The Department of National Defense (DND) is looking to foster a stronger bilateral relations with Canada by establishing a Defense Cooperation Agreement.
DND spokesperson Arsenio Andolong made the revelation on Thursday, March 3, after confirming that the Defense department recently conducted a virtual meeting with the Canadian Department of National Defence.
“Both sides expressed keen interest in concluding a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Defense Cooperation Agreement as a way to further strengthen bilateral defense cooperation between the two countries,” Andolong said in a statement.
A Defense Cooperation Agreement is a bilateral accord which establishes the legal frameworks that can be used to facilitate deeper defense-related collaboration between the signatories either in the form of military exercises, research and development, education and training, policy coordination, arms procurement, and intelligence information sharing.
An example of this is the Philippines’ 1994 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the United States which allows American military personnel’s rotational presence in Philippine military bases.
However, the details of the planned MOU for the Philippines and Canada’s Defense Cooperation Agreement were not revealed by Andolong.
Last February 24, Assistant Secretary Teodoro Cirilo Torralba, of the DND’s Strategic Assessments and International Affairs, met with Sumeeta Millington, Acting Director General of the Canadian Department of National Defence’s International Security Policy, to discuss both countries’ perspectives on regional security in the Indo-Pacific region.
It was considered as the first virtual engagement between the two defense departments.
“The two sides reaffirmed their support and commitment to the shared goal of a rules-based international order,” Andolong said.
According to the DND spokesperson, Canada expressed interest to “engage the region” while the Philippines highlighted the importance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) centrality and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (AOIP).
ASEAN centrality refers to the vision of organization's member-states to "keep ASEAN as the leader, driver, architect, institutional hub, vanguard, nucleus or fulcrum of regional cooperation in the wider Asia-Pacific."
Meanwhile, the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific envisages ASEAN Centrality as the underlying principle for promoting cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region.
Aside from these, Torralba and Milington also tackled the application of Canada as an observer of the ASEAN Defense Ministers' Meeting (ADMM)-Plus Experts' Working Groups (EWGs) activities, where the Philippines is a part of.
The ADMM is the highest defense consultative and cooperative mechanism in the ASEAN.
There are seven EWGs under the umbrella of the ADMM: counter-terrorism, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR), maritime security, military medicine, peacekeeping operations, humanitarian mine action, and cyber security.