Home Newsroom 2005 Speeches (archive) McLellan: 2005-05-11

The first anniversary of securing an open society: Canada's National Security Policy

Speaking notes for
The Honourable Anne McLellan

Meeting of Women in Defence and Security Canada
Ottawa, Ontario
May 11, 2005

As delivered

Thank you very much Wendy. Merci beaucoup.

Hello everyone. Bonjour tout le monde. Je tiens d’abord à remercier l’association Femmes en défense et sécurité de m’avoir invitée à me joindre à vous aujourd’hui. C’est pour moi un honneur de m’adresser aux membres d’un organisme qui favorise l’avancement des femmes dans les professions liées à la sécurité et à la défense, et qui offre en outre une tribune pour échanger des idées.

It is indeed a great pleasure for me to be here today and I am deeply honoured that I was invited to be your honorary chairperson and I take that role very seriously and I think it’s wonderful that we have an organization such as Women in Defence and Security now here in Canada because as Wendy and others of us were saying at the head table during lunch, this is indeed an expanding area and one where we need to ensure that women are playing an active role in every capacity. I’m going to say a little bit more about that in just a few minutes but as Wendy has said my speech or my comments today are really in two parts.

One, a little bit about where women are in some of our key departments and agencies within the Government of Canada dealing with defence, law enforcement and security, then I want to say a little bit on the occasion almost of the first anniversary of our national security policy and then I’ll be happy to take some questions time permitting.

In so many areas of defence and security, women, as you all know, are taking on new roles and making a difference. The number of women in the Canadian Forces has increased from 1,500 to almost 7,800 in the past 35 years and today women can enter any military occupation and serve in any environment. In our national police force, the RCMP, the proportion of female officers has increased steadily with women making up about a third of the service’s new recruits.

I want to stop here and say a couple of things in particular General about our new Chief of Defence Staff, General Hillier. I talked to him about this organization yesterday and what an enthusiastic proponent you have in your new Chief of Defence Staff. He gave me so much information about women in the Armed Forces that I can’t possibly share it all with you. For example, for the first time in our history we have four Brigadiers General who are women. That’s an outstanding achievement and I could go through this long list of women in the Armed Forces who have done extraordinary things, but I think what is most important is the philosophy that the forces and General Hillier talk about and believe in is that women are full and equal partners in the Canadian Forces. I think that’s a very important philosophy for our Armed Forces to express at the beginning of the 21 st century and I think speaks to the fact that indeed women in the Armed Forces have come a very long way. There’s more to do, obviously. General Hillier would not suggest otherwise but I think when you think about the philosophy of people like General Hillier, General Caron and others and the opportunities for women in the forces that we see how far we’ve come.

But the advancement of women is not due just to the number of women entering our security and defence forces, it is due to the quality of their work. Today women can enter any military or security position and they serve in any environment where they meet the standard. In the RCMP, women are represented at all ranks, undergo the same training as men and can aim for the same career opportunities as their male counterparts. In our military they may serve not only in combat but also in roles such as technicians, air traffic comptrollers or military police officers.

As Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness I can also look with a great deal of pride to my own department as a place that demonstrates how women are taking on senior roles. My Deputy Minister, many of you know her, Margaret Bloodworth, has extensive background in dealing with security issues having served previously as Deputy Minister both for the Department of National Defence and with Transport Canada. As well, women account for four of our five Assistant Deputy Ministers and several hold senior posts in the six agencies that are part of my portfolio.

However, we know that looking at government, looking government-wide there is not parity of numbers amongst senior officials. Things have improved in recent years but we cannot simply assume that improvements will continue. The gains women have made did not come without effort so we have to put a focus on the role of women and I am pleased that an organization like this one will help us achieve that. The networking you do and the interest you generate can help build momentum around bringing women into fields in the areas of security and defence.

I was reflecting this weekend, as I’m sure many of you were, on the contribution of our Armed Forces to the victory in Europe as we celebrated or commemorated VE Day and you know I started to think about in light of the speech I was delivering today, I started to think about the women who were so instrumental in assuring victory in Europe and more generally in the Second World War. I hope we all remember the women who served on the civilian side in the defence industry: while Rosie the riveter is an American image, we had so many Rosie the riveters in this country on the civilian side during the Second World War, not to mention the thousands of women who served in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps and other parts of our Canadian Armed Forces. So we shouldn’t think that somehow it’s new or strange or novel or unusual that women would want to be involved in security and defence in whatever way because they have been there, not only for decades but actually for centuries.

Let me just give you one other example, in the law enforcement area, where we see women taking a leadership role in ways that directly affects the quality of life, the security and safety of our children and our communities. As was mentioned, I am responsible for the forces, the RCMP and I had the opportunity a while ago to meet a remarkable woman in the force. Her name is Inspector Jennifer Strachan, she’s the Officer in Charge of the National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre and she is an amazing person. She’s been with the force for 17 years serving in various postings across the country and now runs the centre at RCMP headquarters that coordinates police efforts to combat the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet. This is just one example of areas where members of government agencies - female members of government agencies - are playing direct roles in securing the safety of our communities.

I think that it’s so important to acknowledge the role of women in both traditional law enforcement and in security and defence and there’s another reason why we need to do that. This is one of the fastest expanding areas in our government and, dare I say, probably in our private sector, in part because of September 11. Everywhere I go in the private sector I am talking to people and meeting people who are in the security business, in the safety business or in the defence business. Obviously and this is an expanding area and therefore women need to be very much a part of this and they need to be assuming and undertaking leadership roles because here in government, the expansion is remarkable, but I think we would find even more remarkable in the private sector.

I want to now turn my attention more directly to developments in the area of national security and the context for these developments was as we know redefined for all of us after September 11 th, 2001. On that day the issue of national security was brought into sharper focus for all of us. In subsequent months, when Canada was specifically named by Osama bin Laden as a potential target, Canadians knew that we had to confront terror in its most fundamental and dangerous form and had to face the reality of a more complex time.

Security in our homes and communities is at risk from a range of threats, man-made and natural. Canada has dealt with threats such as SARS, the 2003 electricity blackout and the 2004 forest fires in British Columbia. These threats are not new and terrorism itself as we know was not unknown to Canada. However, there has been a sharper focus since 2001 and we have renewed our efforts in relation to what is clearly a core function. I describe it as the most fundamental function of government, which is the collective security of any country’s people.

When Prime Minister Martin was sworn in, he made a number of key machinery of government changes: a new committee on security, public health and emergency, a new cabinet committee which I chair, a new position in the Privy Council Office of national security advisor and a new department and portfolio, which I now lead: Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada. This department, as you’ve heard, brings together key agencies involved in protecting Canadians.

The Prime Minister also committed in December 2003 to develop a National Security Policy. I tabled this document in Parliament just over one year ago. It was comprehensive in scope, defining national security threats as all threats that have the potential to undermine the security of the state and society. It highlights six strategic areas of action: intelligence, emergency planning and management, public health emergency, transportation security, border security and international security. As well, it includes measures to improve collaboration with others, such as the provinces and territories, first line responders, the private sector, communities and allies.

The National Security Policy focuses on three core national security interests, protecting Canada and the security of Canadians at home and abroad, ensuring that Canada is not a base for threats to our allies and contributing to international security. The policy recognizes that Canada must be able to respond to a broad range of threats to the safety and security of Canadians. This is an essential capability because Canadians’ health, safety and economic stability can be affected not only by acts of terrorism but also by outbreaks of infectious diseases, occurrences of natural disasters, cyber attacks on critical infrastructure or acts of terrorism. By adopting what we call an “all hazards” approach, Canada is in a far better position to coordinate and respond, more effectively ensuring that the right response is delivered to the right place at the right time. That is no small challenge, as many of you understand.

With the tabling of this new policy, the government also committed more than 600 million new dollars’ worth of initiatives and we have also committed to update Canadians on our program in implementing this new policy. This is why this afternoon in Parliament after Question Period I will table an update report entitled Securing An Open Society: One Year Later. The National Security Policy, when it was delivered last year, was not without controversy because, unless you’re very careful, it is possible that communities, individuals and others may feel victimized, marginalized or singled out. One of the things that we wanted to do was be transparent with all Canadians and one of the ways to do that is to make sure that you’re updating Canadians on what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and that you’re benchmarking your success. I think that’s what people expect, whether they are professionals such yourselves, those who work with government and other clients, or whether it’s in our communities. I think that particularly after September 11, we’re much more interested - in our communities and in our families – in issues of collective security and therefore, we felt it important to be as transparent as we could be with Canadians in helping them understand the purposes of our national security policy, what we wanted to achieve and how we’re doing on an annual basis.

I would like to highlight some of the many initiatives that we have launched over the past year in the implementation of this policy.

One of the key requirements for better security is better information and information sharing, something every nation is trying to do more effectively. This is something we have to get right. This is not optional and of course this was the basis for key recommendations in the 9-11 Commission’s report in the United States. To help achieve this goal we created the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre, to ensure that threat related information would be brought together from across government, assessed and forwarded to those who need it in a timely and effective manner. The centre began operations last October and has distributed over 40 comprehensive threat assessments to key government departments and partners in the intelligence community.

The challenge here is to collect the right intelligence, the right amount, the right kind, get it analysed and get it back to the front lines in real time so it actually can make a difference, whether it’s with the RCMP, the Ottawa Police, the Canada Border Services Agency or one of our allies’ agencies with whom we share information. You can have all the best information in the world sitting on someone’s desk and it’s not translated, it’s not analysed and it’s not back to the front lines, where you can pick somebody up on the streets of New York City if you stop them or whatever the case may be, it’s not much good. Our challenge with the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre is to do all of that and do it in real time in the way that makes sense for the people who can use the information to protect us.

Building on our experience with SARS, and other health issues, we have created the Public Health Agency of Canada and appointed Canada’s first Chief Public Health Officer and I want to give full credit here to my colleague the Minister of State for Public Health, Carolyn Bennett, who was instrumental in taking the work that I began but she took and made it, over these past 14, 15 months, her life’s work and she just deserves an awful lot of credit for getting that agency up and running and making sure that we had a process that selected such an outstanding first Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. David Butler-Jones.

In my department we created a Government Operations Centre to provide round the clock coordination and support across government and to key national players in the event of a national emergency. In the event of an emergency, the centre will help share information and coordinate a response across the federal government whether that emergency involves health threats, security threats or a variety of other threats. Response has to be coordinated and this centre operating 24-7 is helping to do that. It plays a critical role in the Government of Canada’s national emergency response system, or NERS, which is being implemented under my department’s leadership.

My department also is coordinating emergency response in relation to cyber incidents with a new cyber incident response centre established in February. We are developing a critical infrastructure protection strategy with the release of a position paper that is the basis for consultations with provinces, territories and private sector partners. These consultations have begun and are taking place across the country and to improve emergency preparedness and response throughout the country, I convened a meeting of federal, provincial and territorial Ministers responsible for emergency management earlier this year in January. This was the first such meeting of these Ministers in 11 years and we all agreed - not surprisingly - that we need regular meetings and we need a detailed work plan. We agreed to improve our emergency response framework in order to harmonize the federal system and ensure it compliments each provincial and territorial system. That may sound bureaucratic, but if you look at successes and failures in emergency response, you know that a seamless response where each of the players carries out its role as part of a team is essential to responding effectively and ladies and gentlemen we’ve seen situations where that didn’t happen, the electricity blackout of 2003.

But, you know, every one of these situations you learn from. You do the very best you can in the situation in which you find yourself, you learn from these situations and you build better systems for the future working with your partners, you train better human resources understanding always that the challenges transform themselves. Just when you think you’ve learned something or nailed something, all of a sudden you’ve got a brand new challenge and a whole new context and you think to yourself, well, maybe we hadn’t anticipated that as well as we should have and maybe we have to learn from each of these situations. One of my goals is to have a department and a system working with our partners and all our agencies where in fact you’re not reactive after something has happened and you say, okay, we weren’t quite ready for that and this is what we want to do better. Lessons learned are key out of every one of these situations but you’ve got to be a lot more pro-active. You’ve got to be anticipating what the next challenge may be and one of the things that September 11 taught us was that we under-estimate the novelty by which those who choose to do harm can carry out their evil plan and therefore we must always be thinking much more pro-actively than we have been. Sometimes that’s a challenge for government because we’re better at reacting than being pro-active, but with our partners and especially those in the private sector, you have got to help us be much more pro-active in anticipating the kinds of things that can happen, how certain kinds of acts of terror for example can be carried out and what we need to do to be prepared, to have the kind of seamless response that is absolutely key to ensuring the security of our people and the people who live in our allies’ country.

To that end, we are working very hard on a national exercise program, because we’re learned that this is key. I’ve just participated in Triple Play. Last year I participated in Top Off Two. These are such important exercises because what you have to do in real time, everybody - agencies as well as ministers - is to make very important and difficult decisions that have consequences, because we’re evaluated. You know, it’s not the consequence of the real, but we are evaluated and if you’re found wanting, I have questions for my agencies and they, quite rightly, have questions for me if I made the wrong decision. It is there to ask those questions and that’s why training exercises are so important.

Let me just conclude by saying we have I think come a long way in this past year in relation to the implementation of our national security policy. There are two things quickly that I want to mention.

One is our cross-cultural round table. It is up and running, it’s had its first meeting here, and has a meeting in Vancouver in May. It’s going to be so important in working with ethnic communities across the country so that they do not feel victimized, marginalized or fearful of our national security policy, but that they see themselves as a key component of that policy.

The other thing that I’m pleased with is that we are about to establish our new national security committee of parliamentarians and that will be an all-party committee. It will be the first of its kind in this country. The UK has such a committee, Australia has a similar kind of committee and we hope to develop a culture with those parliamentarians of non-partisanship where they develop expertise over time and they bring that expertise to bear to help provide oversight to our national security system.

So I think we’ve come a long way in the past year. We still have a long way to go. This is never static, it’s always evolving, you can never stand still when you’re in the business of working toward the collective security and safety of Canadians, whether you’re the Ottawa Police Service, the RCMP, CSIS, the CBSA, whoever. You must always be looking to the future. You must always be anticipating the next threat, the next challenge and you must figure out with your partners how you’re going to deal with that.

I conclude where I began. There is no more important obligation of any government than the collective security of its people and if you cannot reassure your people that you able to provide that collective security you will have profoundly failed. So, I just want to thank you all for inviting me here today. It’s been great to see so many of you and as I say again I’m honoured to be the honorary chairperson of Women in Defence and Security.

Thank you very much.