 Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Professor Leo West. I'm an assistant professor at the Northern Patterson School of International Affairs. I'm very pleased to have so many of you join us today. I'm going to invite our Dean, Brendan O'Neill to present some opening remarks before we get underway with the presentation of research today. Thanks very much, Professor West. And I want to thank you and your team for all the hard work in bringing this event together today. Welcome to everyone who's joining us this afternoon. And before we begin, I would like to just take a moment to acknowledge that Carleton University is located on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation. And although we might be attending from different events, I think it nevertheless remains important to recognize the traditional indigenous lands on which we reside and to do so with intention. Today, we're going to learn more about the role of Canada's intelligence and national security community in global welfare emergencies. So national security threats have certainly not ceased during the pandemic. And indeed the rapid transmission of disease in a globalized world brings with it a host of security concerns. We've seen an increase in violence, cyber attacks and disinformation, and of utmost importance is maintaining national security while respecting legal obligations in the privacy to some extent of Canadians. So there's no questions that these are key issues of great importance that you'll be discussing today. Thank you to all the presenters, NPSIA faculty members, NPSIA students, as well as NPSIA students from the infrastructure protection and international security program. All of this research and all of your research is important and integral to the mission of the Faculty of Public Affairs, which is to help build better societies and stronger democracies and to address regional and global challenges and to enhance and inform public discussion. So there's no need to listen too much more to me. This event is part of the FPA research series, an ongoing celebration of the diversity of research produced in the Faculty of Public Affairs. You can always go to the FPA website at Carlton.ca slash FPA slash events to learn more. So I look forward to hearing hearing from the panelists today. And back to you, Leah. Thank you so much, Dean O'Neill. So, before we begin, I must say that this research has been funded by Shirk through a partnership engagement grant. Our partner in this work was the intelligence assistant secretariat with the privy council office. We also received funding from mine through a targeted engagement grant with the Department of National Defense to fund our research to ensure that it'll be open and accessible and published open access. So we have to thank both of our funders for allowing us the opportunity to engage in this research. Before we move on, I'll just explain everyone the format for today, rather than have everyone present and then do Q&A at the end, we're hoping to make this a little bit more engaging. We're going to have each presenter prevent for a short period of time, five to 10 minutes, and then take about 10 to 15 minutes of questions either from the audience, or from our other panelists. I am encouraging our panelists to chime in and test the metal of our other presenters. If you have questions, please use the chat function, or you can raise your hand, but the chat function is preferred as this allows me to aggregate questions if they come up, and they happen to be somewhat repetitive. And so that's what we'll do to begin. Once we've gone through all of the presenters, we will have some time for more thematic questions or questions that didn't come up at the end. So to begin, we're going to hear from Professor Wilner from the Northern Patterson School of International Affairs on exploiting chaos. Professor Wilner, over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Dean. Thank you, Professor West and all my colleagues. It's great to see you again Alex for Bell as well. Listen, our, my presentation really should be done jointly with the PhD student who's writing who wrote the chapter with me. Casey Bab, but he recently had a baby. So he's off for a couple weeks. So I'm taking the mantle. But really, this is a joint project and it's really quite, quite Casey's brainchild. So our contribution to the larger volume is, is itself funded separately from a number of different sources and so over the summer we received our own D&D grant through the COVID-19 Challenge Program, and separately through the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, and the Society, otherwise known as TSAS. So we're working with two different pools of money to compile our data and what our chapter to the volume does is try to provide kind of some preliminary findings. So projects ongoing, I assume we have another, you know, couple months to a year left. So, so what I'm presenting to you is a kind of a cold notes version of what we've accomplished so far. The larger project as I'm alluding to has four kind of buckets within it. And the first has to do with exploring those global general trends within the specific nexus of COVID, public health measures, and then online malicious activity. And particularly here we're looking at non-financial criminal activity online. And so we're not so much dealing with the cyber hacking or ransomware attacks, which is something worth exploring. We're exploring how what we would call violent non-state actors are using the COVID and pandemic situation to further their own agenda. So that's kind of what we're exploring. And the second larger bucket has to do with an empirical exploration of this, right? So we want to lead in and explore theory and approaches and all the rest, but we also want to have a deep empirical assessment. And so we're building a data set of all events that we can identify to try to make sense of some of the more nuanced ways in which non-state actors are using the online space within the backdrop of COVID to make hay, basically. Then we wanted to explore policy, both from a Canadian and international and comparative perspective. And then finally, if only because D&D is one of the partners in our case, there is an element specific to understanding whether or not the disinformation, misinformation space might alter or influence Canadian Armed Force engagement overseas as it relates to COVID. So this is the kind of four buckets we're working with. And the goal right is to conduct interviews, do open source data collection. I think we're halfway there. And then the next phase will lead us into 2022. I should say also that we're really ideologically and motivationally agnostic. And what I mean by that is that we're not focusing purely on religious inspired militant groups or ideologically inspired militant groups. We're really trying to catch anybody and everybody. There's a bit of a methodological issue there, I think, but we're working around it. There are three underlying forces at play here, before I get into the findings, right? The first has to do with the actual disease itself, COVID-19 and the pandemic. But related to that, of course, is the actual public health response. And those two obviously go hand in hand, but the public health response is distinct and different depending on the jurisdictions that you want to explore. So in some jurisdictions you've got lockdowns, others you've got mass mandates, you've got curfews in other ways and other areas. Economic collapse has unevenly felt, travel bans, and now, of course, vaccine and unwrapping and the rest. So we're working with both of these areas, the disease itself, but also the public health measures. The second element that we're working with here is the societal way in which we've most, most of us, certainly in the West, quote unquote, have pivoted to online interactions, right? This is of course a case study in that itself. So we're working from home, we're going to school from home, but we're also sharing religious practices online. I'm sorry, we're working online, we're sharing religious services online, community events, governance, everything has moved online. And that's the kind of space that we're exploring, because as we move online, militant non-state actors are also moving online to make sense of that themselves. And so we're exploring that third part, which is how non-state actors are integrating themselves into that information and dis and misinformation space to promote their strategic interests. All told, we've kind of landed on three general trends. I don't think these are too surprising, but they have a flavor of COVID-19 and pandemic response to them. And so these are the three kind of responses that I'll go through. The first has to do with the fact that what we're finding is that non-state actors are using the COVID-19 space to delegitimize governments, but also to legitimize their own response, right? And so there's a really interesting play there. This is a classic thing that non-state actors have done before. It's not a COVID story, but we have a COVID lens to it. And what they're doing is they're trying to target specific governments, both local but also international, and to try to finger their response to the pandemic and then suggest in the same vein that they themselves have a better response to the pandemic itself, right? And so they're delegitimizing public responses and the governments behind them and legitimizing their own response. And we see this across the board, right? So Al-Shabaab blames the African Union for spreading the virus across Africa, but also in Somalia. They've got Boko Haram calling the plague, you know, God's punishment against secular Muslims. You've got the Taliban using social media to promote their type of response, their own public health awareness campaigns, right, in just a position to the Afghan government. ISIS, right, suggesting that local governments are withholding information on the virus. If you turn to the far right in Europe, you know, they're promoting their own alternative economic assistance efforts, right, distinct from the government themselves. Other far right groups across the globe are trying to use this to promote accelerationist and eco-fascist narratives and motivations. And then finally, even the far left, right, it's tapping into that, especially the economic angsts to try to push specific populist movements, anti-elite, often anti-Semitic narratives and tropes. So the de-legitimization feeds into the legitimization and there's a nice interplay there between the two forces. A second kind of finding from our examples here has to do with recruitment. And so we, lots of emerging evidence to suggest, right, that, and this is, again, it's not new to COVID. Non-save malicious actors have been using cyberspace to recruit beforehand, but there is a lens, there's a COVID lens that we can explore and unpack. And so while they're pitching their own more effective response to COVID-19, they're also trying to recruit members or at least recruit support to their larger base. And I think that recruitment process, if you want to call it that, looks a lot like, or has a flavor of what the group has done in the past, right. And this, for instance, will note in its social media, right, that only true, you know, true believers will become immune to COVID, right. So they're kind of layering on this aspect to it. And al-Qaeda will do something similar that it's, you know, COVID-19, the pandemic is God's wrath. And if only, if only their base would turn back to Islam, then, you know, it would help save parts of the community and the Ummah more broadly. And if you turn to the far right, quite prevalent here as well, right, they're co-opting the pandemic, and they're really playing on that angst against the government, something that existed previous, of course. But they're trying to spread those conspiracy theories and to radicalize and recruit supporters. And we're seeing that now, you know, a pivot from stop the steal to stop the vaccine. We're seeing that now emerge as it relates to the vaccine drive in the United States in particular here. And so that's really interesting way in which they kind of play with this narrative. And all of this in terms of number two, you know, has to do with that pandemics toll, right. So it's 14 months, 15 months that we've been dealing with this internationally. And there's deep economic and communal hardship. There's unemployment. There's a physical and social isolation. There's a mental health and psychological aspect to this. There's individual hardships, community based hardships, political uncertainty and go on. All of these factors feed, right? It feeds the momentum of recruitment and perhaps radicalization and violence. And so it's not just COVID, it's about all of the underlying effects here. And then finally, that third piece that we're exploring has to do with incitement of violence. So this is where we cross over from physical or digital sorry crossover from digital space cyber space into physical space in some cases. And you see evidence right of Milton groups trying to promote certain measures active measures acts of intimidation and acts of violence related to COVID right in physical space. And ISIS, particularly right urging its supporters in the West to go and attack hospitals in the West to try to add an extra burden on hospitals that are themselves already burdened because of the pandemic right. You've got the far right in Europe. You know, playing on that kind of Turner diary approach try to say like let's, let's use COVID to launch biological attacks against particular communities, especially ethnic communities and minor minority groups right in urban settings. And you've got, you know, the capital riots in January is an interesting kind of microcosm. It's not a pure COVID storyline certainly not and it's not just about pandemic response. But there are lace it's laced into it right and so it's an anti government response that's laced with the pandemic and again I think there's an emerging anti vaccine element to that as well which is really interesting. And similar violence in Canada right we've had attacks against minority groups Asians, Muslims and Jews, and attacks against public figures including the Prime Minister. And so again not a pure COVID story but there's a lace of it within there. So I think right, and this is all finished here the next steps for us beyond the chapter itself is to go and build that empirical record to provide a more nuanced assessment of what's happening. What we've suggested is occurring, and then to kind of do the so what response which would be, you know, how do we, how do we effectively manage what we're exploring here because again, our sense is that this is going to continue not necessarily the pandemic but the, the effects around the pandemic will continue certainly the economic side of things, and our militant storyline here will continue so we want to make sense of what to do not only from a security intelligence community perspective that there is something there to be done by the SNI community, in you know, awareness of emerging trends, but this is a much larger storyline and it has to do with, you know, international consortium private sector ability to manage the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation online. There's a hard economic element here right that's not an SNI solution, just how do we rebuild the societies. And then how do we provide counter narratives that's going to be probably a bottom up or grassroots approach. And then finally right just the polarized political environment, certainly in the US, Europe, maybe in Canada, that requires a solution as well. So Leah, I will stop there. Right this is a work in progress, but so far we're pretty happy with it. Thank you. I'm a co-principal and well there so if any of the, I'm going to put up my gallery review and I do have the chat open, so if you would like to ask a question, please put it in the chat or raise your hand, especially those who are the other panelists. I invite you to test your co-panelists and learn from each other. So we'll start with a question from PhD student Nipthia. Hi, Jess. Thanks for that. That was really interesting. I was wondering a little bit about the effect of lockdown on militant violence or non-state actor violence. So there's been a fair bit of debate about, you know, COVID will create more opportunities or reasons for violence. But then what's the effect of the actual lockdowns and the restrictions of movements and then like an availability of targets as well. Yes, fascinating question, right? My gut told me at the beginning of this, right, Jess, maybe you maybe had the same sentiment that there was less room because of lockdowns and other measures to conduct physical attacks. And I think we, if you were to go look at the data, I wonder, right, like gun violence probably dropped in the United States during the first wave. Of course that spiked over the last three weeks, unfortunately, right. I think there's a sense that as physical space shrunk that the ability for these groups to conduct physical attacks also shrunk. I'm not sure. That's my gut. But I'm open to other suggestions. But I think as we open up, you know, as we open up our societies, I think we're expecting to see the combination of all these developments online, which will then I think propagate physical responses. And so my question for you is you talked about a little bit about it narratives and we've, and you mentioned specific, you know, hate based violence in Canada, but are you seeing any narratives that are specific to Canada or Canada's response to COVID in this. Yeah. So not yet. So I think, you know, truthfully, we've been doing the kind of wide angle lens so far and we're just trying to collect as many points of, you know, single points of data like the ones I listed right from across the globe. I think there's specific Canadian elements. I think if you were to drive down deeper you'd find even regional sentiments you'd find something happening in Quebec that looks a little bit different than in Alberta looks a little different than in Toronto if you could parse the data together, parse the data even more thoroughly. So I think, again, Leah, like the hunch is yes we're going to see some of that. As we start really diving into the data but so far we're seeing that kind of classic global examples that really do kind of hue to the, you know, I said we were going to see that but I kind of has a certain pitch here right and far right communities have a certain pitch and we're we're seeing that classic pitch, but it'll be really interesting to see whether or not there's an actual Canadian flavor. And, but not yet we haven't seen it just yet. Professor Corbett. Thank you, Leah. Thank you, Professor Wilner. Hi, Alex. One thing I'm looking to read about in the near future I'm interested in your view given your ongoing research is the long term implications of our kind of quick move to digitalization in the coven 19 context. A lot of individuals who write on tech policy and basically made a rough estimate to say that because of the pandemic and because of our move online, we've kind of seen this 10 year jump happening in the period of a year, a year plus. And I think the long term impacts are for violent extremists and terrorist activity online, the impact in the physical world, you know, through radicalization of violence as well as terrorist attacks, due to the kind of current period that we're in increased digitalization. Yeah, it's a great question Alex. Alex and I, we partnered in the capstone class separately right through capstone nipsia and public safety and we're working in that digital space Alex as you know, with you and your colleagues at public safety. You know, it's a great question and I really do like that idea that we're fast forwarded 10 years we hear the same thing from the private sector right like online sales are 10 years ahead or five years ahead or where we thought they would be and same things they feel that what Amazon or Walmart or Shopify like they're all their long term projections have been shortened very quickly. And so I wonder like you know taking that observation and then applying it to the things that we're talking about today. I would suggest that one thing is like we're all getting better online, I have to say it like even, even this zoom setup is much sharper than it was at the beginning right so we've we've learned to be more creative, protective, secretive or not secretive and more safety wise online and on our daily interactions right. And so I think you know, there's a, I think there's a, there's a nice window of opportunity for militants to make sense of what's happening. But now the counter forces are responding right I think I think they're responding. And so even these collaborative setups. And as we get more familiar with them as we get more tuned to them, as we build better regulations and better awareness of how elements of malicious activity or using them, our responses will kick in and so you'll have that kind of cat and mouse. Classic. We've had that in physical space as well. I would imagine there's a cat and mouse, but certainly cat and mouse element but certainly the physical the digital domain is much broader than the physical domain in terms of ability to interact with communities that are distinct and diverse and right and to make sense of different forms of information and the dissemination of that information. So, so that's the new element. I'm not sure exactly where we're going to land, I would hope that you know, gatherings like this. Books like Professor West and other will help the practitioners in this case and other stakeholders make sense of what's happening, both in theory and in concept, and then we'll respond so I'm a bit of an optimist I like to be an optimist. I think there's an action reaction kind of thing. And we're still in the midst of this, of course, but I, but I do think, you know, I'm still also out, basically I'm an optimist I think that we will respond. We are responding. And then we'll improve. Thanks. So the question from my MA student based on it's a little self interested because this is the topic of his MRP, but have you seen any evidence of veterans participating or being targeted by misinformation and these narratives. That's a great question. And so that's a very, that's a good that very topical approach for an MRP that's your that's your students, Professor West. Yeah, if you want to, you can elaborate on your question if you'd like. Sorry. Yeah, I'm doing research on veterans that may be adopting right wing extremist ideologies and kind of seeing how that fits into the greater landscape in the West. So I was wondering if you've seen any evidence of miss or disinformation targeting veterans or veterans themselves participating and spreading that information. I mean, so I mean the cap, you know, if you're working on this now I think the capital right would be a great microcosm for this certainly because of the active participation of current and former members of the Armed Forces in the US. And then I think you could probably, so we've seen we've just dabbled with this but I think what we're understanding is that there is this call to arms right this call to arms saying that you know, veterans who are on the sidelines of the capital right are not following with the call of duty right and so you so you see this kind of motivating elements. And in Canada to we've had, you know, is the specific case against the Prime Minister was, you know, right. So, so we have evidence of, usually it's former. But that ties into the how the far right was also making inroads with the military before COVID so they'll be interesting to see maybe based on if you could actually do this to see how they were communicating amongst themselves pre coven and post coven and explore how the language change how the narrative change, but certainly if you needed a proper case study I think you could build pretty good lens with specific individual case studies on the individuals that were implicated in the capital rights that would be tremendous. Yeah. Thank you. So I don't know if you're able to answer this question, I think it might be a bit out of your wheelhouse but I will, I will ask it on behalf of the person here is whether or not you think that there is a possibility of actually, I'm going to say, and, you know, countering the disinformation with and concerns about mass vaccination. Of mass vaccination. Yeah. No, I think it's going to be like, so again, how does information and disinformation and misinformation spread right countering the narrative requires us to put the forces of good doctors public servants etc front and center and we see evidence of this across the network, but then the counter argument as you have those certain doctors, including some who are doctors who are anti vaxxers who also rioted in in January right they are also promoting counter their counter to the counter narrative. For the anti back which supports the anti vaccine so I'm not sure exactly how to do that. I don't know how to do the communications, or even a journalism student to kind of hash this out. But but certainly, but certainly what's interesting is right like the, the stop the steel has shifted to stop the vaccine. And so we can just understand how, you know, it's not just Q and on supporters, it's much broader than that but how that pivot can occur like, how can they so easily pivot from one core element of their foundations to another core and if we can start needling in with the logic you hope that some people will drop off just as some people have dropped off, post, you know, post the transition phase of the government United States people have dropped off at a Q and on. Okay, so what are lessons there in that we could add to the anti vaxxers. But again, the, my point would be, you know you fight this and misinformation was just more good information right at the more stories of older generation surviving COVID because of vaccines the better, you would think that some of those lessons would trickle down to a point to a point and then I'm not sure how you do it. It's not an SNI community thing it's a broader whole society approach but I think there's probably ways to figure out, both in terms of how they pivoted and then how to build those kind of narratives. So I'll ask you one last question that just came in and it's whether or not you, you know, the people actually being captured by these non state actors and by the disinformation or or being captured and radicalized whether or not that's changed through the shift in the lens towards COVID was about that like the people being, you know, captivated by the misinformation and the radicalization 10 have they do they remain the same, and maybe you don't even know that yet. You mean like the people themselves like the characteristics of the people being captured is that the science of the question. Yes, the question is, have you recognized the shift in the kind of people who are being reached by radicalized. No, I don't have a firm answer on that. Again, my hunt, my hunch is this is what we're seeing is nothing new. All these forces have been in play before the lockdowns and before COVID was a thing. Oh, you know, 2019 is not so long ago this these these factors were emerging themselves. But we're seeing now the all of these forces playing around and dovetailing and making sense of COVID and the response to COVID to up the ante and to increase the volume. I think the people that are susceptible. I think there's a strong mental health issue crisis. Some people will call it emerging that will feed into it. And then the economic malaise I mean right people who have no feeling who feel that they have grievances real or perceived or not a lot of economic opportunities will be perhaps more attuned to narratives that feed their feelings of disempowerment that existed before COVID but of course this will be amplified and the volume will be increased. So I think right through, I wouldn't say there's a specific character or a person that's susceptible but but historically we would suggest that there are and that the overall environment has allowed for more of these individuals to be present and for the volume of the volume and type of information that they're receiving to be increased as well. So, again, no firm answers yet. That's kind of a cop out but I think we're seeing traces of it from the past with that COVID lens within it. So I know what we're going to lose you likely so I'm going to ask you my last question so I wanted to ask it in the wrap up. Was there anything that you were expecting to find or anticipating that you didn't. That's a great question and I should have prepared something for it because I should have anticipated it. You know it's a work in progress, you know, we were surprised when we got funded. So I'll just suggest that like, you know at the first go was like hey there's COVID let's go see if you can get some pools of money and we got like, very, like, like like you know, the idea right we got very good feedback from public servants and from the, you know, forces that support supply and support academic research in Canada so that was a first surprise to us. I would say that you know there are cross cutting themes here I said we were like thematically agnostic and I think that will still hold, but the way that the far right does this is sort of different than the way the far left does it. It's the same and they may even share the platforms and maybe there are like core fundamentals about how you package disinformation and misinformation maybe those things will be shared, but they, they, they, you know, and Islamists and ISIS, they do it differently as well. But it's the, it's the core nuggets in the logic of the disinformation that's really interesting right and the misinformation. It's like it has to speak to the things that you already believe and want to do. And that's how did they tweak the message from the, you know, from the common ground of coven and lock down. How do they tweak the message to resonate with people that are susceptible to far left far right Islamist and other issues. That's really interesting and I'm not sure yet we know we, I'm not sure what we're going to find I think there's going to be small nuances of how that's done but then again the platforms are used probably in a similar way, the way that perhaps that resonated and you know that I think the way that messages are resonated online, probably share common characteristics but it's how do you pivot the logic to make sense with the things that you do that could be a surprise for us down the road. Great, thank you so much. That was a great start. I'm going to be follow up, I'm sure, by equally fascinating research by Jessica Davis and thanks everybody core bay. Thanks very much, Professor Wilner, and on surveillance ethics intelligence and priorities and global pandemic. So I'll turn it over to Jessica now. Okay, thanks so much Professor West. So our chapter is actually called a health intelligence priority for Canada cost benefits and considerations. And this for me is really part of some research that I started at the beginning of the pandemic where I was really wondering like what is the national security intelligence reaction going to be to the pandemic. And for this piece I really wanted to explore the impact in terms of intelligence more broadly for Canada so it was really natural for me to reach out to my former professor of intelligence studies here at Nipsey to help with that. So, the thing that struck me is when the pandemic started states around the world, looked at the increasing infection rates and wondered what they could do to stop the spread of COVID-19 test and trace quickly emerged as one of the most promising approaches. But there was a real disparity in how states thought to do this. Some states saw this as a purely health problem, while others saw their security and surveillance tools as possible solutions, or partial solutions to the pandemic. A number of states deployed tools that we would traditionally associate with national security to trace the spread of coronavirus. And this met with mixed results. I'll rephrase that. It actually met with rather poor results, because it turns out that COVID-19 was spreading far too quickly to be effectively surveilled through mechanisms that have primarily been designed to identify and surveil individuals or small groups of people. So the mass spread of COVID-19 through the population really made a lot of these tools fairly useless. For instance, Israel tried to use their existing counterterrorism surveillance tools to identify the spread of COVID-19, but that didn't stop their infection rates from skyrocketing. And there's very little evidence that their use of these intelligence tools had any effect on reducing infection rates. They may have been able to track those infection rates, what they did with that information remains unclear, and its impact on their coronavirus response, particularly in the early days of the pandemic seems fairly limited. On the other hand, South Korea was very aggressive using any and all of its surveillance tools and was quite innovative in terms of using financial transactions, so financial intelligence, to identify the location of individual suspected of coronavirus infection or who may have been exposed to the virus. This may have helped South Korea get a handle on their infection rates, but it doesn't seem to have been a persistent or lasting approach for South Korea. Instead, they seem to have pivoted to more traditional health approaches once they got that sort of initial infection spread under control. In Canada, the story is really different. So our laws, specifically the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as our intelligence culture really prevented any real use of intelligence tools against the coronavirus. And this was never really discussed, which is no surprise to anybody who's worked in that field. Instead, in particular, the rapid spread of the virus in this country as in others would also have made these tools relatively ineffective. And Canada, they're very much designed for relatively targeted surveillance, not mass surveillance. So again, same problems that other countries actually ran up against. But, and rightly so Canadians are quite keen to learn what could have been done better in terms of Canada's response to the pandemic. And there have been some suggestions that better intelligence on on the emergence of the pandemic so warning intelligence could have helped Canada be better prepared. So a lot of this discussion has been focused on the global public health intelligence network, what it was intended to do and what it actually did and whether it could have been better used or improved in the future as a tool. Yesterday, great timing the AG actually released a report that was fairly skating in this regard. First, this is a very important question. There's an ongoing debate in academic circles and among practitioners about the nature of it, but many have convincingly argued that we are now in the age of the pandemic or pandemic era. That's really driven by four interrelated processes, global warming, income growth, urbanization and globalization, which make pandemics both more likely and potentially more deadly. Global warming damages ecosystems damages the health of these ecosystems, making the emergence of new disease more likely income growth increases meat consumption and in turn deforestation and increased contact between humans and animals. The same could be said, but deforestation due to mining or deforestation due to the production of timber urbanization and then globalization, both increase the pace at which disease spreads both domestically within countries and of course internationally from one internationally connected city to another internationally connected city. And these intertwining processes are occurring in developing countries across the world, but increasingly and worryingly in developing countries that do not have the appropriate health infrastructure and who countries that are facing public health issues that increase vulnerability disease in the first place. If we accept what Alex is saying here about the sort of age of the pandemic. It really makes a strong case for needing a really robust after action review or lessons learned about what the Canadian response was to the pandemic and what could have been better. And a related question then becomes, should we expand or use our national security and intelligence tools to track and respond to pandemics at large. For our allies we learned that the United States is national center for medical intelligence actually determined that there would be a global pandemic in February 2020 and was alerting about the new illness spreading through Wuhan back in November of 2019. That intelligence was shared with allies, the Quadrupartite Medical Intelligence Committee began writing on an issuing warnings about COVID-19 in January of 2020. So, to a certain extent it actually doesn't appear that early warning was an issue. They were warnings if Canada or for that matter the United States chose to listen to them. Of course, with any, any intelligence problem it's really easy to overwarn and getting policymakers to pay attention to warning problems is never an easy task. But this also raises the question questions about what an enhanced role for Canadian intelligence would have in terms of effect for future pandemics, because a lot of the function of intelligence is that warning piece. In our chapter we argue that there's certainly room for more information sharing between intelligence public health officials and that there's good reasons to think that this can be done fairly easily within our existing structures and frameworks. But the question we want to know is should Canadian intelligence assets limited as they are be deployed to tackle health intelligence or is there another way to achieve the desired effect of better early warning. Some of the things that could have been done perhaps with better warning, you know might have included better personal protective equipment, or providing better information to health officials on how the virus actually works, which may in turn have led to better policies to combat the spread of COVID-19. But I think the thing that's really critical here is that early warning doesn't necessarily mean better and early action. The US example illustrates that just because public officials know something doesn't mean that they'll take action, or that their policy actions will actually improve the health of the public. And while pandemics certainly have national security implications, the case remains unmade as to whether deploying contained Canadian intelligence assets to better detect pandemics would have a beneficial effect. I think I made this point, most saliently on Twitter if you can imagine, when I talked about the idea that Canadian intelligence is a pie, and that pie isn't going to get bigger after the pandemic in fact there's probably arguments to be made that it's going to get smaller. So it's really about figuring out where we want how we want that pie to be sliced, and whether health intelligence should be one of the slices within that pie. The temptation will likely exist amongst Canadian policymakers to create or bolster health intelligence priority, but we think this is something of a solution looking for a problem. It's unclear what dedicated intelligence collection on this would yield in terms of action, and why this would be better than simply enhancing or listening to the global public health intelligence network. Certainly sharing any and all relevant relevant information across departments will be critical. The possibility exists that intelligence can surface well in advance of the next pandemic. And this should obviously be provided to the relevant departments and agencies, but retooling Canadian intelligence to focus on this as an intelligence priority may have deleterious effects, including for privacy, effectiveness, and national security at large again if that pie gets sliced a bit and may create more duplication rather than efficiencies. Now this is not to say that intelligence agencies cannot be leveraged to the benefit of pandemic preparedness, rather that there are dynamics that will take place beyond the mere prioritization collection analysis and dissemination of relevant information. The dynamics such as politicization which we've spoken about the deterioration of other intelligence capabilities and capacities and the duplication of other ongoing government activities all have to be taken into consideration. Where the use of intelligence agencies might be beneficial is understanding how other countries are responding to health crises within their borders, the truthfulness of other governments assessments of their domestic situation and response and implications for Canada. That said, these activities alone will not prepare Canada for the pandemic era for the reasons Jessica stated. Great. Thank you so much. And I actually want to pick up on your last point for Professor Corbett and to either of you, the examples that you just provided in terms of where Canada's intelligence agencies could be of most use without duplicating efforts. It strikes me as something that we would call foreign intelligence, so not necessarily security intelligence about a threat related to the security of Canada, but actually about the capabilities intentions and activities of foreign states. Currently Canada can only collect foreign intelligence outside of the signals intelligence realm within Canada. So we wouldn't necessarily be set up to engage in that kind of activity, unless we wanted to rely surely on like over open source types of information which Griffin does engage in. So I guess my question is, does this bolster the idea that there is a need in this current pandemic environment, as I think that you called it to enhance Canada's capabilities and capacity and reach of foreign intelligence. And I'll ask either of you. Yeah, I'll go ahead. He's all, I think Alex will have a bit more to say on this. So I think the way I see it is like would be more incidental collection like as you say sort of that piece of collecting within Canada and that in terms of bolstering the argument. I think, yes to the extent that there's a really good argument to be made that we Canada would benefit from having better intelligence about foreign states intentions and having a better picture of that. I still remain a little skeptical about what the budget piece of that wouldn't look like but I'll kick it over to Alex to answer. So I would have to agree with Jess as well. Really it's about leveraging that information which is in the open source space but also leveraging the alliances that we already have sharing that information within those alliances and we laid out in our presentation as well as our chapter, the ways in which intelligence come to Canada with the COVID-19 pandemic, not advocating for a retooling or refocusing but rather kind of leveraging the information sources we already have to focus on these responses by states and their implications for Canada as well. Great, so I will invite other panelists and other participants to either raise their hand if they're panelists or write in the chat. If you have questions, my other question to you, I won't be presenting my chapter today, but my chapter was on whether or not legally we could have used our intelligence agencies to actually engage in this collection and my argument is that there is actually no capacity to have leveraged any of our intelligence agencies or surveillance tools, legally at this point. As I said, you know, in the after action, those things could be amended. So I'm wondering if in your research, this goes to your point Jessica, if you found any countries, not necessarily who engaged in the use of their national security surveillance tools but who enforced the use of an app or made some sort of use of an app mandatory, right. So we did the covert alert app as a voluntary thing and it's proven to be largely a failed experiment. But that's using surveillance outside the national security space, but then requiring it. I'm just wondering if you've come across any countries that or something like that. Yeah, so I think that there's been a couple that have like I think Israel has actually done something fairly recently on this in terms of vaccine so they're not necessarily forcing the use of like a tracking out but they're requiring people to demonstrate the use their vaccination to demonstrate and that's sort of done through an app I think there's also a paper way to do it. So there are some incidental ones I don't think anybody's forced the issue I think there's a lot of hesitancy to do that just because of access to smartphones and that kind of thing and like there are real barriers there. But I think the kind of the more interesting part of the question that you asked is really about whether Canada should consider the capability to do this in the future. It comes down to like that robust after action review but like looking at other countries experiences with this like what did using national security or intelligence tools actually get these countries up to my mind and what I've seen so far has been very very little. So it speaks to a little bit of the whether we should even pursue it. Yeah, I'm just going to because I'm not presenting today I'm going to take a few of my minutes to say I think that that's right I just wonder if we build the tools in advance and they're ready to roll out expecting down the road that this but build them into kind of a public health intelligence rather than what we think of classic surveillance, if we might be able to leverage the tools in a new and more efficient way. And I don't have an answer to that. All I the only answer I have to that is that there's no current legal way in which we could do it. So if we were were to engage in some sort of mass surveillance or mass collection. There's absolutely no way to do it under Canadian law currently despite what some other privacy advocates have suggested. So I'll turn over to Professor Wilner you have a question. Hi guys. I was just wondering if you if your chapter dealt with not so much the use of intelligence apparatus to collect intelligence in the public health but but but the next step of actually encouraging action against public health right so like, what do we do with the intelligence if you have thoughts thoughts on that because I think you're right there was perhaps a lack of intelligence but also a lack of inertial initial initial initial action to take to take measures. I'm thinking back in March and April right so I wonder that next step, if you might comment on that. I've got a quick, quick answer for you there. The only real thing that we've sort of come across in our research and some of the other research that I've been doing for this is that there is probably a lot of space for lessons learned from the intelligence community in terms of crafting effective warning intelligence messages for public health officials so there could be some overlap or collaboration there that could be really beneficial. Alex did you anything you wanted to add there. I agree I mean we have to definitely look at what was happening within these countries, and the to your question to as well what sort of affordances and authorities security intelligence agencies have in those countries as well. So for instance, if you take a look at some of the examples that we put forward in the chapter, and all look specifically at Israel, Israel's whole SNI community was put forward to address COVID-19. And everything from understanding and tracking COVID in Israeli population, but also at the same time, trying to look at the the intent and what's happening overseas and then importantly made quite a few headlines in New York Times the use of massage that actually go out and try to procure a lot of the medical equipment that would be needed for Israel to react to the first wave of COVID. Now of course that's somewhat of a different circumstance right the reason massage was probably playing that roles because massage has a number of covert relationships with other states that Israel doesn't have official relationships with that they leverage during that period as well. Another example would be in another context would be Singapore force intelligence agencies in that context have a have a larger role in society. But you definitely saw a breakdown trust in Singapore whereby it was promised to to the people in that country that they wouldn't use that information for any other reason that quickly became apparent they were using it for criminal investigations for instance in cases where there were people who witnessed a crime particularly murders. So I think there's a need to be very very sensitive in terms of how we apply the lessons learned and how we transfer those lessons learned from very different circumstances very very different security intelligence cultures to Canada. There's a great peace and warned the rocks for instance with regards to the Israeli response written by a former member of the SNI community who says, you know this is very kind of typical about the way that Israel approaches these issues where they jump into address the situation and then think about the implications after the fact, not to say that they get supplied across the board but in the circumstance you can definitely see a full full press by the Israeli state, and the recent Supreme Court decision in Israel about the collection of data through through the contract tracing was was you know that ship that role was was limited by the Supreme Court given concerns about personal information privacy etc. Great, thank you so much. And that was great. I know that we're going to lose Professor Corbe because he is a busy man, but we will have Davis with us for our final round of questions. Thank you very much. And we are going to now turn to the rule of the Canadian Armed Forces, and it's a response in the global pandemic. So we'll hear from Professor Seiman who is joined with Professor von hockey and, and one of his Nipsey students in writing this chapter for us so Professor Seiman over to you. Can you let me share the screen please. Oh, sure. Since I'm talking about military stuff the military has to talk in PowerPoint I just always in PowerPoint hold on and under security. Security hold on to the security box at the bottom of the screen. This is why we have extra. There we go. Bingo. All right. Yep. Thank you. What I want to do today is as briefly talk about the paper we wrote it was myself Stephanie von Lackey at Queens University and Graham Hopkins one of our Nipsey graduate students who has also been one of the three MA students who's been working with the Canadian Defense and Security Network. For the past year, he's his time at Nipsey at that city essence coming to an end. And this is his research was key to our, our findings. And the basic question is, is how did the pandemic affect the kingdom forces, how did it affect what was doing both the home and abroad. And the punchline is, is that it really depended on what the mission was, because some missions were more exposed to pandemic and that meant that they were more heavily affected and some missions were less exposed. And that's really depends on the nature of the enterprise. How often are you meeting other people people outside your unit essentially. So the first thing is his operation laser was launched now supposedly operation laser exists all the time in phase one which is always standing by to jump into the fray. But it was really the activation of operation laser last March that launched the CAF operations within Canada. And that took the most visible form which was sending people into long term healthcare facilities in Ontario, Quebec because they were ravaged by the disease and by well turned out to be poor preparation and poor training and poor personnel techniques and all the rest of it. And so there needed to be something like 1000 soldiers from the CAF went into these facilities. And that made the most news in two ways. One is that it was very visible to the public that we saw this media covered it quite heavily because it wasn't what anybody was expecting. The second was, and then my second picture in the middle is of the report they wrote that get that made it into media which where the report where you had all these individual members the CAF of the Canadian forces in these long term care facilities report on abuse and neglect that these places had been exposing or perpetrated upon their, the people they're supposed to be caring for. And so that created a lot of news as well, in part because a lot of these facilities were supposed to be their own to regulated by the by Ontario and Quebec. And I'll get back to that later. The second is that they also helped isolate isolated communities up north. First Nations communities, in particular, that had limited healthcare capabilities and had limited access and so you had periodically not just once but in the spring, then in the fall and now again this winter, the CAF sending troops up there to create a response to evacuate people were ill and all the rest that was very visible and important effort by the forces. The other which we're hitting now and you can see with a picture of Major General Danny for time is operation vector which is the vaccination effort that the Canadian Armed Forces has both great logistic skills that being able to get stuff from point A to point C. And has lots of personnel available to put to be deployed. What we're learning about the public health agency of Canada is they don't really have a lot of excess capacity to throw bodies out of problem. The military has that in great abundance and so they've been doing that. But it's really dependent on the nature of the operation so the first picture is of Canadian Air, Royal Canadian Air Force that was involved in training the Romanians that as part of many of the missions that we've got going on. The Canadian Air Force was, we sent CFA teens to fly with the Romanians to help train them and also to be a presence that we are part of a variety of efforts to deter the Russians in their aggression in Eastern Europe. So we're under operation reassurance one met one part of that is an occasional deployment of the usual six F six F 18s. And the biggest change in this was they didn't do air shows they didn't travel around Eastern Europe because that would have led to more exposure but if you're doing training amongst pilots you're either doing it on the tarmac, which meant that you could do it out in the air that wasn't really going to be that difficult and or that you know, there wouldn't be much contagion, or you're doing it in separate planes communicating to each other and that was not a problem. There are other Royal Canadian Air Force planes out there doing things and some of those were more affected because those did involve operating in countries that closed down their their bases due to COVID and things like that. One of the other forms of Canadian involvement in the world is the Canadian forces engaging capacity building that is training that the CAF's biggest missions outside of the Latvia mission in Ukraine and in Iraq. The Canadian forces are training other militaries, and those got postponed for quite some time, and then gradually opened up because the challenge of those kinds of environments is you're constantly meeting new people, and and working closely with them as the as a result, that provided to me of a risk, particularly the start of the pandemic. And so those were mostly frozen the one in Iraq was also frozen because we forget but it was a little more than a year ago that the United States and Iraq and Iran almost went to war in Iraq over the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani. And so that changed the nature of operations in Iraq so that was going on at the same time. The last picture is of of a Latvia mission that Canada has about 450 troops in Latvia as part of the NATO effort and hands forward presence to deter the Russians from attacking Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland. We're based in Latvia, and we're based along with, I want to say eight other countries in the Latvian battle group, the Canadians lead the battle groups they have the most troops there of all these forces, and they command the battle group. And those eight other countries included Italy and Spain, which was pretty handy because Italy and Spain got hit by the pandemic first. And so the routines the procedures to handle the pandemic were shared pretty quickly and earlier than, than they were in other parts of the Canadian forces because these Canadians were working with folks that hit earlier. And the idea of this that their training processes didn't change too much because the way to think about Latvia is to think about the NBA playoff basketball bubble last year, where if you keep everybody in the same spot and they're not leaving that spot and nobody else is entering that spot, then you reduce the risk of transmission. And that was the way it worked in Latvia where you had 1000 troops roughly from all these different countries. And the idea would be quarantine them before they go and quarantine them after they come back, and that would minimize the exposure and so the mission itself continued continue to have these troops working together training to prepare for that next war with well Russia. But that was different from the capacity building because it's a state for, for the entire six month rotation it's essentially the same people inside the bubble, which is different from the training efforts in Latvia and sorry Ukraine, and other places, because there's a constant flow of new people. Now it turns out, as we look closer into this we learn more that the calf has been a little bit discreet about the troubles they've had because there have been problems there have been folks who are supposed to be on quarantine not not following the quarantine where there was one plane load of king troops that were rotating in as a fresh set of troops, and they got turned around because there have been some exposure. And then there was some outbreaks in Latvia that they then had to respond to and the Spaniards reported it in their own media about how this was handled, but it didn't really get much playing Canada. What are the implications of all this. Well, first of all, COVID as a disease tells people what their pre-existing conditions are because those people with pre-consistent conditions suffer more from the disease. Well, it does the same to political systems that says does the same to organizations that that it reveals what problems these beforehand and so obviously in Canada, one of the big challenges is federalism that we've had lots of disagreements between the federalism and the feds about what to do about this crisis. And we've seen that within various organizations and so what we were what we knew, we kind of knew before the pandemic that the treatment of senior citizens and long term care facilities probably wasn't optimal. While COVID revealed that it was far from optimal in fact there was abuse and neglect that was quite widespread and quite severe. We knew that it existed beforehand but the COVID revealed it made it much worse that the exacerbated the consequences of that. The second is that we learned that pandemics are political that means a lot of different things but part of it means that you have politicians who have faced mixed descendants I've got this sort of oops picture from Doug Ford because he's kind of trying to figure out how to deal the fact that the military blew the whistle and the fact that the elder care facilities were in, you know, poorly managed and had all these records of neglect and abuse this was a basically criticism of the Ontario government and there's also criticism of the Quebec government and so put those premiers in awkward positions because they had asked these troops to help them out and then these troops then blow the whistle on on the state of being in these places. And they also faced mixed incentives because the longer the troops stayed there then the less the provinces had to spend on nursing because the Canadian forces while they could ask for reimbursement for they do they tend not to for emergencies like this. And so on the one hand Doug Ford wants the nurses doctors troops to stick around from the calf because he has enough pay for and he saves saves the province money. On the other hand, he doesn't control them and they can say things that he doesn't like. The third thing is is that these kinds of operations, as some of the previous speakers suggest they're going to be more normal that last January before the pandemic. Lieutenant General air who is now the acting CDS but at the time was the head of the army had observed that the army and the rest of the Canadian Armed Forces were increasingly stretched by the increased pace of operations that had been there have been fires and floods in other kinds of storms and other natural emergency triggered operations that had been increasing the past five or 10 years that climate change is real and it's and it's causing Canada experience a variety of things that call for the Canadian Armed Forces to provide civil assistance to civilian authorities. And so we're putting before the pandemic before it hit Canadian shores that this was a problem. And while every defense review always identifies as among its major priorities, domestic operations, it's always, you know, protect Canada, participate in the binational Defense of North America, participate in international operations, and most of the attention of the Canadian Forces, and most of the attention of the Department of National Defense and of Parliament of everybody else is on the expeditions on going to Iraq and going to Ukraine and going to Latvia, going to Molly, whatever else, less attention is paid on domestic operations indeed actually we scholars are guilty of this ourselves. There is not really that much in terms of defense scholarship of political science on these domestic operations. So the first step in that is we really don't study it so we don't really know what we do well what we do poorly. What we do realize is we're going to be doing more, more and more and so what we need to have that Canadian Armed Forces think about is not just thinking about these things as emergencies that happen from time to time, but it's part of the day job is not just part of the thing they have to do, because you have to do it, but it's going to be regularly part of the mission set. So that's all for us thinking a little bit about what do we spend our defense dollars on. And what does a Canadian Forces spend it's readiness money for and what is training for, because these domestic operations are going to become a bigger and bigger part of their job. And the larger context of this is of course, the pandemic has killed more Canadians than any of the wars of the past. I think you have to go all the way back to World War two to think of a war that affected Canadians more than than this pandemic has. So this may be some, there may be some need to start thinking about the priorities not just the basic list of what kind of cares about but really prioritizing this domestic operations. And that's what I've got. So look forward to your questions and thanks for listening. I have a question for you that Professor Wilner wants me to ask, as he steps out to take care of children but he may have this on in the background is what is the domestic off as normal off due for recruitment and retention do you think for the Canadian forces. That's a good question. I think part of it is is the on the bright side for the Canadian forces it's, this is a good news story. Right this is, this is a story about how the calf is relevant. One of the things that the Diet, the Department of National Defense and the Canadian forces are regularly agonize themselves about is that they're not the public's not sufficiently aware of the military they were aware during Afghanistan but then the awareness dropped afterwards. And so the first step to recruitment is to show that the Canadian forces are doing good things. The second thing is is that one of the consistencies despite the best efforts of the Canadian forces, the Canadian people still see the Canadian forces mostly in a positive light in terms of doing nonviolent stuff that the Canadian Defense has worked at a survey last fall. And it's very clear from that survey that when the Canadian forces are doing things, the violent things are least popular and the last violent things are more popular. So, this kind of mission is very popular amongst the people that there's a while the military is still one of the most respective institutions in the country. I think this will probably push it a little even higher, because you see the Canadians helping all of Canada through the vaccinations through the elder care facilities through flying five massive refrigerators up to the north to hold is to contain the virus the vaccines. All the efforts that they're doing domestically can only help in recruitment and retention of the force, because it's popular now on the flip side of that. The pandemic itself has stressed out the force just like it stressed out all of us that it has caused people to have to operate very very differently. And most of you deploy abroad no longer have the usual support systems back home because, you know, who do you send you know if you've got two parents of in a family who are both members of the armed forces. If they're both deployed what you do with them will be sending them to your grandparents who are vulnerable to this disease. Childcare facilities, schools, you know all those things that affect all of us affect people in the Canadian forces so the stress levels have gone up. That's been a problem but that that's not unique to the King of forces of course so I think in general this has been a positive experience in the calf in terms of being a positive force in Canada and for advertising for recruitment and retention. And just reminding everyone that please put questions in the chat. My question for you is do you think that this will help keep the calf relevant in terms of funding. You know, going into a period of fiscal restraint. You know the military and doing things that are violent is one that we would think to, you know, in the past has really taken a hit. When we do go into these periods. Do you think that this is this might help the care and forces or is it just that domestic officer cheaper. So it won't really help make sure that the Canadian forces stays flush. That's definitely something that they've been thinking about I was at a meeting last summer where the leadership of the Indian calf are trying to alert us that the message of defense cuts should not be inevitable. But the history that is says otherwise because this is where the money's at right. This is the biggest budget item in the budget. So the irony is that you might have the military praying for liberal sustained power since they don't care about deficits in the same way that they sort of say they care about deficits. It's a real challenge, because the stuff that the Canadian forces spends most of its money on well spends most money on two things personnel, which is probably not going to change. And big budget items are the things that we see so the ships and the planes. And so there's going to be some pressure cutting the budget by cutting military expenditure but on the other hand there's political incentives to go the other way which is all the parties don't want to upset Vancouver and Halifax over the very shipbuilding programs. And so I don't think that those programs will face much in the way of cuts despite how expensive they are. There's a lot of places to cut them and there will be cuts. I, you know, the folks in the Indian the calf will say they're not going to be cuts but there's going to be cuts there's just no way around it. So, what the calf can do is try to play up that's role in Canada the past year and say, we've done a really good job don't punish us. I don't mean to be said for that but I think people will look at it will go but yeah but the things that you are spending lots of money on weren't used it was personnel it wasn't planes, it wasn't ships, certainly wasn't ships. So, that's that's something to consider along the way. I have one more question and again if anyone else has a question to ask go ahead. And I should know this, but I may have forgotten. Do you think there's been any impact on Canada participation in NATO as a result of COVID, either in the last year or going forward. That's a good question allows me to say something I forgot to talk about earlier which is I ignored the Navy entirely I apologize to all our sailors. I think that what is the Navy is sort of the perfect example of what COVID, the COVID challenge because if you're on a ship and you're not exposed to anybody else you're not going to get the disease. As soon as you touch land there's a great risk and so we remember last year that entire American aircraft carrier was beached and like to a real hullabaloo in the United States of ultimately led to the Secretary of the Navy was in his job. As in Canada we haven't had that problem, because we've changed the rules so the ships can still operate in NATO efforts they just can't spend time wandering around port. You know, usually you have these port visits, which are both to relieve the stress of the sailors but also as PR PR camping to show that you know the Canadians are here to help you out and aren't they wonderful people. What happens when a ship, you know, goes to port it the troop the sailors don't leave the ship or they don't leave the vicinity of the ships they don't go into the town. And that has been mostly successful keeping our ships from having the same problem that the Teddy Roosevelt had for the United States, which probably got the disease by having to port visit to Vietnam just as this thing was developing. The answer to the question, the short answer to the question is Canada still has ships in NATO fleets it's currently leading the maritime standing standing group in the Baltics. It still has troops in Latvia. And so the NATO, our participation NATO has not changed. The operations and the training exercises have gone smaller or been delayed so in the Pacific Rim pack which is usually this massive sea based land land based exercise of ships all across the Pacific. That has been downsized we still had two ships per participating but we had none of the land component. And it was much smaller effort than in the past so those kinds of things are still going on and and yes we're still as plugged into NATO as we ever were. Thank you very much, Professor statement. Hopefully you'll stick around. We're, and we're going to move to our next group of presenters which are if it's students. We have any way and refills. I'm probably going to pronounce that wrong, you can correct me when you go. I believe you should have availability to share screen. So hopefully you can. And we're going to hear from our students who as a, as a class essentially put together a chapter under the supervision of Professor Carter was also from from the Davis on supply chain. So take it away. Okay, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much professor. Yeah, last, I will let me show everyone consider slides and a wrap are we ready to go. We are good afternoon everyone. Okay, awesome. So, thank you for being here today, and I am here to present on behalf of our team. We're presenting today on manufacturing, which is one of the three component of the broader supply chain chapter. As you know, the Senate spike in demand for PPE, coupled with the disruption of global supply chains, severely limited the ability of the health sector to access these critically needed products. This disruption made it even harder for our domestic sector. In fact, it could not ramp up its production fast enough to compensate for the dual supply shock. I will now pass it to Annie. That's right. So remember when pandemic struck not only disrupt the healthcare system modes of operation, but also restrict its access to medical goods, also known as COVID-19 goods. So this is because the production of these goods tend to be concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of companies, which themselves depend on a larger global supply chain to produce them. So by definition, a resilient healthcare system should be able to maintain its essential function in a short term and in the long term, despite the double shocks of the pandemic and the disruption to supply chains. So that's why we need to discuss healthcare resiliency and the releasing of the system. So it because the ability to sustain those essential function are crippled and the health and safety of Canadians are compromised. It poses a direct threat to national security. Yeah, so what a resilient health strong, what a strong domestic manufacturing can have bring to the table are they can help us ramping up production to fill in the gaps left by foreign supplies. Also provide innovative solutions to help extend the life of devices and the detect counterfaith and reduce resiliency. Yeah, I'm going to now on to wrap to talk about some of the policy. Yes. Thank you, Annie. As you know, government policy is the backbone of both the health and manufacturing sectors, as they create the political and economic environment that these two sectors operate under. This policy can either support or for straight production efforts, depending on the government's ability to fill the gaps exposed by COVID-19. These gaps include first import and export restrictions creating resource constraints. Second, a low domestic supply of these products. Third, a freeze of economic activity because of weaker than normal demand created by the initial job losses. And for production limitations brought on by physical distancing and other requirements. That being said, our government can come with policies to fix these gaps. But first, we needed to know the exact production capacity of medical mass manufacturers within our borders. We also needed to identify any bottleneck that could hurt the production of these essential medical devices. As you, as we now know, Canadian government has has taken appropriate measures since then, but there are important points that we need to take into consideration. Namely the creation of a comprehensive national emergency plan with a standard operating procedure and a clear chain of command in emergency situations. These could promote swift communication and a faster mobilization of resources, as well as the timely diffusion of essential information, which is very important in this era of miss and disinformation, right. And, yeah, second, we also know that policy and legal limitations can impact manufacturing sectors willingness to meet demands. I will now pass it to me to talk about the economics incentives. Yeah, so another thing we remember is when each one and one and Ebola and did manufacturers were left with a lot of expensive equipment material. Business overheads to deal with so they lost profit in the end because demand dried up and eventually there's no further incentive to reduce mask. Therefore we suggest that greater manufacturing incentives in Canada needs to be considered in order to promote domestic production from a long term perspective. So this was one of the biggest takeaway there are others important such as kind of problem such as tariffs and the cost benefits off and 95 using and 95 versus surgical mask. So for times sake we're not covering that in this presentation, but if that's off anyone's interest we're happy to discuss that during the question period. Yeah, next one. So, after the policy and the economic section we kind of looked at the operational. So we look at, there are many efforts made by the industry to form partnership with the government and then to help ramping up the production. Yet there are still many challenges the industry were facing. Next one. So one of the biggest area is procurement and mostly the challenges lie in the procurement of raw material, both domestically and internationally, and then also procurement of automation and equipment. Lastly, difficulty in recruitment of men power due to cover 19. So in one case study we look at a male balloon fabric so my own fabric is one of the most important raw material and mask manufacturing it's the layer that blocks the droplet so the first figure in the presentation you see is a increasing asymmetric trace status of PP Paul the polypropylene the it's a plastic particles to produce metal and fabric. So we see from this chart very clearly that there is increasing reliance at the source level. So this problem couple with other constraints like a really long lead time and expensive to set up plans. So eventually the manufacturing sector favored outsourcing rather than local production which makes sense at 100% economically, but this caused a cycle of less and less spending in research and development leads to a higher technical threshold, and then eventually completes the cycle and then turns into and then does turn into the sectors vulnerability when China decided to bang all Melbourne fabric export in 2020. So in another case study, we look at the procurement of automation. So in the video right now you are seeing a complete assembly line sold by a Chinese company that has in build quality control function using automated visual inspection technology. So Canada already have access to those automated and the visual scan technology. In fact they are operational in some medical device manufacturers, but has not been used in mask manufacturer sector so we think this is a good point for the industry to reflect on and we believe that Canada could become more resilient by advancing and using those technologies. Slide. So now if we recall one of the concept we bring up is vulnerability triad, which is the three aspect technical, economic and policy, both cases, they suggest that raw material shortage and technical defects and constraints results from the existing economic and trade structure. That is heavily reliant on foreign import. So we must recognize that there is a trade off here and the prioritization of profit, calm at the price of building a more resilient manufacturing industry. And it takes time and effort but all level to reverse the cycle and then eventually to better prepare for the next one. Right with that I'll pass back to Raphael. Thank you, Annie. So, as you know, PPE manufacturers faced multiple technical dilemmas since the beginning of the pandemic, and I will brief you about one of them. And medical device companies and health authorities Canadian government, etc. I would like to fight back the substandard counterfeit products that are spreading into our supply chains. But if they do that now, it will make it even harder for us to mean the current PPE demand that is very high. After research, we recommend that PPE manufacturers and their business partners install end to end traceability systems, which will speed up the detection and removal of fake products. But to install these systems manufacturers have to shut down their production lines for quite some time. And that is why they are likely to work on this only after the pandemic will be under control. That brings us to the conclusion of our presentation. Here are the four lessons learned that we learned through our case study that could increase the resilience of the PPE manufacturing sector in Canada. So first, an early and comprehensive government response is necessary. The government must be ready to fulfill the immediate needs of the PPE manufacturers and also of all their business partners. We also saw that Canada wasn't as fast as the US to share plans on how to retool existing manufacturers into mask manufacturers. Second, a reevaluation of economic links to compete with foreign manufacturers. In fact, we need to reevaluate our current strategic framework to build a more diversified market structure, which will reduce our dependence on foreign sources. Third, research and development and economic innovation can help promote resilience. We should encourage the manufacturing sector, this manufacturing sector to increase its use of automation. And the medical device sector so also be stress tested to ensure its resiliency against future pandemics and forth as we just discussed. We should consider the implementation of a traceability system for a better quality assurance. So, thank you for your interest in our presentation and we we warmly welcome your questions. Thank you. That might have been the best that it flies I've ever seen. Thank you so much for having me done to the both of you. And so my first question is you talked about incentivizing and increase manufacturing or keeping manufacturing in Canada. And can you talk a bit more about that what what what an incentive look like with this. How would that work. Yeah, we already have advanced manufacturing technology. In fact, I worked for four years for a company that manufacture automation for pharmaceutical and medical device industry. But that's just of course like one drop in the ocean but our company had maybe 90% of our business outside Canada because mostly people outside Canada were interested in what we do. And I think the government could have helped us and many of our, many of the other players in Canada we have a great technological engineering industry, but maybe we need some help so that Canadian get to know better what we are capable of. And we definitely already have many of the technologies here to help our own good. So, in case of a policy I think maybe better funding that better recognition. Also, the minimum requirements around medical device production could be a bit tighter in certain areas. Thank you. And did you want to add anything. Yeah, just a couple of thoughts so one of our, one of our teammate Richard wrote the, wrote the economic section so I think he might have better to say but I know that right now. We were thinking of your word to have a incentive program what if it looked like, and then we thought it was it was really a big tax for us to tackle so we didn't go into there but we know there are right now there are programs that similar to that like the Ontario together program which give us it sets out incentive for to develop research and development. There are. There's another stock program Ness national stock program that is looking to add stock to to, I think that's not part of a supply chain but that's what they plan to do to add in that resilience and aspect in there. And also I know there are partnership formed, such as between like three and and then, and then government level that they're looking at how to help other manufacturers from for example auto other auto manufacturing sector, or clothing manufacturing and how to help them what are the sources they need, and then to help them to develop and come forward at the frontline and then to build a more material so we really hope that there are a more concrete policy framework could be coming out to address this incentive program but I think the government are in the industry are working together right now. So, in terms of framing this and I think it's obvious to you but to those in the audience. What is the failure that you identified here with the lack of preparedness, what was the impact for Canadian security and Canada's capacity to deal with the crisis do you think, in your opinion. Okay, I think I can start speak a little bit. I to me, I think the biggest takeaway as I wrote part of the section was the trade off that we must recognize which is globalization with very simply I think a lot of people that are anti globalization that are against some of the trade agreement right now would argue the point. It is because we see that even though the industry tried to start really hard to to ramp up the production they want to help out and build in you know protecting our people, like at the very source level even just to get the fabric we couldn't get it right because we don't have the capacity we decided not to produce them from 2000 starting 2005 it started to have that trade. It was one of the slides the trade status started to just really getting larger and larger so it's really that prioritization of profit at the end come back to hit us. So, to me that was the biggest takeaway and I think if we continue to cycle and say, we're going to rely so much on globalization. And if it's not a pandemic could be another thing could be maybe a war, then does our supply chain just get crippled and then we can't get food we can't get the things we need. So, I think that's a point that I was really start to think I think that's really the tie to national security is the ability to produce the ability to self sustain. Anything. I think any really framed it correctly. I will add that Canada was maybe over relying on certain allies for its supply of medical device. And I think we need to consider that we need a certain minimum threshold of our own medical device production to be here in Canada, where we will be able to increase or decrease their production as we need. Great. Thank you so much to both of you that was a fantastic presentation. Thanks a lot and everyone. So stay with us. And so if all of our panelists want to turn on their cameras we're going to start kind of thinking about things a bit thematically or answering more questions from the audience that may have come up over the course of the presentation that you can ask to multiple panelists or to one individual panelists. Yes, the, the one thing I want to ask about and maybe I'll start with you, Jessica, and is this idea about ethics and in response to the pandemic. This isn't necessarily one aspect of your, your paper but you know, speaks broadly is that there's a lot of ethical questions about how we respond to the pandemic both in terms of surveillance, in terms of, you know, whether or not we're going to continue to do our, our military partners or military commitments, whether it's vaccine nationalism. I don't know if anybody wants to think about how you've seen the role of ethics versus national security play out here in the specific issues that you're, you're researching. I think in the, in the work that I was doing on this it was a bit of an interesting piece because I would say that generally speaking there's a really robust ethical framework for intelligence that sort of been written about an intelligence studies but I think that the pandemic really challenged that, particularly in the sense of proportionality so because so many people, especially in the early days of the pandemic we're getting sick we didn't really understand the consequences of the, of the illness. There's a lot of deaths, I think that it really shifted the proportionality argument for sort of enhanced surveillance and enhance monitoring of individuals, and it was a really interesting thing to watch, especially in Canada where we have a lot of individual rights, and I think a fairly low tolerance for government surveillance compared to a lot of other states we've talked about today. And just sort of seeing how that tolerance for enhanced surveillance or enhanced involvement of the government and that kind of thing shifted and I'm actually surprised by how little it did. It doesn't seem like a lot of Canadians were keen to have the government on their cell phone in, in the COVID-19 app. And so we're even less interested in having other kinds of surveillance imposed upon them, but in other countries it was totally different so in South Korea again as a great example, they didn't really seem to have a lot of problem with the enhanced surveillance of the population for COVID-19 reasons. I was speaking to actually one of my, one of my friends who's in Hong Kong and his argument was really that North America has a profound disregard for elderly life, I think that's Professor Stadium and touches on this a little bit in his presentation, that we didn't necessarily, and that in, in a lot of the Asian countries that have had really robust responses to the pandemic that are the things that can explain the difference or the variation in the responses. And again, sort of relates that surveillance piece as well like sort of more acceptance of surveillance to try to cut down that spread and really stop it whereas in North America it doesn't seem to have been quite that way. Great. Does anyone else want to add to that. I'm wondering if I could add something in there. Absolutely. That's just my personal view, it's not part of the paper, but I am also very interested in this topic because I was looking at, you know, response taken by Korea and China and I, and one of the things I noticed, and then is that they have when the government says we need to do this and then the people have a sense of individuality, they will think like yes we're doing this we're accepting this feeling under a very special circumstances it's for national security so they have like a general, have a broader sense of national security and then less sense of individuality I think that was very fascinating to see how the constitution how democracy has to play, and then how the political system has such an impact and it's it's you can argue either side, but it's very interesting when it comes to ethic how we think the ethic that we perceive as a right sometimes could come into the way when certain things need to be done. I would just say the ethics of the all this is that it's interesting that the military, when it does domestic operations is in a weird position where they say that they communicate well with the provinces and all the rest of it but they they don't. They don't always make abundantly clear exactly the full range of what they can and cannot do, like when you go on a foreign campaign, you don't release your rules of engagement, because you don't want the adversary to know what you can and cannot do because then they can use that to your advantage. And in Canada, the rules of engagement should be transparent because the disease doesn't read your rules of engagement and then try to circumvent them. Fires don't do that floods don't do that ice storms don't do that. But there is a challenge which is that if they make an abundantly clear what it can and cannot do then they'll be asked to do more. And they would rather have the provinces do as much as they can and the cities do as much as they can and the other entities and Canada do as much as they can so they're not asked to do things that they can't do, or they don't want to do like clean up after they've, you know, the, they'll put out the sand bags during a flood but they don't want to be doing it forever because they have these nurses these doctors these medics, their day job is handling the medical problems of the force, not of the public. And so if they're stretched taking care of these nursing home facilities forever, then those they're not available to take care of the force, or deal with other things so the the Canadian Armed Forces always stuck with these trade-offs of the how much help to offer, or they see their job is to give aid to civil power or assistance to civil authorities, but they don't always want to be abundantly clear about it because they don't want to be over overstretched. Is there a sense professor statement and I mean I had my personal opinions back when I was in the Armed Forces about the value of domestic operations within the Canadian Armed Forces at least in terms of whether or not that's really their job. Or, you know, do they embrace the role of dumb up. Well, it's interesting they put it that way, Professor West, because I get the impression from the way they look at it. I mean I haven't talked to him that I've done content interviews. Again, every defense review puts domestic operations number one, but they certainly in their doctrine and their training. They don't really say that now I what I'd be curious about is it used to be before Afghanistan if you took a look at the website. And I've listed all the bios of every single officer in the Canadian Armed Forces who's an Army or Air Force Colonel or above or Navy Captain above, you can find out what their bio was and they, many of them prominently listed participation leadership in the storm of 1998 and things like that. I wonder after two decades of Afghanistan and other more kinetic things whether those operations are still proudly listed in the biographies of officers. Alas, D&D and CAF have made that website, unaccessible. So we can't really do the compare contrast that would be fun social science. I don't really see that. But my guess is that yeah they probably diminish the value of that are the importance of that but I think that this experience of past year may leave us a pushback, because again, what affects more Canadians running around in Latvia Ukraine, or doing what they were doing in the past year is that it's obvious that it's domestic operations. And they're going to have to say that, you know, okay, if domestic operations are going to take more and more time and more and more money, then we're going to have to reprioritize because that means shifting resources, not just going oh no we're stretched but actually putting the time and effort into rejiggering things so that there's more, more troops available for this, that it's part of their natural battle rhythm that they know that they'll be spending the spring dealing with flooding every year but they do know that but do they really plan for that that they really change the rest of their training and recruiting and schedules for that I'm not sure. Thank you very much. Professor Carvin has a question. I can't hear you. The infrastructure prof that always every freaking time anyways okay doesn't matter podcasting TV, same thing. Anyways, all that to say, first of all I just want to give a shout out to my students. Annie and Raphael they were, you know I asked the group if they could present they did so very willingly we practiced all week and it really showed so I'm just a proud masters mama right now which is probably inappropriate but I am you guys did great so thank you. Thank you for representing the chapter in the book. My question to you guys is that you know I have a chapter in the book as well and it kind of looks at how operations were affected during coven. But one of the things that took away from the interviews that I did was the fact that senior leadership in Canadian national security institutions is definitely looking to expand. Maybe they didn't expand because of surveillance but because of you know they're looking at what happened and they're realizing that, you know, maybe we have a bigger role to play here maybe we have more to offer maybe we need to do more horizon scanning in terms of our I was going to ask you the downside of that but I think you've already maybe covered it. And so I was wondering is there an upside to a larger national security presence in the post pandemic future but I'll be happy to hear about your downsides as well. I'll hear from Jessica, then for the statement. Not really a supply chain question but if you either you have anything you want to add to and I might jump in as well. There are some upsides I think, you know there's a natural space for a lot more information sharing here. Anything that can enhance our preparedness next time around I think is the upside to any greater involvement of national security in the space. I think there are a lot of natural limits, you and I Professor carbon have written about a lot of those natural limits and where they should be. So, for me the upsides are really about getting the intelligence to the people who need it but also maybe sharing some lessons learned about how to effectively brief warning problems. And then just hopefully integrating health more into sort of that national security apparatus because it the pandemic may not be a national security problem but it has national security implications. So I think it's important to steal your own mind from you. And I'm sorry, Professor carving can you tell me the question again. Sorry, just to address those two points. Okay, so, first of all, with regards to supply chains I guess my question would be this question with regards to supply chains. Is there an upside at looking at supply chains from a national security perspective. Like what are the advantages of doing that. And Steve my question is really just, you know, we have, you know, I did some interviews with national security agencies as a part of my chapter in the but I guess what I'm wondering is, if you know you guys have you've already addressed some of the downsides of this kind of wider role for national security agencies and the Department of Defense. Is there any upside here for a wider role for the for say the Department of Defense in your case. Sure. As I suggested a little bit earlier there's one of the things that civil civil military relations scholars like the National Geith about is that there are gaps between the civilians and the military. The more we see the Canadian forces doing things that we can touch and feel and you know perceive, then that narrows the gap so when you're you get your if you're going to a place and there are people in uniform or helping you get your shots or you're seeing folks in uniform going up to the north to help out the first nations. If when you see Major General Danny Fortan at these briefings sound a lot sharper than most other people in the room, particularly the premieres. When you see, you know, the pictures, people will not forget the pictures of the calf going into a long term care facility so I think that all helps to create a little better understanding of what the calf can do. And I think, I think you might see as I suggested earlier that that the military may take these missions a little more seriously as part of their day job as opposed to rather than just an inconvenience, just sort of the way Professor Leah West hinted in her question. And so I think taking this seriously as as a major priority, not just one thing on a list of four or five things but maybe the second most important thing and the third most important thing rather than sort of an add on. Again the pace of operations in the down the road with more climate change disaster induced disasters, more pandemics. This is not going to be the last time the calf does stuff domestically so I think that the pandemic will help them. Maybe realign the parties a little bit, and it will also help bind the calf to society a bit more clearly, because it's it's a domestic security problem. And they're showing that they play a role in that we don't have a FEMA, we have you know that the United States has we have a calf. And so I'm going to jump in on that as well and provide some upside and I think, and I think it is about refocusing priorities and changing the lens. And I think we've been overly focused in terms of cost to human life and resources that balance on terrorism and certain types of terrorism in the national space in terms of what our broad government intelligence priorities are. And I think this will cause some of the intelligence priorities to shift in terms of aperture to public welfare causes of insecurity, human security issues. And I think that that's appropriate, especially given what we expect to see with climate. And I think it'll help us continue to look at, or I think it's allowed us to reshape our understanding of the real impacts of public welfare emergencies on national security in a way that without this kind of movement would have kept that kind of intelligence low on the priority list. So that's my upside. And in terms of infrastructure protection, do either one of you want to tackle Professor Carvin's question or sorry supply chain. I don't think I have anything to add to this question. Great. So we did get a question from Deborah. And I might jump in on answering it first. She said, generally speaking, what are your thoughts on the use of the emergencies act during the pandemic. Did the government go far enough and using the possible powers as an instrument to maintain national security and civil society and this is certainly an area where the government could have the government could have the emergency act for supply chain management, certainly. And also, in terms of the collection of information and security and surveillance potentially in more minute areas. My perspective was the emergencies act, the legal threshold to meet the emergencies act has long been there. The legal threshold for the emergencies act is an emergency beyond the capacity of a problem to deal with that has an impact, you know, a national impact that can't be addressed by any other act of parliament, meaning, any other federal act. So did we have any other legislative tools to do the things that you need to do to respond to coven. What the government chose to do was create new legislation. It, it offset, you know, and I think this is largely to do with the fact that the biggest issues to deal with are those things that are managed largely at the provincial level. And manufacturing, you know, that is provincial jurisdiction health provincial jurisdiction. So if we look at the role of the federal government what is the federal government to do here. In this case, right, what they needed to do was provide money, right, and to people, largely, and had certain provinces, not responded appropriately within their jurisdiction. If we'd had a South Dakota type response, for example, where one of the premiers chose to not respond. And in order to manage it the federal government needed to seize control that would have been something that would have been appropriate for using the emergencies act for within and sees jurisdiction. But the provinces didn't respond inappropriately. At first, they largely took control over the issue. They didn't need the federal government to mandate them to do certain things. And so unless we get into a situation where provinces aren't doing things or things need to be federalized that fall within that provincial jurisdiction, like supply chain management, for example, or vaccine distribution, which is largely being managed to an extent right now at the federal level and then down to the provinces, then that would have been a useful use for the emergency. But otherwise, what do we need? Right, what do we need them to do? And I don't have a good answer for that. Some people would have said, you know, increased bands on travel. Well, that's done through the quarantine act. Right, so I don't, I don't know that what they would have needed to do unless a province or provinces chose not to respond using their own provincial authorities. So, but I'll leave it to others to answer as well. Anyone else want to jump in. I'm not a legal beagle. So the legalities of this. I think one of the challenges that this pandemic has revealed, as reminded us again is that federalism is both Boone and Bain and so this disease revealed the strengths and weaknesses of federalism. So, when the federal government is doing things poorly and the provinces doing well, then the province can do things well like we saw the Atlantic bubble work out really well and that was something that they worked out together. And that was better in some ways than whatever the poll the stance is the federal government was taking. On the other hand, when federal one provinces are screwing things up. And they've been screwing things up in a big way in Alberta, Quebec in Ontario, other places to potentially but those are the three big three that seem to be making the most of the news for messing this up. It's hard. You know, we would like to have the federal government tell them what to do. But because there's only 11, you know, 10 or so provinces, these negotiations always hard federalism is very contested here you just can't you don't have the same kind of authority is just to do stuff the United States the United States government could say inter interstate commerce act that this is traveling across borders so it's a federal thing shop states and no state proposes the same kind of leverage the American politics the way Quebec or Ontario or Alberta does in Canadian politics so it's it just really hard to do so so you know it's been reluctant to step on their toes he could have done some things early on. And part of it is these did she give money to the provinces and then they chose not to spend some of it like Doug Ford spent chose not to spend as much money on preparing the schools. This past fall that was his choice. He had the money to do it, but he didn't. So, can emergency act force a premier to do it was the right thing. Maybe, but not really. And it's, it's not really what the act is for. So, in this case I would say that that, you know, when it reminds me of what has become a common phrase in American politics which is Green Lantern theory Green Lantern is a superior was magic ring allows him to change reality by wishing it to be so as long as creating a green thing of any kind of any shape. And so what we see increasingly by the media and both the United States of Canada is Green Lantern theory. Oh, you can just do it they just can wish it into being and the answer is no that's not the case. I had that. Early on, when there were calls from public figures to invoke the emergencies act saying why haven't you done it why haven't you done it and a lot of there was a lot of theorizing that it was because of the political history of the war measures act and yada yada yada although the two acts are very very very very very different. I will say that if you look to a large number of those people who were calling for the emergencies act to be employed it was former military general. And, and I think because there was some belief that the feds can do it better. But I think it and and I think realistically when we're talking about a disease that really impacts municipality by municipality differently. Right. The emergencies act is a very very blunt tool, right you don't want to take the power out of the hands of the provinces and the municipalities, nor the responsibility from the promises and municipalities by invoking the emergencies act with not necessary. And like I said the emergencies act, you know public welfare emergencies is just one but it can be a board invoked for war or insurrection, where you might see a real need for, and that's when it was invoked in the past. But public welfare emergency, unless the provinces are not responding I don't see that going to be the first time we see it see it used in this country anyway, and personally because of what Professor statement just had to say. So we have a question from our students. How she can attract medical device manufacturers to establish a sort shorter supply chain in the local economy, and what be some supporting or blocking forces to this movement towards shorter supply chains. And is it essentially manufacturing industry to supply your own health care system. How would. So, you know, how would we do that how do we incentivize that. How do we establish shorter supply chain. First thanks a lot for this question. Could you repeat the first part, the first portion of the question. How should Canada attract medical device manufacturers to establish a shorter supply chain in the local economy. I'm saying that when medical device manufacturer consider Canada has a place where you can establish. They have pros, there's a highly educated workforce and I could go on and on for all the pros, but there are also cons such as a low domestic small domestic market. Therefore, any manufacturer in manufacturing operation considering to establish in Canada will also have to consider we will have to export to Europe to the US to their, and a bunch of places but sometimes we make it harder to export from here than some other countries who have facilitated program. So it's something that I know for a fact that could help. So companies will consider to establish themselves in Canada if we remove certain barriers, or if we help exports. And if we help them to establish here. Of course, they will increase their link to many distribution partners and therefore help to short term the supply chain gaps. I don't know if this answers the question. It's very clear. Thanks Rafael. All right, well I don't see any more questions in the chat, and I'm tired of hearing my voice. So I'm going to thank you all very much for attending on a Friday for so many of you sticking all the way to the end. And I do hope that when the book comes out everyone takes the opportunity to read it and provide feedback. We really again, thank our funders sure and mine and the faculty public affairs at Nipthia for hosting us today. So thank you to everyone for attending. And thank you to all of our panelists and have a great weekend.