Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good evening, everyone.
My presentation today will deal with three issues that are essential if we wish to understand Canada's position on the Indo-Pacific region in general and, more specifically, Canada's relationship with Taiwan.
The first issue is to clearly define the interests that Canada must defend. The second issue is to determine how vigorously we wish to defend those interests. Finally, the third issue is to determine to what extent we would like to attain our level of ambition and what measures we would take to do so.
My field of expertise is security and defence. Therefore, I'm going to concentrate on what I see as being Canada's fundamental interests in the region.
The first interest is to keep the peace, that is to say prevent Taiwan from being invaded and also prevent Taiwan from declaring its independence. We are living in extremely tense times, given the invasion in Ukraine and China's increasing power. Many analyses show that China's power could peak toward the beginning of the 2030s.
In its national security strategy, the United States recognizes that it is in decline and can do little to counter China's increasing power. All the research shows that countries whose power is waning are more inclined to take risks in tense situations.
The People's Liberation Army of China will hit its target before 2027 thanks to its efforts to scale up and modernize. China's new white paper on Taiwan clearly indicates China's desire to annex Taiwan against the will of the Taiwanese people.
Obviously, it is in our interest is to preempt any aggression on behalf of the Chinese army and maintain the status quo, i.e., the one-China policy, which confers a kind of de facto independence to Taiwan without recognizing it as such.
Our second fundamental interest in the region is to ensure free movement in shipping lanes, for example by preventing a possible Chinese blockade in the East China Sea or the South China Sea and reinforcing international law multilaterally in the field of marine safety. There is currently a lack of regulations and no multilateral consensus on conditions for accessing and using common shipping routes in the region.
Our third interest is to reduce Canada's vulnerability to hostile Chinese acts that do not constitute open conflict as such. We saw an example of this this week with Hydro-Québec. This type of situation renders Canada extremely vulnerable. We have to increase the resilience and security of our supply chains. We also have to decouple certain sectors, not the more mundane ones, but rather the strategic industries, such as high-tech and mining. Finally, we have to fight against disinformation and hostile interference targeting elections, for example.
Our fourth interest is diversifying and strengthening commercial ties in the region in general, such as those with Taiwan, but also with other partners in the region, like Japan, Australia, India, South Korea and members of the ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. We should particularly seek to enhance non-governmental ties with Taiwan in matters of information and through parliamentary, academic, commercial and technological exchanges, to name but a few.
There is another important aspect to the unfortunate situation that we are living right now, and that is the fight against the effects of climate change. The various summits on climate change show that this issue is becoming a source of tension. Canada has to incorporate climate change into its agenda when dealing with China.
Allow me to come back to a second aspect, which is the level of ambition that we can set. Canada does not have unlimited resources to draw upon. The resources that we invest in the Indo‑Pacific region will not be available for other regions, whether it be Europe, the Canadian Arctic, Africa or elsewhere. So we have to define our level of ambition. I believe we can define the role that Canada can play according to our interests.
I think Canada enjoys a much greater leadership role in certain areas, such as our strategy to counter disinformation and political interference. However, when it comes to reinforcing our cybersecurity capacity, infrastructure and institutional resilience, as well as our military defence capacities, Canada is more able to make a contribution rather than truly influence matters or even take on a leading role.
When I was talking about deterrence, I was talking about deterrence by denial, which is more frequently known as the porcupine strategy. We have to give Taiwan the capacity to offer an asymmetrical defence against China. Canada does have some limited capacity, as we can see in the present situation in Ukraine. This also applies to shipping lanes: Canada only has 12 frigates and is currently struggling to maintain two frigates in the region.
Canada is modernizing its fleet, but it will take a lot of time and require a lot of money. We are still unsure as to how many warships Canada would be able to send. That will very much limit its capacity.
The same goes for our rapid force deployment capacity. We can see that in the context of the war in Ukraine; Canada needed a lot of time to build up a contingent in Latvia. This requires resources that are difficult to find right now because of personnel shortages within the Canadian Armed Forces.