Flawed Security?

by John Thompson

05/04/04

Between 9/11 and the Jihadist threat, SARS, Mad Cow disease, and the twitchy way our economy goes every time the U.S. gets nervous about border security, Ottawa may be finally learning to get serious about security.

Last week, the Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan tabled in Parliament a comprehensive statement on national security. Entitled "Securing An Open Society: Canada's National Security Policy", the document plugs a few gaping holes in our defences and, sadly, introduces a new problem. There is another problem too--the Liberals might be getting security conscious for a change, but they certainly haven’t changed some of their ways.

The creation of a permanent, high-level federal-provincial-territorial forum on

Emergencies is a positive step towards improving emergency preparedness in Canada. Time and money spent on readiness is never wasted; even if (unlikely as it would be) we never get smacked by al Qaeda, Mother Nature lavishes a good disaster or two on us almost every year… just ask the citizens of Toronto who endured two bouts of SARS and a massive blackout last year.

The creation of the National Security Advisory Council might be a good idea, but much depends on who gets appointed to it. The Council will exist to "give the Government the benefit of advice by security experts external to government in evaluating and improving our system." Great! But, alas, Ottawa has a long habit of picking people it wants to listen to--and a council full of academics and lawyers with impressive Liberal connections won’t be worth much.

Personally, I’d nominate people who’ve been on the front lines and seen what’s wrong — unfashionable ex-diplomats and immigration experts like Martin Collacott and James Bissett; veterans of insurgencies and the long war against terrorism, like the former SAS veteran Alan Bell or my old boss Maurice Tugwell (a veteran of 30 years in British counterinsurgency campaigns). The National Post’s Stewart Bell or Vancouver Sun’s Kim Boland have done magnificent work on some of the terrorist groups here too. If Ottawa was to pick their brains, the council might be worth something.

What really scares me is the proposed Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security. The idea is that this "will better engage Canada's ethno-cultural and religious communities around

ongoing security-related issues". Appointing self-selected leaders from different ethnic communities might be bad enough, but considering Ottawa’s long blind eye to the presence of supporters of the Tamil Tigers, Babbar Khalsa and Hezbollah, one can just imagine what sort of ‘representatives’ might ooze onto this body.

Instead, let’s pick people who got beaten or harassed by the terrorists within their ethnic communities, like the truly independent Tamil journalist David Jeyaraj; any of the Sikhs that stood up to the Babbar Khalsa militants, or that brilliant young Muslim journalist Irshad Manji--her book The Trouble with Islam is one of the most lucid and courageous works I’ve seen in years. If the government wants real value for its Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security, there are people of proven vision and real courage available.

The rest of the document is also a good news/bad news affair: Some of the bromides in Anne McLellan’s speech included "A Government's most important duty is to ensure the safety and security of its citizens," (Hurrah!) and "… protects our collective security interests in a way that reflects core Canadian values of tolerance, openness and respect for fundamental rights and freedoms." (Uh oh… it was our unquestioning tolerance and openness that has got us into trouble. There is nothing wrong with ‘tolerance’ provided that it is clear to all people that there are some activities that are absolutely intolerable.)

Other points worth noticing include the selection of facial recognition biometric technology on our passport--which should keep the abuses of our refugee system down, and limit the ability of terrorists to travel with forged Canadian passports. The RCMP’s Real Time Identification Project will finally be fully funded, and we will be building operations centres for emergency measures groups that (finally!) have independent power and water.

There is much more money for maritime security--which will bring us into alignment with American goals to monitor and intercept problems well off from our coasts. We are creating Health emergency Response Teams to react to major emergencies (although one hopes they are more robustly supported than our current lame medical stockpile program). More work will be done on the smart border program to secure trade with the U.S., on cybersecurity, food safety, and much else.

Amid all the money being lavished on new (or previously under-funded) programs, there is even a promise of a more robust military, a Canadian Armed Forces that can take a larger role in external stability operations. However, given how Ottawa has gutted our military, I’ll only believe this when they show me the money.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca