The Toronto Star - October 29, 2003
By Colin Kenny
In terms of Canada’s capacity to defend against rogue vessels, both our east and west coasts have a lot in common with your kitchen sieve. Plenty of holes; not much resistance.
And the Great Lakes? Hard to believe, but according to the RCMP, Canada’s ability to interdict along the length of the St. Lawrence Seaway is actually worse than it is on our coasts.
Think about that. The most powerful country in the world is getting more and more paranoid about its borders. That country (I won’t name it, just in case George W. Bush reads the Star) absorbs more than 85 per cent of Canada’s exports.
That makes the border between our country and that country more crucial to the Canadian economy than all the people on Bay Street and their bankers combined.
How do I know Canada’s defensive capabilities are so pathetic most places Canadians look out at waves? Because I am chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, which heard all kinds of witnesses in preparation of a report we are releasing today – accurately titled The Longest Under-Defended Borders in the World.
And what did our Committee discover? It discovered that the Canadian navy is not defending Canada’s coasts – other than assisting with surveillance – and that the navy has no jurisdiction over interior waters, such as the Great Lakes. The Navy prefers to do its defending on waters far away.
We learned that, despite its name, the Canada Coast Guard does not guard Canada’s coasts. Nor does it guard our interior waters. The Coast Guard does a lot of other decent things, including search and rescue. But its people are unarmed and they do not go out challenging suspicious ships.
We learned that the RCMP is pretty well on its own in terms of interdicting suspicious vessels – whether they may have terrorist intent, or simply criminal intent in terms of the age-old practice of smuggling drugs, booze and people.
How reliable is the RCMP at performing that role on our coasts? Judge for yourselves.
RCMP Chief Superintendent Ian Atkins, of the Criminal Operations Branch, Province of Nova Scotia, appeared before the committee. He testified that he had exactly 13 officers dedicated specifically to maritime security in Atlantic Canada, backed up by 32 officers with other duties who have “emergency response training for armed ship boarding.” Thirteen officers available full-time to apprehend and board suspicious vessels along a 7,400-kilometer coastline.
Asked whether the RCMP might be somewhat short-staffed to act as the “teeth” of Canada’s coastal security, Supt. Atkins conceded that “The coastal policing is essentially a volunteer-based coastal watch program. The RCMP has two full-time coordinators and utilize local RCMP detachment personnel to educate the public and help them to recognize and report unusual coastal occurrences.”
In other words, loyal Canadians, get out your rowboats. You and 13 RCMP officers are it, at least for that long Nova Scotian coast.
Is Canada’s east coast the RCMP’s biggest concern when it comes to lack of capacity to interdict rogue ships? Nope, that brings us back to the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes.
John F. Thomas, former Commissioner of the Canadian Coast Guard, is now a consultant. He told us that Canada’s highest marine threat areas “are from Vancouver down to the U.S., the Great Lakes, and from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick down to the U.S.” In other words, in the waters where traffic moves between Canada and the United States.
When Supt. Ken Hansen, Director of Federal Enforcement, RCMP, was asked what he perceived to be the biggest challenge to the RCMP when it came to countering terrorism in Canadian waters, he said “a lack of capacity to conducted armed ship boardings in the St. Lawrence Seaway.”
It turns out that, of the 23 armed boardings of major vessels that have been conducted over the past five years, 22 have been on the coasts and one has been in the Seaway. It also turns out that there is almost no capacity to stop and board vessels in the Seaway. The RCMP often uses Canadian Coast Guard vessels as “taxis” when it boards, and since the Coast Guard is vastly under-funded, and since the Seaway has never been a priority, there just aren’t any substantial resources for boarding on the Seaway.
Again, the importance of ensuring that no terrorist incidents happen on the border between Canada and the United States cannot be over-estimated. Lives depend on it, but so does the lion’s share of the Canadian economy.
The committee will recommend in today’s report that surveillance, intelligence and interdiction capacity be bolstered on our east and west coasts through a variety of measures, including arming our Coast Guard and giving it constabulary duties. It may never be comparable to the U.S. Coast Guard – regarded as the third-largest navy in the world – but it should be rehabilitated, funded properly, and given some teeth.
As far as the Seaway and other border waters are concerned, the committee will recommend that the RCMP conduct a risk/threat assessment to determine what personnel, equipment and resources it needs to re-establish its disbanded Marine Division and to police the St. Lawrence Seaway, St. Lawrence River, Great Lakes, the Fraser and Skeena Rivers, and other inland coastal water ways.
On October 11, Miro Cernetig of the Star wrote a feature article that began: “For years, booze and cigarettes have been smuggled across the Canada-U.S. border near Cornwall – now it could be terrorists.”
No kidding. And who would stop them?
Time to grow up and do two things on our coastal waters: protect Canadians’ own physical well-being, and protect our most important economic asset: a free-flowing border between Canada and the United States. If that goes poof, so does Canada’s economy.
We are supposed to be co-defenders of North America. Right now we’re not.
At least we could try.
Senator Kenny is chair of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. He can be reached via email at kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca