The Globe and Mail - October 29, 2003
By Colin Kenny
Regime change is at hand. My advice to the new government? Allow me to quote from a report of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, being released today: “History rewards governments that are prepared, and punishes the others. Right now Canada’s federal government is unprepared for big, bad moments.”
The focus of the committee report – one of a continuing series examining the security of Canadians in a strange new assymetrical world – is Canada’s porous approach to guarding our vast coastal waters. Thus its title, The Longest Under-Defended Borders in the World.
While the focus was on coastal defence, we found ourselves drawn to weaknesses at the centre, within Canada’s central decision-making apparatus for responding to all disasters, man-made or natural. While these obviously include potential terrorists incidents on Canadian territory, terrorism isn’t the only threat looming over the physical and economic well-being of Canadians.
One doesn’t have to delve deeply in Canada’s past to come up with incidents that have scared us, hurt us, and could well revisit. The list includes SARS, energy blackouts, mad cow disease and most certainly endangered relations with the United States, which gobbles up more than 85 per cent of Canada’s exports – until it decides not to. Another terrorist attack on America could turn the U.S.-Canadian border into a wall.
Canada needs brains and muscle where it counts to prepare for big threats, and to react quickly and effectively when they come our way. We have become frightfully short of both.
In her short stint as prime minister 1993, Kim Campbell disbanded the cabinet committee on security and defence. Not much replaced it. There was some lip service here and there: in the bailiwick that our Senate committee examined in this report – coastal security – an interdepartmental committee was established, but atrophied during the 1990s and was finally disbanded. When? The week following September 11, 2001. I am not making this up.
Then another, similar committee – composed of relatively junior bureaucrats – was re-established some months later to do the job the former committee had quit doing.
The original committee was disbanded days after September 11 because somebody inexplicably decided that our coastal security was in good shape, and revived only when somebody else woke up to the fact that terrorists and their assault mechanisms are as likely to arrive on boats as on planes.
Trying to deal with crises by forming committees of junior bureaucrats with their own departmental priorities in the fronts of their minds is not the way to deal with national security, nor national crises in general. These committees too easily slip into irrelevance, generally report to junior ministers, and aren’t seen as major players on the decision-making scene.
Nor are senior decision-makers well-organized. Canadian post-9/11 crisis meetings consisted of ad hoc meetings of deputy ministers in the clerk of the privy council’s office. There is no permanence to the process.
Anyone who thinks the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers was a one-off is playing the ostrich game. Neither terrorists. nor their grievances, nor their apocalyptic solutions, are going away in your lifetime, or mine. Biological crises such as SARS and West Nile Virus are going to recur, again and again. The Third World used to be home to nearly all mass tragedies. In the 21st century, North America will finally see its share.
We need crisis management at the centre dealing with issues like Canada’s territorial integrity, the U.S. file, intelligence fusion, and national disasters generally. National crisis management – with special focus on anti-terrorism – should be the main mandate of a strong deputy prime minister in the mould of Don Mazinkowski during the Mulroney governments and Allan MacEachen during the Trudeau governments. That strong deputy prime minister should chair a reinstated cabinet committee on security and defence.
This committee should have dedicated bureaucratic support in the Privy Council Office, which provides bureaucrat support to both the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister. During the Quebec separation crisis of the 1970s, a special branch of the PCO was set aside to manage federal-provincial relations. The new threats to Canadian security that have raised their ugly heads over the past few years demand the same kind of focus. Right now there are only ten intelligence analysts in the whole PCO. That is ludicrous. So is the lack of a strategic operations centre in Ottawa, with a full-time backup centre.
Today’s report is quite detailed about the void in Canada’s approach to crisis management and what we need to do to fill it. The essence of the committee’s message is that the perisistent threat of wars between nations that marked the 20th century are largely going to be replaced by asymmetrical threats that are just as dire, but much more unpredictable. We can’t hide out. We need to be prepared.
Our view received vigorous support from Tom Axworthy – now head of the Study of Democracy at Queen’s University, and former principal secretary to Prime Minister Trudeau, who told the committee:
“If we had a Prime Minister and a Privy Council Office that made emergency preparedness, security and intelligence critical functions by making them the primary focus of the Privy Council machinery, with extensive resources for assessment and with some ability to help man operation centres, then there would be a clear signal to the entire system of the importance of security preparedness in the eyes of senior leadership. ”
Canada, he said, wasn’t prepared for World War I, wasn’t prepared for World War II, and has never really been prepared for any national crisis.
We can’t keep muddling through, hoping that the Americans will bail us out. In fact, the Americans are now watching to see whether we can get our act together, or whether they would be better served to ignore us and assume responsibility for the defence of the whole continent.
Our ad hoc approach to big crises is making us look foolish, because it is foolish. We Canadian need to get our act together. We need to begin at the centre, and work our way out to our under-funded security institutions, from the Canadian armed forces, to the Canadian Coast Guard, to just every institution with a mandate to help out when crises hit.
Canadians can dream on that we are secure in our cosy northern haven if they want to. Better, we think, that all Canadians get it through their heads that there are no cozy havens anymore. Best, we believe, that a new government move decisively to demonstrate that someone is looking out for Canadians in a thoughtful and coordinated way.
Colin Kenny is Chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence and a former advisor to Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca