The Windsor Star - June 22, 2009
Embassy - June 3, 2009
By Colin Kenny
The first duty of the state is the physical protection of its citizens.
The state’s second duty is to advance the interests of those citizens at home and abroad – political, economic and cultural interests included, with the economic being paramount these days.
Throughout most of Canada’s history a variety of federal governments have placed a great deal of trust in two phenomena to offer its citizens physical protection: (a) luck; and (b) the proximity of the most powerful nation in the world, the United States.
That’s right – (a) luck. We Canadians have always felt so geographically isolated from the world’s trouble spots we have never made it a priority to be properly prepared to defend against attack. Canadians fought bravely and emerged on the winning side in both World War I and World War II, but anyone who thinks that our politicians did a good job in preparing us for those wars should read their history books more closely.
Unfortunately, neither luck, nor the proximity of the United States, are likely going to get us through the physical and economic challenges that Canada is likely to face during the 21st century. Things have changed.
Things have definitely changed with the nature of warfare – international terrorism has made the threats to the security of Canadians far more asymmetrical, meaning they could come from anywhere.
But things have also changed in terms of our relationship with the United States. True, Washington will continue to defend North America in order to defend itself. But 9-11 showed that the Americans have enough holes of their own to plug without being able to plug ours at the same time. They are watching closely to see whether we are hard at work on our holes, and they are prepared to distance themselves from us if we don’t.
U.S. markets were easy pickings for Canadian companies under NAFTA until September 2001, but they have become more and more difficult to access ever since. Given that the Democrats are traditionally more protectionist than the Republicans, access to those markets – upon which much of our prosperity depends – is going to continue to be problematic.
So, if Canadians’ physical and economic well being is becoming more iffy, what can we do about that? We can take better measures to protect ourselves. And we can try to ensure that those measures improve our working relationship with the United States. We can try to ensure that Americans generally – and their leaders in particular – see us as helpers rather than hindrances in protecting against asymmetrical threats.
We can do that by bolstering the Canadian Forces, which are currently burned out and underfunded, and in no condition to rise to the challenge that President Barack Obama will inevitably throw out to Canada to further assist him in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
And we can do that by toughening up on security at our airports, seaports and border crossings so that, first, Canadians are better protected, and second, Americans feel less threatened by the specter of terrorists coming at them from the soft “overbelly” of the Great White North.
So how are we doing in terms of making ourselves less fragile at key locations?
Airports. Twenty-two years after Air India Flight 182 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, nearly eight years after 9-11, and more than six years since the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence brought out the report The Myth of Security at Canada’s Airports, there are still huge security gaps at our air terminals.
Passengers are still getting earnest vetting at security, although publishing results of blind tests of the system would give us a better idea of how well passenger screening is working. But the big holes are still located behind the curtains: the documented presence of organized crime, inadequate background checks and access control for persons who work around aircraft, lack of screening of mail and other cargo carried on passenger jets, reduced levels of policing at many airports since the privatization of local airport authorities . . . the list goes on.
Tell me, if you were a terrorist intent on blowing up an airliner, would you try to get a bomb through passenger security? Or would you use one of the innumerable gaps behind the scenes to sneak one on board – just another package in the mail or another item among the thousands that crooked workers smuggle through Canadian airports on a regular basis. Taking the front door would be just plain dumb, and these people aren’t always stupid.
The current Minister of Transport, John Baird, gives me hope. Our committee has complained incessantly about the fact that airside workers coming in and out of secure areas are neither searched each and every time, nor are their passes set up electronically to assure that they aren’t entering areas they are approved for at weird hours.
Reliable sources tell me that Baird is at least thinking about having these airside workers searched upon entering secure areas one out of three times. That would be a start – although I really see no reason why these people shouldn’t undergo the same kind of sustained scrutiny that passengers do.
But that’s just one gap that may be partially filled. There are still huge problems with mail and other cargo, lack of searching at buildings on the periphery of tarmacs, lack of policing and proper background checks . . . I won’t go on. We may get lucky and never have another terrorist disaster at a Canadian airport. But everybody’s luck runs out sooner or later.
Seaports. In the past seven years, the federal government claims to have spent about $100 million dollars to improve security at Canadian seaports.
Every year more than four million shipping containers move in and out of Canada. A huge chunk of those are trans-shipped to the United States. If one bad one ever gets through – packed with explosives, biological weapons, the wrong kind of people – it will change the history of U.S.-Canadian trade forever.
While Minister Baird announced in January that background checks will be required for specified port workers, this appears to apply to only about one-third of them. That leaves two-thirds of port positions in which people that are a threat to Canada’s security and Canada’s economy can hide. There are many tales of these kinds of people applying pressure to people with security responsibilities to do the wrong thing. “Ghost cans” – containers that are unloaded from ships but somehow never pass through Canadian customs – are just one of the problems.
We need more RCMP officers at Canadian seaports. We need wider requirements for background checks on employees at Canadian seaports. And we need more Vehicle and Cargo Inspection System (VACIS) machines to scan containers. The Committee’s 2007 Security Guide Book pointed out that there is no way that 15 VACIS machines installed at major Canadian ports can scan any more than a small percentage of more than four million containers annually.
Border Crossings. Our committee estimates that the Canadian Border Service Agency, which staffs 1,200 border crossings and other ports of entry into Canada, needs 2,300 additional employees.
They are needed to put an end to using undertrained student summer replacements as border guards, to add a second person at more than 300 border crossings where officers are forced to work alone, to operate electronic cargo inspection machines that should be purchased and used far more widely than they are now, and to provide enough backup to replace officers missing from their posts because they are taking firearms training.
The government has wisely followed our committee’s recommendation that border officers be armed. But we need a lot more officers at crossings. And we also need a lot more protection at locations between border crossings.
The federal government has committed itself to hiring 400 new customs officers, which will be enough to eliminate work-alone posts, but won’t solve the other problems listed above.
The last information CBSA provided the committee showed that 459 vehicles crashed the border into Canada during a six-month period, and more than 200 were never apprehended. No wonder Canadians read so many stories about guns and drugs showing up on the streets of Canadian cities. A good part of that problem can be traced back to our leaky borders.
The U.S. Coast Guard patrols the Great Lakes with 2,200 officers. Canada tries to do it with 14 Mounties. The Americans beg us to team up with them to fight crime, but the RCMP doesn’t have the people.
The funny thing is that the government has announced it will probably run a $50 billion deficit this year to fight unemployment during the current international recession. It should spend a good slice of that money on creating good jobs in the RCMP, in the Border Services Agency, in the Canadian Forces. That way it would create decent jobs and build a security infrastructure that Canadians and Americans could trust for years to come.
It’s too good an idea to be taken seriously in Ottawa, so don’t hold your breath.
[Colin Kenny is Chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. Kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca]