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We Were Lucky. This Time.

By Colin Kenny


As a Liberal member of the Senate, I should concede from the start that Canada’s current security and intelligence weaknesses cannot be blamed on the Harper government.

Far from it. The holes in Canada’s ability to defend its citizens from man-made and natural disasters go a long way back, certainly to the budgetary cuts made under my own Liberal government in the 1990s, and back beyond that.

Security has always been the easiest portfolio for federal governments to underfund, since Canadians have by and large felt safe in the myth of their peaceable kingdom.

Having conceded that this government has inherited many of our security problems, however, let me be blunt: whether or not this government is responsible for the current mess, it is this government’s job to repair it.

The Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, which I chair, is bipartisan. We see our job as producing fair, honest reports about the things that are wrong (and right) with security in this country.

Some bureaucrats and politicians didn’t like our reports under Liberal rule. Unless our committee starts getting some assurances that the new government is committed to fixing problems that threaten the security of Canadians, there will bureaucrats and politicians who do not like our reports under Conservative rule either.

So far our committee has witnessed a combination of the good, the bad and the ugly from the new government.

The good includes the government’s announced commitments to increase Canadian Forces personnel and to replace outdated military equipment.

The bad is that budgetary commitments to both these ends fall short. Words without money are worthless. Beyond that, even some of the words forthcoming represent an ugly approach to relating to the public on security issues.

Responses to the arrest of 17 terrorist suspects in Toronto last week from the most senior members of government – including the Prime Minister – were not encouraging. The essence of responses from the top was that the fact that arrests were made should reassure Canadians that everything is under control. So calm down.

The public doesn’t need calming. The public needs the truth. The truth is that it is probably going to take us a decade to get up to speed on monitoring and countering the potential threats at our airports and sea ports, along our borders, and in neighbourhoods likely to incubate terrorist threats.

It will take that long even if governments do the right thing, because countering terrorism effectively is going to require a lot more personnel, equipment, coordination and training.

While the Government is ramping up in these areas, it is going to need a lot of support from the Canadian people, It is going to need public support for funding these systems, and it is going to need public support in bolstering these systems by helping to identify threats. 

One of the lessons learned in Toronto last week is that the police are unlikely to succeed without information from people who live their lives in proximity to would-be terrorists, or at least get close enough to notice that something is amiss.  

This is important because to accomplish their mission, terrorists only need to be lucky once. The police need to be lucky all the time. The public is far less likely to be attentive if the message is that everything is fine out there. It isn’t.

Let us look at some more of the Government’s calming words last week. Its public position on immigration from Pakistan and Afghanistan left the impression that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) vets 100 percent of all immigration from those countries. When one parsed that position carefully, however, one discovered that does not vet 90 percent of such immigration. It only gets involved when it is tipped that something may not be right.

Is that being careful enough? The message was clearly “yes.” But CSIS itself has voiced doubts. CSIS Deputy Director (Operations) Jack Hooper told our committee recently that “Over the last five years, in the order of 20,000 immigrants have come from the Pakistan-Afghanistan region. We are in a position to vet one tenth of those, and that may be inadequate . . . we will be making a case to the Government. We believe we will need to be increasingly active abroad to collect the information that will inform us about threats resident in Canada.”

He also said that CSIS used to estimate that there were about ten threats to Canadians’ security for every one the agency was aware of but that the ratio had probably increased ­– “I think there may be more unknowns now than ever.”

The Government should be honest about where it needs to go from here. The public should know that it takes a tremendous reserve of trained personnel to ferret out terrorist cells. In Toronto, 400 security professionals were needed to arrest 17 suspects.

Canada is short of these kinds of people. Mr. Hooper told the Committee that, despite welcome new permanent funding for CSIS missions overseas, the agency is still short-staffed outside Canadian borders. Moreover, he said, CSIS has been stealing from it domestic personnel in recent years to bolster its overseas presence.

In other words CSIS has grown weaker at home and has yet to build up sufficient strength overseas. The RCMP is also vastly understaffed:

29 RCMP personnel are responsible for tackling crime at 19 Canadian ports – ports that handle approximately 240 million tonnes of cargo annually, valued at more than $100 billion dollars
100 RCMP personnel are responsible for tackling crime at the 89 airports within the National Airport System
There are 139 ports of entry across Canada where border personnel work alone at least part of the time
The RCMP Commissioner told us that at any given time his force can only investigate about one-third of the organized crime units that it is aware of
 
This government is jutting out its jaw on security, which has finally become a political issue. But it needs to put its money where its mouth is. Our committee estimates that the RCMP needs more than 5,000 additional personnel to do its job. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is just now getting back to its mid-1990s strength and is not nearly ready to tackle post­–9/11 challenges.

The government has put some seed money into improving these situations, but not nearly enough. It should focus its get-tough resources on intelligence and surveillance against plots to destroy the state, rather than routine crime, which statistics show is already on the downturn.

Terrorism is not on the downturn. We are one of the six counties on Osama bin Laden’s notorious list. Some people will not be happy until there is a check mark next to the word Canada on that list. No government should want that to happen on its watch.

Senator Colin Kenny is Chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. He can be reached via email at: kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca