be incorporated smoothly into U.S. operations is a reflection of the extent to which we really are quite well integrated in this area already.

• 0920

As Professor Doran has indicated, there's also the consequence of intensifying pressure for more effective collaboration between Canada and the United States over border controls and immigration. We know that's not a new concern. A great deal of the U.S. concern with the Mexican border over the last 20 years has spilled over to relations between Canada and the United States over the U.S.-Canada border. There's also the perception that Canada has been excessively lax in its immigration and refugee policies, and we have allowed into the country individuals who have turned out to be known terrorists.

I don't think there's any question there should be, and will be, pressure to have a much more integrated and collaborative approach to immigration and refugee policy. Canada will face the problem—as I think all of us around this table know—of maintaining its independence and its autonomy in immigration policy, on the whole.

There is no logical reason why we can't have collaboration on border issues, but the more sensitive and difficult problem is going to be the protection of Canadian immigration policies and refugee policies, to maintain some distinction.

Professor Doran has noted the importance of cross-border trade. It's extremely important economically for both countries to ensure that we have a relatively free movement of goods across that border, without the kind of barbed wire and lengthy lineup situation that has long prevailed at the Mexican border. If we had had a situation like the Mexican border over the last half-century, the level of commodity trade would never have been possible.

My last item—which is not in my written presentation but I want to emphasize—on the security and military side is the vulnerability of North American infrastructure, and I stress North American infrastructure. If you look at oil and gas pipelines and the export of electricity, which is predominantly hydro electricity to the United States, the generation of electricity is normally from remote areas of Canada in northern British Columbia, northern Ontario, and northern Quebec. The vulnerability of that infrastructure to terrorist attack is extreme.

If you were to superimpose the location of areas that are very sensitive in the infrastructure area onto a map of Canadian military presence across Canada, our military capacity would be very far removed, in terms of time response, from many of those important infrastructure developments, whether they were hydro-electricity or oil and gas. It would take us three or four hours, for example, to scramble to deal with a problem in the high Arctic, whether it were an environmental impact or something of more immediate human concern. So our infrastructure, which is an integral part of the North American economy, is extremely vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Strictly on the economic side, in addition to the cross-border trade, our extremely low Canadian dollar, as everyone around this table well knows, has also contributed to a sense in Canada that there should be a renewed call for a common North American currency. That's not a new issue, but it's one that has been intensified by the acts of terrorism on September 11 and the war in Afghanistan.

The plight of Canadian and North American airlines, which predated September 11, has been intensified by the impact of September 11. We are moving toward pressures to achieve a higher degree of integration or consolidation of the airline industry in North America. There will have to be a Canada-U.S. bilateral approach to airline industry activity in the North American environment.

The other issue, of course, is energy policy. Predating September 11 was the Bush administration's call for a North American energy policy. I don't think there's anything particularly new in that call for North American energy, but the vulnerability of middle eastern supplies has once again, as it did in the early 1970s and again during the Iranian crisis in 1979-80, underlined the importance of having a higher degree of autonomy from Middle Eastern supplies, and the importance of Canadian energy supplies to the United States.

• 0925

In my written submission I touched, of course, on the softwood lumber export issue. I don't think it's been affected at all by the events of September 11, but it does tend to underline what I think is an extremely important point, which Professor Doran touched on as well, that U.S. trade policies and foreign policies are driven to a very large extent by domestic protectionist interests that find their main voice in the United States Congress. I think we need to be very sensitive to public opinion and domestic U.S. political pressures, not all of which are sensitive, as Professor Doran has pointed out, to relations between the United States and Canada.

In closing, let me just touch very briefly on the issue of culture very broadly defined. We went through this debate on many occasions in the past, particularly in the U.S.-Canada free trade debate. There is still a high degree of sensitivity in Canada to the integration of culture in a North American environment. You will have seen advertisements over the last several weeks from Canadian publishers on their concerns about protecting cultural industries, particularly book publishing. This also applies, of course, to the electronic media.

The events of September 11 underline the extent to which Canadians care very much about what goes on in the United States. There's virtually no border, in that regard. But when one recognizes the vulnerability of Canadian publishing to American production, the vulnerability of Canadian magazines still, and the vulnerability of the electronic media, television and the CBC, it's quite clear that North American cultural integration is not something that is coming; it is a reality.

I noted in my written presentation that viewers of Ally McBeal, ER, and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? significantly outrank, in the Nielsen ratings, those who watch the CBC—only 7.4% for the CBC, versus more than 36% who watch those high intellectual quality programs.

I'll stop at that point. Thank you.

The Chair: I understand, Professor Randall, you're going to be good enough to appear before our subcommittee on Colombia this afternoon, so you're doing double duty by coming to Ottawa. We want to thank you for doing that.

Mr. Stephen Randall: It's a disadvantage of being a true Americanist, Mr. Graham, and that is covering the hemisphere as opposed to the bilateral.

The Chair: This is very commendable of you. I just want to let you know that the heritage committee is presently undertaking an extensive examination of the CBC, so you might want to join that committee too at some point, while you're here. Let's take advantage of the air fare.

Mr. Stephen Randall: I think I'll pass.

The Chair: Okay.

Now, colleagues, I'm going to take a quick break. We have a quorum, so before we turn to questions—we have a full hour for questions—I hope we can deal with Bill C-41, which was discussed in the subcommittee on trade yesterday. I'm going to ask Mr. Harb to quickly introduce the subject.

I understand, Madam Lalonde, you wish to speak on a point of order.

[Translation]

Ms. Francine Lalonde (Mercier, BQ): Mr. Chairman, I wish to raise before this committee something that was brought to my attention by Mr. Pierre Paquette, who sits on the subcommittee, that is that we proceeded with the clause by clause study when the notice of meeting did not include it. It seems to me that the procedure in the subcommittee should be the same as in the committee.

We have to obey some basic rules. Of course, we need flexibility when we are dealing with questions that are not as important as a clause by clause study. It is a point I wanted to raise and I hope that it won't happen again. This puts us in the uncomfortable situation of having to propose a non-written amendment that we must submit to members. Some other parties were not there because they did not know that we would proceed clause by clause.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[English]

The Chair: Mr. Harb.

Mr. Mac Harb (Ottawa Centre, Lib.): I will be very brief, Mr. Chair.

• 0930

My colleague's comments are well-taken. From here on we will ensure that we have those details.

Having said that, the committee did not err. When the clerk sent out the notice, it was within the guidelines. It fitted in perfectly with the rules as to how the committee conducts itself. I would suggest that at the next meeting the clerk can bring to the attention of this committee whether or not everything was done according to the books. We have checked it out, and there was absolutely no problem in sending out the notice. Everything was within the rules. For the sake of my colleagues, the next time we deal with any bill whatsoever, we'll make sure that it includes clause-by-clause, just to appease any kind of potential concern.

[Translation]

The Chair: If I understood you well, Ms. Lalonde, you have no objection to a vote this morning; you just wanted to raise the issue. I think that all our colleagues wish to know in advance that we are going to meet to study a bill clause by clause. The other day, we voted a rule that requires the amendments to be submitted 24 hours in advance. If members of Parliament do not know that we are going to study a bill clause by clause during a meeting, they cannot submit amendments. Therefore I think that your point of order is totally appropriate. The clerk will make sure that we abide by this procedure in the future. Thank you for your understanding.

[English]

Colleagues, I would ask that the sixth report of the Subcommittee on International Trade, Trade Disputes and Investment, on Bill C-41, an act to amend the Criminal.... No. We're getting so used to these omnibus bills. It's Bill C-41, an act to amend the Canadian Commercial Corporation Act. I would ask that the subcommittee report be adopted as the fourteenth report of the committee and that Bill C-41 be reported to the House without amendment.

Mr. John Harvard (Charleswood St. James—Assiniboia, Lib.): I so move.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Harvard.

Is there any discussion? Do you wish to have a recorded vote?

Mr. Keith Martin (Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, Canadian Alliance): No, it's fine.

(Motion agreed to)

Mr. Mac Harb: It will be tabled tomorrow.

The Chair: Can we authorize Mr. Harb to table it, committee?

Mr. John Harvard: I won't be here tomorrow, though.

The Chair: I said Mr. Harb.

Mr. John Harvard: Oh, you were talking about Mr. Harb. I'm sorry.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Harb. We appreciate it very much.

Thank you, colleagues.

Now we're free to go to questions for Professors Doran and Randall. Mr. Martin, sir.

Mr. Keith Martin: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. Randall and Dr. Doran, thank you for appearing in front of the committee on such a beautiful Ottawa day.

Professor Randall, I want to thank you for the outstanding document your institution put together. It is very timely and prescient. So thank you for that.

Dr. Doran, do you think we should simply abolish the border? Do you think that the obstacles to abolishing the border relate primarily to the insecurities around a Canadian identity, as opposed to any real security challenge that exists at the border?

Professor Randall, you mentioned in your document that we need a defence white paper. Do you not think it would be better to have a combined defence and foreign affairs white paper, as defence is the arm of foreign affairs? If we don't know what we want from a foreign affairs perspective, we can't appropriately articulate whether our defence needs will be met.

Also, you mentioned dams and hydro-electric power. Do you think our nuclear facilities are adequately protected from a terrorist attack?

Thank you.

Mr. Charles Doran: Thank you for that question. Unfortunately, the answer has to be a little bit of yes and no. It seems to me that in many respects not just the Canada-U.S. border but probably most borders in the world today are becoming somewhat less significant. With the increased trade and investment, particularly the effect of the electronic revolution in all areas, including the media, borders have perhaps a little less significance than they did before.

• 0935

The Canada-U.S. border has always been unique. I know of no textbooks on foreign relations, for example, that don't identify the Canada-U.S. border as being this unusual border that's not only undefended but so highly interdependent.

Yet a border—maybe a little more for the smaller participant, but probably to some extent for both countries—has a lot of symbolic and emotional content associated with it.

As we now know, after September 11 our own situation in North America has changed in security terms. That's the perception on the part of many people in policy circles in the United States. In the 20th century we went through all kinds of confrontations and never was there a massive event of this sort that affected either Canada or the United States. Suddenly, it has happened. Something is different. So we have a security problem.

This gets down to the essence, then, of the significance of the border. It's a decision that our two governments and peoples have to make, it seems to me. If we can address the security issue in terms of using our own approaches and institutions and if we can address this in such a fashion that effectiveness, however that's measured, is essentially the same in both Canada and the United States, I don't think the border is going to be affected very much at all. But if we can't make effectiveness what we would like it to be or if there's a perceived great difference in the level of effectiveness, then the burden is forced on the border as a kind of screening device. I don't think it's really capable of handling that, but I can see that in the background. That's why I say we have to be serious about dealing with this perceived issue of security.

By the way, it doesn't have to impinge heavily on immigration matters. I respect very much, for example, Quebec's concerns about making sure that immigration is handled in the way it has been. I must say that most Americans don't know about these things, but I've checked with policy-makers about this and they have no problems. This is an internal Canadian matter. They understand that French-speaking immigrants are necessary for Quebec. That's wonderful. There's no problem with that.

But when it comes to things such as how one examines asylum seekers, we have to be very serious. In each case it's going to be done independently by each country. But what I emphasize is that each country is looking over the shoulder of the other and the legislation that each one puts in place is affected by what the other one does or does not do. That's the essence of interdependence.

So what I'm saying is that I think the border is becoming less and less significant but the events regarding security have suddenly reminded everybody, especially on the U.S. side, that there is a border.

The Chair: Mr. Randall.

Mr. Stephen Randall: Let me add to that before I respond to your two very good questions. I think that the entire notion of perimeter defence, for example, has significant implications not only for military security but also for the immigration issue. I would agree to some extent with Professor Doran that we need to maintain not only a symbolic but a real open border in large part. But I don't see how we are going to harmonize our immigration and refugee policies across North America. Frankly, I think the Canadian approach is sufficiently distinct that we should not be trying to harmonize with the United States on immigration policy. They are very different, not only because of Quebec but also because of the rest of the country's approach to immigration. I think that if harmonization takes place, we will be harmonized along the lines of U.S. policy, not along the lines of Canadian policy.

• 0940

With regard to the question on whether we need to deal with both foreign affairs and defence, yes, I think there's no point examining.... Defence is simply an extension of one's foreign policy in large part, and, yes, you cannot study one without the other. If you're going to develop a defence white paper, one obviously needs to do that in the context of examining our foreign policy as well. I'm not going to elaborate. I think that the two are simply an integral part of the same issue.

On your other question, are our nuclear facilities adequately protected, we're told yes. I don't have sufficient inside information to answer that question beyond what we are told.

I would only return to the points I made before: that our military capacity, domestically and internationally, is clearly inadequate, not only in terms of the technology but also in terms of the size of the Canadian military force and where it's located as well.

If you look at our reserve policy, and I know that my colleagues in their document on defence, and in other work they're currently doing with a conference next spring in fact on Canadian reserves.... Our Canadian reserves policy is so different from that of the United States. As it has been jokingly, but rather unfortunately, observed, if on a Saturday evening the guys are all out bowling and they're called up even to sandbag a local river that is rising and they feel like continuing to bowl, there's no law that requires them to actually show up to engage in that, let alone to defend a nuclear facility. We're pretty lax on this.

I'm not inclined to be strongly pro-military, I hasten to add, but if we are serious about defending ourselves against a terrorist attack, or indeed providing Canada with the capacity to really contribute to international military operations, then we need to do a better job of it. It's a question of what our priorities are in that regard. I can't be more specific, I do apologize, on the nuclear facilities.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Ms. Carroll, was there a point of order?

Ms. Aileen Carroll (Barrie—Simcoe—Bradford, Lib.): It was not a point of order, but I wondered if my honourable colleagues would let me have one quick sentence, because I have to run to the House to do Bill C-35.

Thank you. I never get to question because I have to do other duties.

I want to thank you both. I would want Dr. Randall to know that I brought my University of Calgary law school mug on this occasion from my daughter.

On a more serious note, if there can be anything more serious than the high calibre of the University of Calgary, I want to thank you for your comments specifically about the integration and how vital it is that we maintain our own, and also the need to coordinate on other areas, that not being one of them. I hope you will be invited to many committees so that you may proclaim this, Dr. Randall.

Mr. Stephen Randall: Thank you very much.

Ms. Aileen Carroll: Thank you, and Dr. Doran as well. Thank you.

Thank you for your tolerance in allowing me to break the rules, honourable colleagues.

[Translation]

Ms. Francine Lalonde: I wish to thank Mr. Doran, with whom I would like to discuss issues other than those on the table. I also wish to thank Mr. Randall.

Our study deals with North American Integration and the consequences of September 11. I noticed that neither of you included Mexico in that integration. Why? NAFTA, the first agreement that led to commercial integration while being an institution, includes Mexico. Mexico also has a border with the United States, where different rules apply, but that has consequences as well for Canada. This is my first question.

Here is my second question. Don't you think that the fact that the United States did not sign the Kyoto Agreement whereas Canada did poses a serious problem? Of course, we are just starting to try seeing all its consequences here. I come from a riding where chemicals and petroleum products businesses are getting very nervous as the United States will have a competitive advantage because of the fact that they did not sign the Kyoto Agreement. I personally think that we should start asking ourselves questions and Canada should find solutions not to let an entire important industrial sector go to the United States.

• 0945

My third question has to do with the borders as such. Mr. Doran, you suggested that we review completely the visa and asylum programs. As you are well informed, you are not unaware that on this side of the border, the problem that we have and that I have as a parliamentarian is that the United States visa policy is not as strict as Canada's. In my riding, I was asked to obtain a visa for Canada for the mother of one of our citizens who is in the United States, where she came from another country. But the Canadian officials are refusing, based on Canadian policies, to deliver a visa in such circumstances. We estimate that this is the root of about 50% of our problems. I am sure it is not the perception that people have of Canadian immigration policies in the United States. They are under the impression that the Canadian border is like a sieve but it is not the case.

Did you look into the arrival conditions at Schengen, in Europe? Borders were abolished in Europe. Of course this was within a union that is now not only economic but also political but one had to look into applying a common visa policy and also a right of asylum policy I think. I will stop here.

[English]

Mr. Stephen Randall: Let me reply, if I might, to your first comment, on why did we not include Mexico. I think I did, but without elaborating on that, in two areas. One is the North American energy policy, for example, where the intent, clearly, is to look at all three countries in terms of supply. But, again, it has had a very U.S. outward-looking focus, and a bilateral U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada approach.

The issue of North American integration in the energy area of course is a very old one. It's certainly not something that dates only from the current Bush administration comments. And it has been looked at in a much more systematic way, really, since the early 1970s and the first oil crisis, but it was also said in the late 1940s. If you look at a book I wrote rather longer ago than I'd like to think, on the United States foreign oil policy, in the late 1940s the comment was made, on a number of occasions, by senior U.S. officials that North America is an economic unit, and particularly where energy is concerned. And of course that was about the time the Leduc fields in Alberta were just being developed—1947 and after.

So it's clearly the Bush administration, in talking about energy policy, includes Mexico as well as Canada in that, and I'm sorry if I didn't make that quite clear.

The other one is the border question. To some extent, the attitude toward the Canadian border in recent years has been driven by the U.S. response to the problems on the Mexican border. And when we first, in the last few years, ran into serious problems of cross-border movement of people, our snowbirds going to Florida and elsewhere, that was in part of course related to what was happening on the Mexican border. The Clinton administration, as I think we all in this room know, put a great deal of money into reinforcing the border with Mexico, with far more border patrol officials, more barbed wire, razor wire, and so on, along the border.

If you look at the Canadian border, on the other hand, we have—I may be wrong in my data here—something like 270 ports of entry and we have only about 600 officials operating those ports of entry. I may be slightly off on my data, but the ratio of the number of border officials we have to the number of ports of entry is so low that we clearly cannot maintain a high level of security at the current state of play.

• 0950

There is a clear relationship politically, ideologically, and in security terms between the way in which the U.S. responds to the Canadian border and the Mexican border situation as well.

I'm not sure I fully understood your last point on the issue of visa policy. Do we need a common visa...?

[Translation]

Ms. Francine Lalonde: This is Mr. Doran's proposal.

Mr. Stephen Randall: Oh, yes. Thank you.

[English]

Mr. Charles Doran: Those are very clear and good questions. I hope I can do them justice in terms of my answers.

As far as the question about the role of Mexico is concerned, that is obviously central, especially in the aftermath of NAFTA. It is the case that while the United States has to think of this in terms of two borders, actually unlike either of the other countries, as someone who is very sophisticated about politics, you'll understand that the U.S. position is going to be a little different when it has to look both north and south in that fashion.

Yet I think the process of integration in North America is much more complicated, much more complex, than is reflected in these border issues. We started with a Canada-U.S. free trade agreement. That is what in fact led the way in terms of all these other sorts of agreements. We then talked about and signed this very innovative agreement, NAFTA. But we are also talking about a free trade area of the Americas by 2005, as you know. So that is a more complicated set of overlaid issues involving many other actors in the western hemisphere. And recently we have renewed the WTO effort. Canada and the United States I think have worked together very closely on those issues, so it's another layer of change that's going on.

What does this mean? It means that, yes, we have to, on the one hand, look at this in a comprehensive way involving Mexico, and particularly, as Professor Randall has pointed out, recognize that the United States is going to be influenced by this in a complicated way. But we should also recognize there are possibilities in Canada-U.S. relations alone. That's the point I was trying to emphasize in my remarks.

When you ask where are the next steps in a fashion that the average American and average Canadian really are concerned about, and want to have benefits and improvements, I think there is potential, and it's in the Canada-U.S. sphere. It really falls in the area of making more positive steps in the direction of allowing people to move back and forth. In a sense, it gets at your concerns about visas as well.

How would Mexico respond? I can't speak for Mexico. I don't know how they would respond. But it seems to me that if Ottawa were to say, following the thoughts for example of the labour union leader I mentioned, we have some specific problems here, and we need to open up this border movement of people a bit more.... If it were expressed in such a fashion that one would say this is going to be an experiment, in fact it has to be phased in over time, and indeed it might even be looked at and reviewed after three years, or five years, so it could be reversed.... If it were expressed in that fashion to the U.S. government and to the Mexican government, the Mexican government would recognize that this is a kind of experiment to see if it works, to see what the Americans and the Canadians can do, and if they succeed at some point down the road there could be more of the same sort of thing in terms of Mexican-U.S. and Mexican-Canadian relationships. But, understandably, that would be down the road. If it were expressed in that fashion, I think you might break a logjam in this thinking very effectively.

• 0955

On the second issue, Kyoto, I consider myself to have been an enthusiast regarding the environment before environmentalists—I'm that old—were out there arguing for these things. I think environmental protection is very important. My judgment is that Americans in general do too. But it's very clear that this administration, and also a lot of scientists and others who looked at this carefully, thought the Kyoto process was fatally flawed, that it will never be implemented. It can be signed, but it will never be implemented in any kind of full sense. Let me give you an example quickly of why.

[Translation]

Ms. Francine Lalonde: But there was Marrakesh.

[English]

Mr. Charles Doran: Yes.

Ms. Francine Lalonde: Marrakesh, two weeks ago, decided they would go on it, the Marrakesh conference.

Mr. Charles Doran: Oh yes, there will be other discussions and so on, but I'm talking about the actual implementation. That's the first point. The second point is, even if implementation took place, it's implementation in the future, it's not now. We're talking about phasing these things in over a long period of time.

I was going to pose this question: Why is there this kind of response by the administration in the United States, and by others, with regard to Kyoto? I'll tell you why I think it is.

I listened to a presentation by the president of an independent oil company in Texas, who happens to be a Quebecker by birth. In fact, his name is associated with a big oil refinery, just identified with that oil refinery in Quebec. In my judgment, he is a brilliant man. He was asked the same question recently, and his response was that the problem is that we must deal with global warming, but we have to show an association between energy consumption and global warming per se. This is a chemical engineer saying he has to show a scientifically proven sort of association, and that's difficult to do, especially when the costs are as high as they are. So there's a huge debate over this issue.

As far as commercial competitiveness is concerned, if there were a situation in which anybody was at a commercial disadvantage because of this, I think they'd have a legitimate right to challenge other governments, including the U.S. government, if it were the subject of this, but fears of commercial advantage and reality may be quite different. That's the thing that has to be very carefully examined, I think.

I think the last one was the issue of the visas and the border itself. In fact, it's a very tough question. What, indeed, is U.S. immigration policy in a broader sort of sense? Frankly, I would not like to be in a situation where I had to either explain or justify an overall immigration policy. I think it's a very, very complicated set of issues.

Rather, let me try to reduce this question to one that's more manageable. Both the United States and Canada, and at this point many other countries in the world, are built on immigration. We're countries that were created and we need immigration. We thrive on it. We're also not going to take steps that will impede immigration in the sense of reducing or halting it, or whatever.

Having said that, and I'm not sure I can convey that effectively enough here, not only the events of September 11 are pertinent, but what followed. Nobody's mentioned here anything about anthrax. I can tell you the concerns about what, apparently, some crackpot has done in terms of sending these letters around is such that the change of attitude and so on in the Washington community and more broadly in the United States is something that cannot be minimized.

As a result, the new reality of the 21st century is how do we deal with these new security concerns without impinging negatively on our immigration policy? The answer is that we've got to look for the problems. On the U.S. side, the problems may be associated with visas, maybe, to some extent. Why do I say that? Because quite a number of the hijackers had legal visas. As an analyst, that tells me that somebody gave them visas and there was potentially, certainly, a problem there. I'm not saying you can be perfect in these matters, but there seems to be a concern there.

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I'm speaking now not just from my own research, but from the research of others, particularly some Europeans. When they look at the Canadian situation, they say the asylum issues are quite different from what the French use, for example, and others, and potentially there may be a problem there. It must be looked at seriously.

The reason I say that as well is that Canada and the United States are open books. Americans know exactly what you're doing. You know exactly what we're doing. There's nothing opaque.

Given that, we have to seriously deal with any potential issues and problems. I think we can do it without impeding the flow of people who want to meet families and so on. I think there are lots of techniques that can be put into place. What has happened is we have just neglected this.

Mr. Stephen Randall: Let me, if I can, pick up on a couple of points.

Madame Lalonde, I'm sorry I didn't reply to your comment on the Kyoto accord. I think if one had serious intent to implement the Kyoto accord, and the United States was not a signatory, then yes, it would provide a competitive economic advantage to the United States, which potentially would be in violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and possibly the World Trade Organization rules as well.

The real issue in North American integration where the Kyoto accord is concerned would be Mexico, which cannot and does not enforce its own environmental legislation, as you well know. Canada and the United States come much closer, in direction at least, toward Kyoto than does Mexico, and some of the countries further south as well.

On the immigration issue, Canadian and U.S. immigration policies look very open in comparison to Mexico. Capacity to gain citizenship for a foreign person entering Mexico is extremely limited. There are years in which there are one or two people who gain Mexican citizenship. On one occasion I can recall it was the official photographer for the president. On another occasion it was a Frenchman who was a significant investor in Mexico. I think we're dealing with a completely different world in immigration and citizenship policy in Mexico from that of Canada and the United States.

Let me touch on one point, which goes back to the visa issue, and to Professor Doran's comments as well, and that is refugee policy. It has been suggested that we have a potentially serious security problem with what happens to people who arrive at a Canadian port of entry and claim refugee status. While their case is pending, they are free to move into Canadian society. We know that. That has been the traditional Canadian practice. The only recent exception I am aware of was the ship that arrived off the coast of British Columbia, where they were impounded effectively, incarcerated, until such time as their cases were dealt with.

Normally, when a person applies for refugee status, their case is pending, and they move into Canadian society. We have no way of tracking them if they decide to disappear. I'm not suggesting this is a bad thing, but if we're concerned about security while the case is being reviewed.... Chuck is absolutely correct—in large part, the people who engaged in the September 11 attacks were carrying legal visas. So we're lax somewhere. They were not refugees. It's not simply refugee policy that is at stake here.

Mr. Charles Doran: Madam Chair, could I respond with one more comment here? As an analyst, what I'm worried about is this. If there is another event.... Your understanding of politics tells you how people begin to do things in a way that is helter-skelter rather than systematic and effective in terms of passing legislation. There are many people who say that lamentably, unfortunately, the events we have seen could be replicated, maybe not in size, maybe not in the same place, in the same way, but there will be some events. Terrorism is not something we have put behind us, unfortunately.

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What I'm concerned about is that there is progress made, and seen to be made, so that one can say we've done what we could, we've made an honest, serious effort to deal with these issues, we aren't perfect, but we've made these efforts on both sides, and then we take what we can get. But if we couldn't say that, if the press couldn't express things in that fashion, and another event were to take place, then I think the capacity of government to control the response would not be very good.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine (Etobicoke—Lakeshore, Lib.): Thank you, Madame Lalonde. I'm sure you will agree you've had more than....

Ms. Francine Lalonde: Yes, I've had a lot of very interesting answers.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine): But very interesting for all of us. Thank you so much.

Dr. Doran, I notice from your biography that you are director of Canadian studies. We've had several people who were very strategic in terms of dealing with Canadian studies, Canadian relations, etc., speak to us. Yet over and over we hear about misconceptions about Canada, about Canadians, about Canadian policies. What is it you are teaching?

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine): And why is it we have that gap in terms of knowledge and true information about each other, despite all the things that have been said here about being good neighbours, working together very closely, knowing exactly what each other is doing, etc.? Americans seem not to know us. As legislators, how can we work in such a way that we can better access and clarify understandings, etc., about Canadian policies?

Mr. Charles Doran: That's a very interesting question, and I was going to say in the opening remarks that I'm the one who brought this first snowstorm to Canada.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Mr. Charles Doran: My response would be a little bit like this. You know, we in Canadian studies have a daunting task and that is to try the best we can to provide some information, particularly to students, but in other forums as well. Professor Randall mentioned to me earlier that he had just addressed a group of businessmen, labour leaders, and so on in the west. We try to do these kinds of things as effectively as we can, but there's still a way to go. There are lots of misconceptions about Canada and the United States that are significant.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine): How can we change that?

Mr. Charles Doran: When I said Canadians know about us and we know about Canadians, I was talking about policy circles. I was talking about a small circle of people who spent their lives, in effect, studying each other and interacting in this fashion. There's very little that passes back and forth, or internally in each country, that these groups don't know about. As you know, it feeds into the policy process. But that is a specialized sort of group, and in a democracy it's important to have broad-based knowledge and understanding, which is what our universities are supposed to be addressing, and we do our best to support that.

Let me just say there's an association of Canadian studies in the United States. It's not unique to the United States, because many other countries now have such an association. Of course, Canada has a very prominent one of its own. There are 1,100 members from universities across the United States. We just had our meetings in San Antonio, Texas. We'd like very much to invite you to participate in the next meetings. It would be interesting for you to see what is being done in terms of discussion of all aspects of Canada in those meetings. But even so, despite that, it's still a fairly small group of people relative to a population of 275 million.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine): Do you think we should have one day a year when all the professors, like Professor Randall, exchange with all the professors...?

Mr. Stephen Randall: May I add a very quick comment?

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It's an interesting question, of course. I suggested in my presentation that the real issue is what happens in Congress. When it comes right down to the bottom line, individual congresspersons, regardless of where they come from, with a few exceptions, are concerned with their constituents; they're not concerned with Canada and the United States. They're concerned with the economic, social, and political concerns of their constituents, not with the cross-border issues—unless they happen to be in an area where cross-border issues are important to them. It doesn't matter, on one level, what the level of familiarity is with Canada. There are real interests at stake in the final analysis, as well.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine): It's my final minute or so. I was intrigued by the closing statement in your paper, Professor. You said “we can envisage a sharp departure in new directions”. I just wondered what you thought those new directions would be and what the departure point might be for new directions in the bilateral or broader trilateral relationship.

Mr. Stephen Randall: I don't think I was suggesting sharp departures; I was suggesting we would have continuity. My closing comment was “As with most things in history, I think we can see as much continuity in all areas as we can envisage a sharp departure or new directions...”. In fact, I was saying the opposite: what we're looking at is continuity and intensification of pressures that already exist, rather than a departure.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine): Thank you.

Dr. Patry.

Mr. Bernard Patry (Pierrefonds—Dollard, Lib.): Thank you very much, both professors.

Mr. Doran, I have just one question. You mention in your brief that “Each government should approve of an exit visa system that works and should share this information with the other government.” I'd like to get a little bit of precision regarding this. Is it an exit visa, let's say, for Canadian purposes, that people coming into Canada and leaving the country after would have, or is it between the two countries? I'm just seeking to have a little precision.

I'll go to my second question, and both could answer this. You also said that each government has to study the French system of dealing with terrorism when it is of a sort associated with fundamentalist Islamicism. My question is this. We're talking about security—about a lot of things like this—but what's going to happen after Afghanistan? It's the problem right now, and the quotation applies quite well in that area, but what's going to happen with terrorism?

It's the root of the terrorism that bothers me here. We Catholics have the Pope; in some other religions there is a head of the religion; but for them there is none. And if you're looking at what's happening right now in Saudi Arabia, there's close to 30% unemployment there. There are major problems in all these areas of the world. Is the United States doing anything about this?

The problem starts there. We can try to find a solution between our countries, but if we don't try to find the real solution, at the beginning.... Is anything done in that way in the United States, and in Canada also?

Those are my two questions.

Mr. Stephen Randall: It's a very important question, and I'm not sure I have the expertise to answer what will transpire after Afghanistan. The resolution of the al-Qaeda and Taliban situation in Afghanistan will not, under any circumstances, end terrorism. I think we all recognize that.

You alluded to Saudi Arabia. Yes, the 15% to 25% unemployment there is a very serious problem. There is no doubt that if we are serious about changing the dynamic in the Muslim world there has to be significant economic development. There has to be. Afghanistan has no economy. It's going to have to turn, of course, to opium production and export it. That's all it has at this particular stage, if it doesn't engage in arms trafficking instead, as it has in the past. Pakistan is extremely vulnerable, in addition to Saudi Arabia.

The relationship between the two nuclear powers in the continent—between India and Pakistan—is still very volatile. This goes way beyond just the terrorism problem. I think we have a very serious international security problem in that region of the world.

We know how vulnerable Saudi Arabia is. As long as Saudi Arabia pays off—and it does, I think we all know—all of the potential terrorists of various factions, it's relatively secure. The Saudi royal family, extended as it is, is extremely corrupt. I recommend to you an excellent piece in The New Yorker magazine a few issues ago on this—as well as other possible reading, of course. There's no doubt that regime is unstable.

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The oil fields in Saudi Arabia, which we were talking about just before the session started today, are extremely vulnerable to a low-tech terrorist attack—extremely vulnerable. It wouldn't take very much to knock the Saudi fields out for a significant period of time. The quotations I think we've all seen are that if that happens, oil prices go to $100 a barrel immediately. Now, Albertans will be delighted, I hasten to add, and the University of Calgary would be very pleased to get some additional provincial funding at this stage, since prices have dropped to $16 a barrel, as we know.

But, yes, I think “after Afghanistan” is a major problem that we in the developed world have to confront.

Mr. Bernard Patry: And the point in your brief about the exit visa.

Mr. Charles Doran: Well, let me take the exit issue first. The introduction of this idea is not reflective of U.S. policy today, nor, I think, Canadian policy, but is reflective of my judgments.

First of all, I think it is very difficult, as I look at the way these things have to be enforced, to enforce a policy for either government if they don't know whether the people who have visas or have entered the country are still in the country or not.

Secondly, I observe that in the European countries, despite the Schengen agreement and the other sorts of efforts to open up movement of people and so on, it's very common, say, when you go to a hotel in Paris, to turn over your passport. They know who you are and where you are. Does that happen here? It's never happened here because we haven't needed it, and I hope we won't go that way. Almost all these governments have an exit policy: you flash your passport; they know who you are when you leave.

We don't do that. I think there'd be many Americans who'd be opposed to this. But I think they're wrong, because it's not very burdensome, when you're going through a gate, to flash your passport and say you're leaving. And the information enforcement agencies have from that—not about the people who are going through without any concern, but regarding the others that they'll try to look for—is invaluable. It's very easily gathered, is very easily shared, and is very relevant.

I would suggest that's the kind of small step that isn't going to burden anybody. It's not going to create longer lines or anything like that. It could be very helpful; that's why I've suggested it.

But the second one, of course, is the core question for the future. Let me try to anchor my response in terms of specifics. It might not be satisfactory, but it's the way I would approach it.

Osama bin Laden and his group have as their objective not really targeting the United States or Canada or France or Britain or whatever; their real objective is the Middle East. Their real objective is regimes like the Saudi regime, the Egyptian regime—they'd love to target the Jordanian regime—all the so-called moderate regimes in the area. Now, those countries don't have a situation where they have no problems; they all have problems—unemployment, and efforts to preserve rights, and all kinds of serious, difficult problems. But the point is they are struggling along, and they also happen to be in an area where the bulk of the world's exportable petroleum is.

What Osama bin Laden would like to do is target us, because we have been more vulnerable. We're easier. Most of these people have been kicked out of those countries. He would like to have us be forced into a situation where we take actions that undermine those governments. He specifically mentioned removing troops from Saudi Arabia. Why? Because he knows that little country of about eight million people, with this gargantuan amount of oil, cannot defend itself in the face of pressures from Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. If he can convince people to believe those forces shouldn't be there, for whatever reason, he is a long way in the direction of undermining those governments.

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We understand his strategy perfectly, but it's amazing how successful he has been, particularly in the Islamic world, in arguing for these things without revealing what his true strategy is and without revealing what the consequences would be of pursuing that strategy.

So this is a long battle. After this is over with, there will still be plenty of other issues and problems. I know people here are beginning to be aware of this. They're beginning to be aware of it even in California, a long way away from what's happening on the east coast. But this is going to be a long struggle, even in terms of this so-called Islamicism. It's not Islamic views, it's not legitimate religion; it's the exploitation and manipulation of religion as an ideology for the purposes of undermining governments in the area.

Mr. Bernard Patry: Thank you first of all for the answer. I think at the end he wants to recreate something a little bit like the Ottoman Empire under Islam.

Mr. Stephen Randall: If you look at Saudi Arabian educational systems, the number of teachers in the school system who are radical Islamic advocates from other countries in the region, from Egypt and elsewhere, is very high. So you're dealing with a political culture and an educational environment in which the views of radical Islam, which are not that far from those of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, are permeating a society that is being held together in a very fragile way from the top, with U.S. support, as you've indicated.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine): Dr. Martin. Keep to five minutes, please, with brief answers.

Mr. Keith Martin: Thank you.

This is getting into an utterly fascinating topic, so relevant to our security and the security of the United States. I couldn't agree with you more, Professor Randall, on the issues you've mentioned about the security challenges we all face, be it in Kashmir or Saudi Arabia, which I believe could undergo the same cataclysmic changes that took place in Iran. This is a deep concern to many of us for the reasons you've mentioned.

My question is to both of you, since you both answered this so very well. In the context of the coalition we have built at this point in time, with partners that we couldn't have envisioned sitting down at the table with in this fashion a year ago—Pakistan et al—how do you think we can utilize this coalition to deal with the largest security issues of Kashmir, of Saudi Arabia, of the Arab and west divide? How can we utilize the moderate Arab states to act as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism? How can we utilize this coalition to build ties of long-term security for the international community?

You brought up this point, which I think is so critical in draining the swamp. How can we actually use Islamic states to act as a bulwark to counteract the negative propaganda that's fed to children from a very young age? It feeds them this negative, vile, venal, hateful propaganda. How can we diffuse that in an effort to have fewer people who are willing to give up their lives in the manner that we saw on September 11? I know it's a large question.

Mr. Stephen Randall: You're not kidding; it's a large question. I'll try to give a very quick answer to a very sophisticated and troubling question, of course.

Let me start on the negative side. The last thing we must do is to encourage the United States to attack anybody else. If there is an effort to unseat Saddam Hussein, I think we totally underestimate his appeal, his support throughout the Islamic world. The rhetoric that has emanated from the Bush administration over the last few months in this area is not only irresponsible, but is extremely dangerous. This is absolutely the last thing that must be done, and the same is true of any attack on any other Islamic state at this stage. It would fragment that coalition instantly and it would totally undermine what might be described as the moderate Islamic movement and moderate Islamic beliefs, and the moderate Islamic states as well.

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Let me turn to the positive side of this. What we shouldn't do is engage in irresponsible military activity. What we have to do on the positive side is to encourage moderate Islam in some way.

I don't have any solutions in terms of how we'd do this. I don't think we'd do this by establishing Canadian and American Studies programs in the Middle East, frankly. I think we have to ensure that these are movements that come from within those societies, that are seen to be indigenous to those societies, not superimposed by external powers. Middle Eastern states have had a high degree of sensitivity to imperialism and to external intervention, which goes back to at least the Crusades. Hence the high degree of sensitivity to George Bush's use of that term “crusade” at the beginning of the post-September 11 response.

I'm not a Middle Eastern specialist, and I don't pretend to have any solutions to that, but if you combine those two things, what we shouldn't do and what we should do, I think we have at least the beginning of some initiative.

Mr. Charles Doran: Thank you for the excellent question.

Let's start with the positive. For the first time since 1945, all the leading states, at least in a titular sense, a sense of assertive statement, are on the same side of an issue. That includes Russia and that includes China. That should not be underestimated as a significant factor in the capacity to do what was felt was necessary in Afghanistan. Just think of the opposite situation. Suppose Russia had opposed this. Suppose Russia had really tried to deny the use of air bases there. Suppose there had been Chinese involvement of a different sort. You can well imagine how messy and complicated this would be.

So the positive thing is that all responsible governments recognize that this level of terrorism—multilateral, organized in a corporate fashion, funded beyond anything we imagined before, this far away from using weapons of mass destruction.... That is something that focuses the mind.

I just said that it seems to me that the governments in the area—I'd say Islamic governments, not just Arab governments.... That includes Iran. Iran supports the Northern Alliance. Let's not forget that. That's in its own self-interest, because it knew the al-Qaeda people were just as challenging to the regime that exists in Iran as to other regimes.

The reality that these policies are aimed against those governments, first of all, is something they understand much better than we do. But they are very limited in how they can express this, for the reasons you've mentioned. In the so-called street, it's very easy for people who are poor, who have not had an opportunity to express their feelings and views other than through a kind of Islamic ideological route, to look upon groups as Robin Hoods. In fact, even those people understand this is not true, but out of frustration they feel this.

What can we do? My own judgment is that we need to maintain our contacts with those governments. When we talk about visa problems, let's not cut off the communication of students going back and forth. The bulk of them are the best ambassadors that Canada and the United States and other western countries could have in the area. Let's continue to maintain contacts. Let's not embarrass those governments. We simply have to be patient, because there's a limit to what we can do in terms of our resources and our capacity for change.

• 1030

One of the problems for the United States is people say, on the one hand, “You are doing too much. You are an arrogant superpower.” On the other hand, they say, “Why didn't you do more? Why are you allowing all this to happen?” And Washington is accustomed to being caught in the middle of these sorts of pressures.

I would say we have to be modest and realistic in terms of how we can deal with these issues while remaining open and communicative, particularly with the youth and with the press in those countries.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine): Thank you, Professor.

Madam Jennings.

Ms. Marlene Jennings (Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair.

First of all, I would like to apologize for having missed your presentation. With the weather, I had difficulty getting my transportation into effect. But I have read both your written presentations. I want to ask you something on one area.

You have both talked about the importance of continuing to provide support to the moderate Arab states and attempting to grapple and develop some kind of policy in terms of international development that would provide support for moderate Arabs within those states to allow them to have a voice.

I think that is good, but I think the challenge may be even bigger than you have described. One, because in those so-called moderate states, it's actually the middle class that has been completely disaffected because of, to a certain extent, the tyranny of their governments, and the non-representation of their governments.

When we look at the al-Qaeda network, and those who have actually been influential, and we look at the background of those 19 suicide bombers, they didn't come from the uneducated classes; they actually came from the middle class. They are actually quite well educated. So how do we, whether as a superpower in the case of the United States, or Canada as a middle state—as one of your colleagues, Mr. Doran, described Canada—actually assist both the middle class and the moderates within Arab states and within primarily Islamic states and governments to have an effective voice, and to feel they have an effective voice, within their own country, and by having this voice be able to actually have worth within those societies?

Mr. Stephen Randall: It's a very good question, and again there is no simple answer, or perhaps not even an answer to that.

You are perfectly right. The middle class, where it exists—it's not really true of Saudi Arabia, but in a number of contexts—is disaffected. This may seem naive, but I think that economic development is the only area where we can make a significant contribution.

In terms of political change, the last thing we want to do is to try to impose some kind of western-style democracy. What has happened in Iran, which was alluded to before, is an excellent model. The shift away from the more radical and fundamentalist approach of a decade ago, or more, to what is at least moving in the direction of an Iranian-style democratic and moderate regime, is what one wants to see happen elsewhere in the region.

I do feel, rightly or wrongly, that high levels of unemployment, the total inability of a significant number of people who graduate from universities in the Middle East to find any kind of significant employment at all, is a major contributing factor to the disaffection on the whole. That's where we need, in terms of our development policies and aid policies, to concentrate, in trying to ensure somehow that the employment situation improves, that there is a greater opportunity, if you wish, for highly educated people to realize some degree of real engagement and involvement in their society.

If I'm not mistaken, I think Egypt produces something like 20,000 new lawyers every year, only to move into the ranks of the semi-employed. That's an unacceptable situation if you're going to achieve real engagement in a society and to discourage the disaffection.

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I have one additional comment. I think support for the moderate Islamic states is absolutely critical. And if you look at what the Arab League has said about the possibility of the way in which they would react to any additional military activity in the region, that's the last thing we want to do. I think the coalition is very fragile, as I've said before.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine): Very briefly, Dr. Doran.

Mr. Charles Doran: First of all, I want to say that this phrase—which nobody has used here, fortunately, but is used sometimes in the United States—“clash of civilizations”, popularized by a book by a colleague of ours in the United States, I think has really done terrible damage, that mentality. The fact is there is no clash of civilizations. There are more differences of opinion within every one of these countries, and groups and coalitions, and so on than there are between any sort of broad-based difference between cultures. It's important to say that and to say it again, and to say it again and believe it.

Secondly, economic development and terrorism are now being treated together. I can see it happening in Washington. It's just evolving. It's rolling off the lips of everybody. The reality is, if you did a correlation between terrorist acts and development you wouldn't find a very good correlation at all.

Still, as Dr. Randall has said, somewhere in the backdrop, over time, as states become developed...the developing process itself is unstable, but once they get to be developed and become more democratic they're going to be much less prone to these kinds of attitudes, and violence, and so on. And the people who are subject to these temptations are probably going to be much less numerous.

The reality is that terrorism is carried out by a very few people in a very highly organized way with a lot of financing, in a totally new kind of setting. And it is important to deal also directly with that threat, if for no other reason than they have the potential to impact on governments there and here in a way that's totally different. And I must say, some of this is going to involve force used and it's going to have to be in conjunction with allies and friends in the west and in the region, because we're all in this in a different way from what was the case before.

I'm afraid that we have to approach this in a two-level fashion. We have to encourage openness, particularly, and contact with youth and the press in these countries, and we have to pursue this through the wonderful techniques, for example, that you do in CIDA. CIDA is a very fine organization. But we also have to be aware that because of the focused, intense nature of this new threat, we also have to deal with it directly.

The Vice-Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine): Thank you very much, Dr. Doran.

I must say that your two presentations were really interesting and informative and we're so happy that we've had you here this morning.

I'd like to invite you to stay and hear the presentations from the University of Toronto, Carleton University, the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, and participate. Since it will be focusing on intelligence and counter-terrorist cooperation, you might find their presentation enlightening and you might want to participate with us in the discussion. So I'd like to invite you, if it's possible for you to remain with us. We'll put you and our presenters to the two ends of the table.

Thank you so much.

To our presenters, I know we were a few minutes late starting, but we'll invite you now to come to the table, Mr. Rudd, Mr. Rudner, and Professor Wark.

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The Chair: We're now going to move to our second panel for the morning.

We'd like to welcome Mr. Rudd, from the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies; Mr. Rudner, from Carleton University; and Mr. Wark, from the University of Toronto.

I gather our previous panelists have been good enough to stay with us. We may be able to bring them into this discussion.

Thank you, gentlemen, for coming. I understand we're going to talk about U.S.-Canada cooperation in security, anti-terrorism, and intelligence matters.

We'll ask you to lead off, Mr. Rudd. If we can keep everybody to around 10 minutes, it means we'll have about 40 minutes for questions. Thank you.

[Translation]

Mr. David Rudd (Executive Director, Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies; individual presentation): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

[English]

Thank you very much for the invitation to appear before the committee.

Before I begin, I'd like to give you the standard disclaimer. My remarks are my own. They do not represent those of the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies.

Oh yes, and I'd also like to thank you for the snow. Thank you for that too.

The Chair: It's Ottawa's anti-visitor mechanism that we have. We implement it for about four months of the year.

Mr. David Rudd: Mr. Chairman, was the snow provided for in the federal budget?

The Chair: No, but I'll tell you the municipal budgeters don't like it.

Mr. David Rudd: As the committee has been examining continental relations and receiving testimony on how Canada and the U.S. can, or should, cooperate to thwart terrorism in North America, it's appropriate of course that we ask what the various security agencies in this country are doing, or can do, in this regard.

First, let me make one observation. Counter-terrorism is primarily, although not exclusively, the responsibility of civilian authorities. In an international context, foreign intelligence-gathering agencies detect and thwart the efforts of terrorists. In a domestic or North American context, counter-terrorism is primarily the preserve of counter-intelligence organizations, as well as law enforcement agencies, as we know—and by this I mean the RCMP, CSIS, and their U.S. counterparts. But also it's the responsibility of organizations such as Citizenship and Immigration Canada, as well as the folks with the metal detectors at the Ottawa airport.

I believe my colleagues are going to deal with the role of these organizations and how cooperation with their U.S. counterparts can be enhanced. What I intend to do this morning, ladies and gentlemen, is to speak to Canada's continental defence arrangements, but only those arrangements that are relevant to counter-terrorism. I will not touch on those arrangements or agreements that are related to overseas military operations, for example. This is something for another day and possibly also another committee.

• 1050

Briefly, those Canada-U.S. arrangements of primary interest in the current political context are, in no special order, the North American Aerospace Defence Agreement, as well as the Permanent Joint Board on Defence.

Now we know NORAD is concerned with the surveillance and defence of North American aerospace, keeping an eye on everything from manned aircraft to orbiting space junk. Before September 11, it was looking outward. Sadly, I regret to report it is also now looking inward at threats from within. As we know, it may be involved in the interception of civilian aircraft. I cannot believe I am holding out the possibility that it might at some time be involved in the actual destruction of a civilian aircraft, but after September 11, little seems to surprise me.

What should be of interest to this committee are the command and control arrangements that may allow such orders to be transmitted. In the United States, the authority to intercept and deal with commandeered aircraft has been already delegated to senior air force commanders by the President of the United States.

It is unclear to me, Mr. Chair, whether similar authority rests in the hands of Canadian air force officers, or whether the Prime Minister would have to be contacted. There must be some degree of consensus between Canada and the United States on how an aircraft travelling between our two countries will be treated if it is reasonably certain that it has been commandeered.

If it's a Canadian aircraft in U.S. airspace, who makes the call? Can the call be made in time? The President of the United States, as you know, has a hot link to his air defence command. Does the Prime Minister of Canada have one? I don't know. The command and control arrangements need to be clarified at the highest political level, and they also need to be streamlined so our joint response to this awful—and somewhat still improbable—threat is a timely one.

Second, as our aerospace is shared, the committee might be inclined to reflect on the location of our air defence assets. As you probably know, we have had CF-18 aircraft based in Trenton, Ontario. Why? Well, this base lies in and around some of the most crowded air corridors in North America. Is this something we need to continue with on a permanent basis, or can we rely on our American cousins to provide this capability? Again, this must be discussed.

Moving along to the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, which is the highest-level forum for discussion of continental defence issues, I'd like to make two recommendations to the committee. First, after September 11 we must encourage ministerial participation in these semi-annual gatherings. Currently I believe this is not the case. There is a senior Canadian, a senior American, but generally there is no ministerial participation. I believe this should change.

The presence of the Minister of National Defence sends a reassuring message to the United States that we take our continental security seriously. It also builds a bond of trust with the Secretary of Defense, a bond upon which we may rely in case we need American assistance.

Let me give you an example. A couple of years ago during the ice storms in eastern Ontario and western Quebec, it was partially due to the personal bonds between the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force and his Canadian counterpart that allowed us to tap into American resources to help us in that quasi-humanitarian effort. All it took was a phone call down to Washington to get the ball rolling. We must not underestimate the value of personal relationships.

My second recommendation is that the chief Canadian and U.S. representatives on the Permanent Joint Board on Defence should make a point of regularly appearing before this committee to keep Parliament informed about what concrete steps are being taken to foster the security of both nations. Conversely, those two representatives should also do whatever is necessary to get themselves invited to the appropriate House of Representatives and Senate committees.

• 1055

Ladies and gentlemen, I could go on about critical infrastructure protection. I could even go on about missile defence and the notional program of building a shield that would conceivably protect Canada as well as the United States. I know that my time is fast running short. If you would like to ask questions about that during the Q and A session, I am prepared to answer them.

Just to conclude, let me remind you that, again, what September 11 did not change is the fact that counter-terrorism is primarily but not exclusively a non-military activity. The military can be used reactively, but it is not our first line of defence.

I believe that Canada has appropriate continental defence arrangements in place; however, they may need to be tweaked along the lines of what I suggested with regard to NORAD, its command and control arrangements, and also the Permanent Joint Board on Defence.

I'll stop there and hand the mike to my colleagues. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Rudd.

We're going to go next to Mr. Wark.

Mr. Wesley Wark (Professor of International Relations, University of Toronto): Thank you, Mr. Graham, for this invitation, and thank you to the honourable members.

I hope the committee has not fled en masse at the mention of the word “intelligence”.

Voices: Oh, oh!

Mr. Wesley Wark: I must say, in my experience of Parliament, Parliament has been lamentably blind to intelligence and security issues in the past. I'm pleased to have this opportunity to address some of these issues in this current crisis.

The Chair: Just assume you've got the most intelligent members of the committee here, so that's why....

Mr. Wesley Wark: I assumed that implicitly, Mr. Graham.

In thinking about this talk, I was reminded of a famous essay by Isaiah Berlin, a British academic philosopher and, as all British academic philosophers become at some time, an intelligence officer as well. He wrote an essay called “The Hedgehog and the Fox”. The essence of that essay was to describe two kinds of knowledge. The fox knows many things and the hedgehog knows one big thing. It strikes me that this metaphor is applicable to the world of intelligence and security, where Canada has to be both the fox, especially with regard to foreign intelligence, and the hedgehog, especially with regard to security intelligence.

Canada's capacity to be both hedgehog and fox depends, I think, critically on the nature of its intelligence alliance relationship with the United States. The United States is of course not our only intelligence ally, but it has become over the years our main one. The relationship with the United States in the intelligence area is longstanding and dates back in fact to the Second World War.

The value of this intelligence alliance can easily be enumerated. The alliance relationship provides Canada with access to a great pool of intelligence data, reports, and technological systems. It also presents Canada with an opportunity to better understand the dynamics of American policy and even on occasion, through the careful exchange of intelligence reports, to attempt to influence American thinking.

My purpose in these brief remarks is to try to highlight what I see as some worrying trends in the Canada-U.S. alliance connection. Essentially, I have two points I want to make. One has to do with ally worthiness, and the second has to do with the mechanics, if you like, of intelligence liaison.

With regard to ally worthiness, I believe that Canada is in serious danger of losing its place at the allied intelligence table. Were that place ever lost after 60 years of accumulated history, it could never be recovered. The costs would be enormous. They would include loss of access to U.S.-generated intelligence, with a consequent loss of security at home in this country and a blindness abroad. It would include loss of influence, and it would open us up to vulnerability to more aggressive and intrusive intelligence-gathering in our country on the part of both allies and enemies alike.

Why might our ally worthiness now be in question? I think there are a number of reasons for this. One has to do with the limited extent of Canadian intelligence capabilities as they currently stand. The second has to do with a perception of Canada abroad and in the United States as insecure and as a terrorist safe haven.

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The third reason has to do with what I see as a shift of attention on the part of our major-power intelligence allies, in particular the United States, to the difficult business of alliance formation in the intelligence field with “regional partners”, especially in the Middle East and Central Asia. I believe that task in the context of the current war on terrorism will take up a lot of the resources and attention of the United States.

What needs to be done in terms of ensuring our ongoing allied worthiness in the intelligence field? In my view, Canada requires a reinvestment in foreign and security intelligence to boost Canadian capabilities in order to bring more barter goods to the allied relationship and in order to combat the perception that Canada is domestically insecure. Canada might also need, in addition to reinvestment, new forms of investment in intelligence collection in terms of certain kinds of intelligence methodologies we have historically shunned. I'm thinking in particular of the question of whether Canada now needs to create a foreign secret service.

To engage in the reinvestment or in new investment in the field of security and intelligence requires, I think, as a first step a systematic review of the current Canadian intelligence community. There has been no such review in this country since the end of the Cold War. I believe it is long overdue.

Let me turn to the second point, which has on the face of it more to do with the nuts and bolts of the intelligence business. It is nonetheless essential, and it has to do with liaison systems. The mechanisms of intelligence liaison are at the heart of a functioning intelligence alliance. In the Canadian case we have, I believe, allowed those mechanisms to corrode very badly. They are underutilized, and the liaison mechanisms replicate what is the essentially disorganized and incoherent structure of the Canadian intelligence community.

Liaison between Canada and the United States—and this is also true between Canada and the U.K.—is essentially conducted not as a central function of government but on an agency-by-agency basis with no overall control or accountability. Thus, we have in Washington at our embassy and in co-located offices, liaison officers representing the RCMP, CSIS, the Communications Security Establishment, the Department of National Defence's Intelligence Branch, J2, and the Intelligence Assessment Committee.

Historically, the Intelligence Assessment Committee's liaison officer was meant to be the senior representative of the intelligence community in the United States, but that practice no longer holds. In fact, the IAC liaison officers in Washington and in London are appointments under the control not of the Privy Council Office, where the IAC resides, but of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. In recent years those posts—I suppose because of the attractiveness of the postings, Washington and London—have rarely been occupied by professional intelligence officers. That strikes me, frankly, as a scandal.

The liaison system needs to be fixed as a matter of urgency and as an early and easy sign of our commitment to a reinvestment in intelligence capabilities. By “fixed” I mean three things. We need to create a more integrated system of liaison representation, with an identified senior officer responsible for that function in Washington and responsible to the coordinator for security and intelligence in the Privy Council Office. Second, I would argue that we need to provide additional, highly qualified personnel for liaison officer duties in Washington. Third, I think we need to create a government-wide strategy to determine the precise nature of the intelligence data and reporting to be shared with U.S. agencies and to be acquired from U.S. agencies. There is at the present time, in my understanding, no such strategy.

To conclude, I would say that for Canada to be both hedgehog and fox in the world of intelligence, we must maintain the vital intelligence alliance links with the United States. Yet in the circumstances of post-September 11, our ally worthiness is and will be put to a severe test, and it rests on dangerously thin foundations.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Professor Wark.

Mr. Rudner.

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Mr. Martin Rudner (President, Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies, Carleton University): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

With the committee's permission, I'd like to focus my remarks on a particular discipline within intelligence, and that is signals intelligence, the capacity to collect communications and other electronic signals and make them into processed products of use to policy-makers.

Signals intelligence has played a salient role, we understand, in the anti-terrorist campaign. We know signals intelligence was instrumental in the detection, and probably the conviction, of Mr. Rassam for his conspiracy to attack the Los Angeles airport. There is understanding that signals intelligence is playing a salient role in our efforts against al-Qaeda and other global networks. The British Financial Times, in an article just the other day, indicated the British signals intelligence agency, the government communications headquarters, was playing a leading role in the war in Afghanistan.

In Canada we have an agency, the Communications Security Establishment, that is our dedicated signals intelligence-collecting agency. It is a dedicated foreign intelligence agency, and plays a salient role in the interception of communications and other electronic interceptions, and in the protection of Canadian communications. This agency is arguably the most costly of Canada's intelligence agencies and the most secretive, and it is one involved in an alliance structure that plays a crucial role, a pivotal role, in the provision of foreign intelligence to the Government of Canada, and in Canada's contributions to the support of the United States and other allies in the collection and processing of signals intelligence.

The remit of CSE, the Communications Security Establishment, currently involves the collection of communications intelligence abroad and excludes—up until recently—the collection of communications intelligence from Canadian individuals, as well as Canadian corporations and other organizations. In performing its function as a foreign-intelligence collection agency, we know from this year's report of the CSE commissioner that CSE produces over 100,000 processed products a year for policy-makers, decision-makers, and the Government of Canada.

The oversight to ensure CSE conforms to statute and to its policy directives is assured by the CSE commissioner, who is a judge. The bill that is being debated currently in the House of Commons, Bill C-36, provides two significant changes to the mandate of CSE.

First, it includes a remit for CSE to collect communications intelligence on communications coming to or from Canada. Second, it provides that with special authorization of the Minister of National Defence, communications interceptions can take place with respect to suspected terrorists who are indeed Canadian persons.

In Canada's signals intelligence effort, CSE is part of a larger alliance, a highly secretive alliance that has been in place for over half a century. In this alliance, Canada was allocated a particular geographic coverage, taking advantage of Canada's locational advantage, both northward and southward. As part of this plurilateral alliance, Canada provides intelligence collection services to our allies and benefits from a full sharing of signals intelligence collected by our allies and available to Canada.

Canada thus has access to the signals intelligence efforts of the United States, also to the technologies of the United States for interception and cryptanalysis. It also has access to the United States' training facilities in these domains of interception and cryptanalysis.

• 1110

Canada also gains access to American imagery intelligence available from American satellites. These are sophisticated capabilities that only the United States has for imagery, radar, and sensors from literally on high, from space. These sophisticated surveillance and satellite-based technologies are shared with Canada on a highly privileged basis. Even as part of peace support missions of NATO, the United States reserves for itself access to these privileged technologies, shares limited technologies with other NATO allies, and does not share at all with non-NATO members. However, Canada is treated in this way as a highly privileged partner and does, we are told, receive privileged access, as American forces do, to these imagery technologies.

We are the main beneficiaries from this alliance with the United States. The terms of trade in intelligence products greatly favours Canada. According to information available to us, the U.S. supplies something in the order of 90% to 95% of the communications intelligence products; Canada approximately 5% to 10%. We are net importers of high-value intelligence, and in fact, Canada's knowledge dependency on the United States both for intelligence products and intelligence technology is immense.

There's informal evidence, though, that much of the benefit we get from our alliance has focused on political and strategic intelligence, whereas financial and law enforcement intelligence has been fairly minor up until now, though with the events of September 11 and the aftermath, we would expect this to grow significantly in future.

The United States has been generous to Canada in the terms of trade of this intelligence relationship, but there are also indications of a certain uneasiness in the United States about this asymmetry in the relationship. Already in the 1940s, the Americans were indicating they were not content to share fully with Canada because Canada was not a major supplier, and there are signals that this concern on the American side has remained present, if not latent, up until recently.

Certainly the British, at the most senior level of cabinet office, have expressed concern that should British supply of intelligence product from signals diminish, Britain would no longer be considered alliance worthy with the United States to the possible reduction of British access to very valuable intelligence resources.

Signals intelligence is confronted with some challenges, and I would like briefly to identify them for perhaps questions and discussion in committee.

There are technical challenges. Communications today are going increasingly through fibre optic channels, and there's question whether the technologies available for interception can be effective in the interception of communications through fibre optics.

There's a human resource challenge, arising firstly from the massive take of communications intelligence, which has to be analysed and made relevant to clients, and second, from the need for translation of communications intercepts from obscure languages. There's a tremendous requirement for language and other types of skills to assist analysts to cope with the surge, the flood, of intelligence from signals intelligence sources.

There's an international relations dilemma. Britain is being seduced by Europe to join in a combined European effort as part of the European security and defence initiative. If Britain were to join Europe, it's questionable whether the transatlantic SIGINT connection could remain viable, and if it did not remain viable, Canada would lose its access to American partnership.

As my colleague, Wesley Wark, mentioned, there's currently an initiative to bring about alliance or coalition building with countries with whom we've never cooperated in intelligence—countries in the Middle East, countries that have authoritarian traditions, countries that have human rights violations in security as part of their approach to the gathering of intelligence. It would be very difficult in many ways for Canada to share with countries with whom we have very little in common in human rights. Yet if Canada does not provide value-added to trade in intelligence, especially communications intelligence, we will find our partnership within our alliance compromised.

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It is a categorical imperative for Canada to maintain and enhance our signals intelligence relationship with the United States. This will require major efforts on the part of Canada—technical, financial, organizational and in terms of human resources for signals intelligence—to produce high-value product to balance our massive dependence on imported product and technology from the United States. We will have to demonstrate our value as an alliance coalition partner.

Secondly, we have a problem of public support. Signals intelligence has been highly secretive. There is much mythology, even demonology, about the collection of signals intelligence. It is important to ensure public awareness and public trust in our signals intelligence effort and in our important alliance with the United States and other allies.

This public trust will require transparency and knowledge among the public. In particular, we will require a parliamentary effort to enhance parliamentary oversight in the interests of knowledge and transparency, in order to provide the public with a basis for its trust in our signals intelligence effort.

Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Rudner.

Mr. Doran and Mr. Randall have stayed to listen. I don't know if they have anything specific they want to add, but maybe we'll just leave them there for questions when the members ask questions.

We'll go to Madam Lalonde.

[Translation]

Ms. Francine Lalonde: Thank you for being here. You will understand that we just changed subject suddenly. Personally I took some interest in the past in intelligence but it was a while ago.

My first question is short, here it is. How is it that with all their sophisticated intelligence technologies the Americans did not see the events of September 11 coming?

[English]

Mr. Wesley Wark: I'd be happy to try to field an answer to that interesting question from Madam Lalonde.

I think there are two things to be said. One is that terrorist operations are an intrinsically difficult target for intelligence services to penetrate and know about in advance. The complexity of that intelligence target should never be forgotten.

The second thing we need to understand in the current environment is that we know there was an intelligence failure on September 11. We don't know what kind of intelligence failure, and we probably won't know exactly what kind of intelligence failure for a long time to come.

What I mean by that, very briefly, is intelligence failures tend to take one of three forms. They can be failures of collection, where you simply don't have enough precise information, hard data, in advance of an event. They very often take the form of assessment failures, that is, the information is available but it's not properly made sense of, or is misunderstood. The third kind of intelligence failure is the failure of what in the jargon is called “dissemination”. There is intelligence available, it is properly assessed, a report or a series of reports is prepared on that particular kind of threat, but it doesn't get to decision-makers in time, or is simply not believed.

In the context of September 11, we don't know what kind of intelligence failure happened, whether it was one of these sorts or a combination of all three. Whatever the nature of the September 11 intelligence failure, it contains political dynamite. The American Congress has already decided to put off, for at least a year, any investigation into intelligence failure in the context of September 11—and I think for good reasons, in the political context.

Intelligence against terrorism is difficult. The United States failed. The real question that confronts us now is whether the American intelligence community can recover from the failure of September 11 sufficiently well and sufficiently quickly to ensure that intelligence is well-used in an ongoing war on terrorism.

[Translation]

Ms. Francine Lalonde: You will understand that this first question necessarily leads to others.

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Mr. Rudner ended by saying that we must give confidence to the population in the efficiency of this measure. I think that September 11 showed its inefficiency. The numerous articles that I read rather suggested that signals intelligence had been favored as opposed to field intelligence, sending in the field spies who would have accepted to live the life of presumed terrorists and who could have given first hand information.

I think that there is a big problem of confidence. You said that it was possible to collect a lot of data and not transmit or not analyze those data correctly and that the correct decisions were not made. You were alluding to the line of command that makes the decisions and has the information. Several different services do not share the information.

I know it is true in the United States. I understand that it might even be more difficult in Canada where we do not have important resources. I once heard a distinguished professor say that the main characteristic of Canada in those days was that we could collect those data but that the analysis was weak. One can collect just about anything but if the analysis is faulty, what use is it? It is true also for signals intelligence which meaning I do not know in French as I did not listen to the interpretation.

I am telling you all this in one piece. In my opinion, you have a long way to go to convince me that me must invest a lot of money in that. You are not the first ones to tell us that. Mr. Albert Legault and Mr. Daudelin were at the round table we had the other day. Even Mr. Daudelin, who does not work in this field and who is at the North-South Institute said that it was important for Canada.... In fact, Mr. Legault said that it was even more important to invest in intelligence than to invest in an army because if we invest in the army, three things might happen: either we will be consenting friends for the United States, or we will become pawns or mercenaries. He would prefer us to invest in intelligence, where we might be able to play a useful role.

I am throwing all this at you in one piece. Enlighten me.

[English]

Mr. Martin Rudner: I would like to respond to parts of this very important and challenging question. I think one has to separate it.

One wants to look not so much at intelligence failure as how one ensures that the kinds of gaps my colleague identified don't impose themselves on the relationship between the collection of information and the utilization of information for purposes of public safety and national security. Here we have legislative problems, organizational problems, and what one might call intelligence collection problems. Let me just briefly identify them, in response to the question.

On legislative questions, one of the difficulties in the United States, as in Canada, was until the new legislation we are now debating in Canada, and has been enacted in the United States, signals intelligence was prohibited from collecting SIGINT, or signals of communications intelligence, on Canadian or American persons, or on communications to and from our countries. A terrorist who was an American citizen, for argument's sake, or a landed immigrant in Canada, for argument's sake, was a Canadian person or an American person, and therefore was exempt from being targeted for communications intelligence problems.

Problem two occurs even when we conduct interceptions. We were told that two or three days ago there were some leaks out of Washington, but the U.S. National Security Agency was unable to translate reams of intercepts in the Arabic language because of a shortage of Arabic speakers who could pass the security clearance requirements of the intelligence organization.

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Frankly, as a professor of international affairs, I can tell you we are extremely poor in training Canadian students here in Canada in a range of languages to meet the needs, not just of our intelligence services, but of foreign affairs, international trade, and international security. So we too can't translate Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Tajik, or other languages, as may be collected for purposes of communications intelligence.

You asked how one gets intelligence on terrorist networks. From what we know of al-Qaeda, jihad, and other such groups, they are extremely tightly knit in the sense that you don't get into these organizations unless you're a part of a cell structure. It's extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate them.

However, intelligence, what is called HUMINT, will try to seek an agent in place or a mole in such organizations. It requires long-term involvement, long-term human intelligence collection, to place people in positions where they can actually get access to information about intentions on planning and operations. You cannot do this overnight and you cannot do this casually. It has to be strategically structured and conducted over time.

It is said, for example, that the British secret intelligence service achieves some standards of excellence, at least in some targeted countries, in this type of activity. We in Canada, for our absence of a foreign intelligence service, probably would not be capable now of mounting this type of human intelligence collection effort.

Third, on the problem my colleague has identified of falling between the slats, it is said today that one doesn't have SIGINT, HUMINT, or imagery. One needs to have a high degree of fusion—coordination between all types of intelligence efforts. So human intelligence feeds information to signals intelligence, which gathers information that supports human intelligence. One can't, in a sense, disintegrate the two and operate them separately. One has to have a high degree of coordination or fusion in the knowledge-gathering of intelligence, to make intelligence effective for public safety and national security.

The Chair: All right.

You have to be very brief, because we're well over time, and there are other questioners waiting to question. Maybe we could go on to the other questions and see if it comes to us later.

Madam Jennings.

Mrs. Marlene Jennings: Thank you.

Thank you very much for your presentations.

One of the things that struck me was the issue that was raised on the need for oversight of Canada's intelligence tools, whether it be CSE, RCMP or CSIS, and that parliamentary oversight was required.

The subcommittee on national security, which had been created back in the early 1990s as a subcommittee of the justice committee and was basically disbanded under the program review that indirectly hit Parliament itself, has just been re-established. Would that go a little bit of a way toward fulfilling what you feel is required, in terms of parliamentary oversight or governance on the intelligence-collecting institutions we have here in Canada? That's my first question.

Second, under Bill C-36, CSE's mandate and authority have actually been expanded, in the sense that it can now collect SIGINT data within Canada and between what are deemed Canadians and others, which expands the potential of intelligence data that can actually be collected. Do you think that will go a certain way toward alleviating whatever American insecurities there are that we're getting the best of the bargain and not pulling our weight, and therefore we're not necessarily as allied-worthy as we may have been in the past?

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In terms of our human resources challenges, it was interesting, Mr. Rudner, that you talked about the lack of Urdu and Arabic speakers, for instance. Just within the last couple of days government representatives appeared before the committee who do a certain amount of either counter-terrorism or intelligence collecting, and I asked them that very question. They said they know the region and have known for over a decade one of the regions where there's a great deal of instability and another one where there is terrorism. Even in terms of the super-terrorism that you're talking about, where it's not conventional military targets you are targeting but rather civilian populations.... Look at the Hamas Hezbollah, as an example, although no one seems to want to call them super-terrorists. I asked whether we were equipped. I was told yes, that it's not a problem. I was somewhat skeptical. So I'd like you to address that.

Lastly, with our capability to collect SIGINT data—that is, domestic security intelligence and foreign intelligence—is there a way we can capitalize on the fact that in terms of new communications technology Canada is either the country or one of the leading countries? We're also one of the countries that is the most connected. Is there some way we can capitalize on our technical expertise in those areas to improve our allied worthiness?

Those are my questions. Thank you.

Mr. Wesley Wark: I'll give four quick answers to four questions, all interesting ones from my perspective.

The subcommittee of the justice committee that previously existed and that was chaired for a number of years by Derek Lee—which is back in business, I understand—had a relatively limited and self-created mandate, which was essentially to look at the role of internal security issues in Canada. One of the difficulties I think we would have in parliamentary oversight is to make sure that intelligence is understood, if you like, as a seamless whole. We can't create artificial boundaries between domestic security intelligence and foreign intelligence any longer.

There are, of course, enormous difficulties in terms of how you have a functioning parliamentary review mechanism. I don't think we're really talking about oversight but rather a review of intelligence, because of the issue of security classifications and secrecy. We don't have a practice in this country generally of holding in-camera hearings on intelligence issues, and that would need to be addressed.

Let me offer a slight correction to my colleague Professor Rudner's remarks on Bill C-36. What Bill C-36 will create is a potential problem. Bill C-36 does indeed extend CSE's mandate to allow it to collect communications emanating from Canadian persons if they are part of a network of communications between Canadians and foreign persons. It will also mean that in fact we will have two agencies working on communications monitoring in Canada under different sorts of procedures and legal justification bases, if you like. We will have CSIS engaged in the domestic communications monitoring of Canadian persons, and we will now have CSE in the business as well.

Beware the creation of intelligence overlap in this area. I think it is potentially very damaging. The intelligence services will say they can cooperate fine—we're working together in an emergency. In the long term, I think this is something one has to be beware of.

On the human resources issue, intelligence officers like to say that their business is to speak truth for power. You may have heard this. That's a heroic endeavour. I think few of them think that their job is to speak truth to Parliament. There's very little traditional practice of that.

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Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. Wesley Wark: Of course, if you ask them if they have the tools they need, they're going to say yes, we're doing fine, because the alternative is to say no, we're not doing well. And the minute they do that, intelligence agencies get into a very difficult area for them, which is to look as if they're criticizing the government they work for and stepping into the area of policy. That is why I think we need a systematic and very professional look at the current capabilities of the intelligence community, which I think should combine an internal review and an external review of exactly the kind the United States is undergoing at the moment.

Your fourth question was whether Canada can capitalize on its capabilities. Yes, although I think the truth of the matter is that we're under-resourced and badly organized in the area of intelligence. Our reputation and our performance have suffered because of that. The fact of the matter is that we have the natural resources to be a good intelligence power in terms of our education systems, our technological capacities, and our multiculturalism. We could even be good at the business of spying overseas, if we ever got into that.

To come quickly back to Madame Lalonde's question, I think we have to be honest with ourselves and recognize that there is a very peculiar culture surrounding the issue of intelligence in Canada. Only in Canada would anybody ask whether intelligence is important. This would never be asked in the United States or Britain or by any of our major allies, because they know that on the basis of historical experience, the answer overwhelmingly is yes, of course. You have to have the best intelligence possible, because intelligence is a knowledge base for efficient policies and for trying to shape your role in the world in terms of domestic security. But for some reason we've never quite digested that message, although we have long historical experience in this area.

Mr. David Rudd: I have a quick rejoinder to the response on capitalizing on our expertise. It's one thing to be the leader in the field of producing a radar satellite or other technological gizmos that might allow us to wet our electronic finger and vacuum up everything in the electromagnetic spectrum. As Dr. Wark said, it's simply a matter of resources. You see this elsewhere as well. Northern Telecom, for example, is on the cutting edge of radar technology. It is producing, along with Germany and the Netherlands, a radar for naval vessels. I have serious doubts as to whether Canada will ever acquire that technology. The question is whether there is enough money in the defence budget. Will there be enough in the intelligence budget for us to capitalize on these technologies?

One thing I would suggest is that to the greatest degree possible we should look at the use of what is called commercial, off-the-shelf technology. As opposed to building elaborate computer networks that are perhaps unique to the intelligence community, we should be making use of—and we probably already are, or at least I hope we are—simple, reliable technologies, ones that are found in schools or universities. At the very least, this would allow us to pursue a type of intelligence gathering that a lot of people don't believe exists. Most of the intelligence on groups such as al-Qaeda can be garnered from human sources, as you know. A lot of it is available from open sources. As a wired society, we do have the ability to vacuum that up. But then we get into human resources and whether there are people there to process it.

The Chair: Thank you.

Madam Augustine.

Ms. Jean Augustine: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Beside me is Dr. Easter, who is from Atlantic Canada. I had to tell him that the brilliant Dr. Wesley Wark is from my university. I said University of Toronto, and he said there's too much University of Toronto.

The Chair: Well, we are talking about intelligence, Mr. Easter. I want to remind you of that.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Ms. Jean Augustine: Dr. Wark, you painted a dreary picture of our situation. If we were to talk about ally worthiness, our intelligence levels, our readiness, and all the links that are necessary, what would you say should be our top priority for cooperation—the foreign secret services, liaison systems? What would you advise us to make top priorities in terms of recommendations? And if you were to speak truth to power, how would you see those priorities working in light of everything that has been said around the table?

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In order to get the point made by our two previous presenters, that we make use of personal relationships—and we keep hearing this, “make use of personal relationships”—how can we move into these personal relationships in those areas that seem not to have the level of transparency and the involvement of parliamentarians at this point?

Mr. Wesley Wark: I'm sure my colleagues might want to comment on this question. If I can stretch the question a bit, I'll give you my sort of personal shopping list and not just the top priority. But I will try to prioritize them.

There are weaknesses, if you like, at all three levels of the intelligence process in this country: I think we are weak in some critical areas in terms of intelligence collection; we are weak in terms of our capability to assess intelligence and report on critical issues; and we are weak in terms of the structures and the systems that are in place to ensure intelligence reporting gets to senior decision-makers, gets onto the cabinet table, and gets to the Prime Minister's attention. All three of those areas, as a broad generalization, need urgent correction. I'm not sure one could come up with a top priority in this regard. This is again why the time has come for some serious look at this whole capacity.

If pressed to say where one should begin, if I could put it this way, I think of one of the past glories of the intelligence business in Canada—and I don't think I romanticize it here, though I do stress “past”.... Once we had developed a reputation for quality judgment in terms of our reporting, particularly on foreign issues, we developed this reputation in part on the basis of the cleverness and skill of a small set of dedicated intelligence officers who were working in the assessment function and who were combining their work with the political reporting, often of very high quality, that used to come out from major Canadian missions and embassies overseas. Both dimensions of this assessment and reporting capability have been allowed to seriously decline.

I'm sure this committee is well aware of the problems we now face in terms of the low level of political reporting from our embassies and missions overseas. And it has meant, if you like, a critical decline in our ability to engage in intelligence exchanges in a particular stream of finished reporting in which Canadian views, when packaged in that way, were listened to with respect and attention.

We also have a vastly under-resourced capability in the government for intelligence assessment. If I had my wish, the very first thing I would do would be to look at a reorganization of this sector and an increase of resources to it, to create in fact a Canadian equivalent of the office of national assessments as a stand-alone agency—and not with a handful of officers, but staffed by about fifty people who could be the central core of a reinvigorated intelligence capability.

On the foreign intelligence issue, the creation of a Canadian secret service also needs to be looked at seriously now, and it's probably the only opportunity we'll ever have in our lifetimes to take this issue seriously. The creation of a Canadian secret service might do many things for Canada in terms of its worth to its allies, but for a kick-off, if you like, it would help to convince them that we are actually serious about intelligence.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Okay. Well, perhaps I could follow this up with a couple of questions. Then I'll go to Dr. Patry.

Mr. Bernard Patry: I need to leave. I chair something at noon.

The Chair: Okay, you go quickly first.

Mr. Bernard Patry: Thank you very much.

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Someone spoke about the failure of intelligence. It was mentioned that it was maybe an assessment failure or that the people on top didn't want to hear about the assessment. This sounds right to me, because there were nineteen terrorists involved in the attack on the towers,; but another one, the twentieth one, was in jail—in custody in the United States—and he's probably still there. There was a proper assessment but it didn't reach the top.

I have a question. It started in 1995 with the first attack. After that came the bombing in 1998 of the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies and the USS Cole. All these inquiries pointed to the file of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and even if governments of America knew about this.... Even on our trip to Georgia, we discussed this matter with our colleague parliamentarians. The U.S. government knew Osama bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan. The present government decided to start negotiations with the Taliban regime, perhaps to have the possibility of running a gazoduc through Afghanistan.

Do you agree that because of its sense of invulnérabilité before September 11, the sense that North America would not be vulnerable, the priority for the U.S. government was solely economic, to the detriment of the security of North America?

Mr. Wesley Wark: I'm happy to try to tackle this.

First of all, let's recognize that the United States pumps massive resources into its intelligence community. The budget for intelligence in the United States is classified, but it's something exceeding $30 billion a year. This investment in intelligence, which of course dwarfs the Canadian investment, is an indication of the seriousness with which it takes the intelligence business. Again, the United States has had terrorism and al-Qaeda in its sights for a long time in terms of intelligence priorities.

I come back to the point I made earlier. We don't know what kind of failure exactly was experienced on September 11. But you have to understand that one of the difficulties that I think the American government faced in trying to understand the nature of a potential al-Qaeda threat was the factor of, if you like, unbelievability, on the one hand. No one before September 11 would have been able to predict honestly that an organization like al-Qaeda could have pulled off such an attack.

Second, there are certain kinds of threats for which there seems to be no realistic defence. By this I mean what would you have done if you'd had a general kind of alert that there might be some kind of al-Qaeda coordinated attack against a major American urban centre that might take the form of an airplane flying into a building? What do you do about it? This poses a fundamental difficulty for a government that is inclined to believe that such a thing is unbelievable in the first place and doesn't know what defensive mechanisms it could possibly employ. Do you evacuate Manhattan? Do you close down all air travel, and so on?

The combination of the unbelievability of the attack and the difficulty of imagining any defence might be part of this question of intelligence failure. But frankly—and this is just my own personal view—rather than poking our fingers into the unknowable question of what was the nature of the American intelligence failure, we should be looking closer to home at questions such as did Canada suffer an intelligence failure on September 11; did we have information that wasn't properly utilized or supplied to our allies? Do we face the prospect of further intelligence failures at home ourselves? This is the issue for us.

The Chair: Members want to leave about five to so they can get over to another meeting, and I have a couple of questions too.

[Translation]

Mr. David Rudd: Mr. Patry, you are absolutely right. In my opinion, for our American colleagues, it is preferable to fight against terrorism abroad instead of in the United States, in North America.

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It might be a cliché, but we must remember that if there are failures there are also successes. I think that we are here because of a very big failure but with failures we can improve on the situation. Usually, successes are not publicized. It is possible that among all the failures there might be a dozen or hundred of successes, big and small.

[English]

The Chair: Thank you.

Colleagues, I want to make two announcements before those who are leaving go off.

The department has proposed that they will give us a brief on what happened at the Qatar meeting, which we could do, I would suggest, next Thursday morning. There's nothing else on. We could get a briefing on where the WTO is going and where the minister is going to take those negotiations.

I would suggest that and also mention that Mr. Kergin, our ambassador in Washington, will be available on Monday. Now, we'll probably be here because the budget is on Monday, so it's proposed he come and speak to us—

Ms. Francine Lalonde: This Monday or the Monday after?

The Chair: Monday, December 10. He's going to be in town the day of the budget. He could meet with us between noon and 2 p.m. We could either do a meeting and have a light lunch served in a meeting room or try to get one of the parliamentary dining rooms and have him speak there. We could serve a lunch up.

The Clerk of the Committee: If it's here, Mr. Chair, of course his evidence can get on the record.

The Chair: Yes, I appreciate that the evidence will go on the record if we're here, but it's more relaxed if we're in the dining room.

Do I hear any preferences?

An hon. member: The dining room.

The Chair: I get the impression. Because it's getting closer to Christmas, we'll go for the dining room, and we won't get the benefit of the recorded evidence. That's that.

Let me ask a couple of questions. People are going to scatter, but I would like to ask three questions.

You talk about this ally worthiness, Mr. Wark, and I'll tell you, it's not the first time it's been raised. When we did our security hearings, our previous hearings, we heard, oh, we're losing our credibility among our allies; our NATO contribution has gone down, so we don't have NATO credibility. Practically everywhere you go in the world some expert tells you Canada no longer has any credibility in that area because we aren't pulling our weight.

There is a resource allocation problem in terms of allied worthiness. Let's say the figure was right about us contributing 10% with the CSE vis-à-vis the U.S.'s 90%. Well, I heard this morning that in fact the U.S. economy is fifteen times the Canadian economy and their population is ten times the size of ours. Maybe in a partnership, that 10% is the right proportion.

What are going to be the cost allocations of creating a foreign secret service, where are we going to get that, and whose pocket does it come out of? That is, unless you're going to phone the taxpayers and say just send us a couple of billion here. Alternatively, do we take it out of the pockets of defence, which we've already raided, or foreign aid, which we've raided? Go down the list.

Proportion and where it comes from are, I guess, the two questions we'll have to deal with when we're doing our committee report.

We do have the problem of everybody in the security context now wanting more resources. As the prime minister pointed out at a recent meeting, every department has suddenly discovered there's a huge security issue they have to deal with. New toilet doors require secure locks, and that's a security issue, so we need another $100 million for that.

Every single department in this country and in the United States is presently framing increased budget claims in the security envelope in order to get attention. That's just a fact of life. So, Mr. Doran, I would like to ask you a question on this allied worthiness thing. You're the guy in the Canadian studies thing in the United States, hearing Americans talk about Canada all the time. Do we have an allied worthiness problem in the United States?

That's the question to you. I'm just going down seriatim, and then we can come at these.

And lastly, Mr. Wark, you and others have talked about the Canadian assets here for foreign languages, for security, and for intelligence. I live in a community, St. Jamestown, that has 12,000 people and where 57 different languages are spoken. We know that at Toronto City Hall they do business in 101 languages, and then you tell us, well, we don't know Urdu and we don't know this. We know there are lots of folks walking around the streets of my community who speak Urdu and speak every language known to man. The question is, how can they be incorporated into an intelligence community?

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The police have the same problem. We have Vietnamese criminal gangs, and do we have enough Vietnamese-speaking police? Lots of people are seeking these resources. The problem is, how do we tap into a community we know has the language skills and is here in Canada? How do we then know that they fit within whatever the defence and intelligence community's definition is of creditability in terms of being able to fit within the very strict parameters of the thing? This is going to be very complicated.

Once when I was practising law, I was personally asked to be engaged in a very important royal commission inquiry. When I had to get a security clearance for it, the RCMP looked at my travel record for the previous six years and said “You've been to so many bloody countries, including Yugoslavia and a few behind the Iron Curtain, it would take us three years to just clear you for security for you to get onto this royal commission”. They hired somebody else who had never travelled. That was foreign affairs, and it was very carefully dealt with—by somebody who had never been out of the country. He was secure, but he had never dealt with anything outside the country.

Mr. David Rudd: Was he an American congressman, by any chance?

The Chair: Those are just a couple of questions. Maybe just the resource allocation and the American one would be...but also I'd be interested in the multicultural dimension of society if you have some reflections.

Mr. Charles Doran: I must say I think you framed the answer when you said that there is this ratio of difference in size, and we have to recognize that. What that really means is nobody can do everything. If one is a bit smaller, one has to recognize that it's a great mistake to try to replicate what other people are doing across the board.

Where Canada's reputation has been so high—and I think it has been high in these areas—it has been because whatever Canada chose to do, it did it well. That means there has to be some specialization. You have to decide what things you can do really well. That will be a very important contribution, and it will be recognized as an important contribution because it's needed.

The other aspect of that—and I know time is short, so I'll just summarize quickly—is this. What is really looked upon as credibility relates to the fact that the Canadian authorities will know best the situation inside Canada. The most debilitating situation as seen from abroad is if somebody, say a European, can claim that somehow there's a problem of collecting, analysing, and providing information about what's going on internally. I'm not saying that accusation has ever been made, but that's the kind of thing that undermines credibility faster than anything else. When you have that information, there's a trade-off with others, and it's a very credible one. So there's no problem under those circumstances, in my judgment, of getting locked out so long as one is able to provide something nobody else has.

The Chair: Do you want to respond to any other one?

Mr. Martin Rudner: On the resource allocation question, to me it's not a matter of what percentage of knowledge or intelligence flows north as against what proportion flows south. The real question is of course about vulnerabilities and security.

Now, here in Canada we wish to have—and I think it's important that we do have—a relatively open border and large numbers of people coming to and going from Canada, whether as immigrants, refugees, or visitors. We also want to have a reasonably open financial system, one where Canadians can move money to and from this country and across this country. All those are of high value to us, and we must ensure that we do not become vulnerable because of our values.

We have to have knowledge of a sort that comes from intelligence to identify what the risks are and who the perpetrators of those risks are. To the extent that we don't meet that requirement—it's not a question of whether we supply 5% or 10% of knowledge to our allies—our allies will regard us as windows of vulnerability, and we ourselves will become vulnerable.

Mr. Wesley Wark: I agree with everything Martin has said.

Let me just say that I think it has to be understood that intelligence is relatively inexpensive. The famous complaint of the chief of the British secret service in the 1930s was that his entire budget was less than the operating costs of a single destroyer in the Royal Navy. Now, if you compare costs you might spend on intelligence with, for example, the cost of a single F-18, I suspect you'd get the same kind of equation. Intelligence is not necessarily a very expensive business. Keep it in perspective.

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I would urge all the members of this committee to think of it as a top priority. Canada could be a smart intelligence nation, but we're a long way from there. What we're in fact facing, I think, in the aftermath of September 11 is the business of catching up to debilities that were already present before September 11: under-resourcing, bad structures, and declining capabilities.

I think we have some catch-up to do first, and then we have to decide where exactly we want to position ourselves as a capable power in terms of security intelligence and foreign intelligence. But understand that it is not going to break the bank to do this. Even the creation of a foreign secret service on a small scale, which probably should be run out of the Department of Foreign Affairs and not necessarily CSIS, would not be a bank-breaking exercise. The estimates are anywhere from $25 million to $100 million. The key thing would be to decide exactly how that service was going to function and what it was going to do.

I would say don't give up the fight, because it looks as if the budgetary figure will be alarming. I don't think that's the case. Intelligence services everywhere cope with questions of recruitment from multicultural societal foundations. One of the difficulties we have in this country—just very quickly—is that the intelligence community is pretty old-fashioned in terms of its demographic makeup, and it, like other parts of the government bureaucracy, is aging.

Also, what is perhaps a little more worrying in the long term is that, I would argue, the intelligence community has no recruitment strategy—none. It recruits, but it doesn't have a strategy, and that's another reason we need to look at this community.

The Chair: I want to thank all of you very much. It's been a very interesting session and has provided us with very important information for preparing our report, so thank you for coming from out of town. We appreciate that.

Please ignore any slings and arrows about the University of Toronto that might have been addressed to....

A voice: That's water under the bridge.

The Chair: Thank you.

We're adjourned until next Thursday—or perhaps next Tuesday.