The University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) has formed a Task Force on National Security to evaluate the changing security environment facing Canada and how best to respond. The group is co-chaired by GSPIA Professor Thomas Juneau and Vincent Rigby, who until recently was National Security and Intelligence Advisor to the Prime Minister. Four of the Task Force’s members are former National Security Advisors to the Prime Minister. Others have served as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs; Ambassadors to NATO, to the United Arab Emirates, and to the United Nations; Director and CEO of the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC); Director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS); Senior Advisor on Global Affairs and Defence in the Prime Minister’s Office; Executive Vice-President of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and The Economist’s former correspondent in Canada. Nearly all are professors or senior fellows of GSPIA. During this event, the co-chairs will discuss the report produced by the task force report, released on the same day.

Vincent Rigby is a senior fellow with the Norman Paterson School of Internal Affairs at Carleton University and a non-resident senior advisor with the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. He has more than 30 years of experience in public service. Most recently, he was appointed National Security and Intelligence Advisor to the prime minister of Canada in January 2020. He retired in September 2021. He was previously associate deputy minister of foreign affairs at Global Affairs Canada (2019-2020), associate deputy minister of Public Safety Canada (2017-2019), assistant deputy minister of strategic policy at Global Affairs Canada (2013-2017), and vice president of the Strategic Policy and Performance Branch of the former Canadian International Development Agency (2010-2013). From 2008 to 2010, he was the executive director of the International Assessment Secretariat and the lead official on Afghanistan intelligence at the Privy Council Office. 

Thomas Juneau is associate professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. His research focuses on the Middle East, in particular Iran and Yemen, on the role of intelligence in national security and foreign policy making, and on Canadian foreign and defence policy. He is the author of Squandered Opportunity: Neoclassical realism and Iranian foreign policy (2015) and of Le Yémen en guerre (2021), co-author of Intelligence Analysis and Policy Making: The Canadian Experience (2021), editor of Strategic Analysis in Support of International Policy Making: Case studies in achieving analytical relevance (2017), and co-editor of Middle Power in the Middle East: Canada’s Foreign and Defence Policies in a Changing Region (2022), Stress Tested: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Canadian National Security (2021), Top Secret Canada (2021), Canadian Defence Policy in Theory and Practice (2019), and Iranian Foreign Policy Since 2001: Alone in the World (2013). From 2003 until 2014, he worked with Canada’s Department of National Defence as a policy officer.