By Senator Colin Kenny
Any government agency that suddenly gets its budget increased by a whopping 33% should be delighted about its enhanced capacity to do its job. Right? Hey, that’s a pretty dramatic boost in these fiscally frugal times.
Yet I suspect that “delighted” might not be quite the right word to describe the mood over at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service these days - although you’d never know from the poker tongue of CSIS chief Ward Elcock, who, when pressed on funding issues in committee makes Marcel Marceau look like a babbler.
Here’s the situation that seems to strike Elcock mum. In December Finance Minister Paul Martin used part of his budget speech to remind any Canadian who had been in a coma for the previous three months that Canada needed to be more secure. He then bumped CSIS’s funding from $200 million a year to $267 million a year. Well, that should get CSIS back to where it was about a decade ago: understaffed, and underfunded. Since then the situation has deteriorated even further - there have been all kinds of cutbacks and layoffs at the agency, in recognition of the fact that intelligence operations have become less critical since the cold war ended.
Ha! My best estimate is that doubling CSIS’s budget might have at least set the agency on the road to being able to identify a respectable percentage of the shadowy creatures that have been landing on North America’s doorsteps undetected, planning events like those of September 11.
Of course, the vast majority immigrants and political refugees aren’t shadowy. Good people, most of them, and Canada needs them. But that tiny minority - those CSIS calls “persons of interest” can be very destructive. These are the people whose eyes keep glowing after the lights go out. And anybody who assumes that September 11 was a one-of is living in a fatalist’s haze. If we don’t start getting a handle on destructive people before they arrive and disappear into cavernous North America, we are taking a huge and very stupid risk.
The trick here is domestic and foreign intelligence. Governments can heighten airport security all they want, but they can’t put a shield around every water reservoir, hydro tower and large gathering of people on the continent. Best, I say, to identify “persons of interest” before they hit your doorstep. If there is one commodity that Canada could be pulling its weight on in terms of contributing to North American defence, it is intelligence. We Canadians are never going to have a mighty army, even if we get our armed forces into respectable shape again. So intelligence is where we could shine.
We are not going to shine with an increase to CSIS funding that amounts to catching up with not much at all. The announced budgetary increase will turn an agency that has been starved into an agency that is undernourished. In a rare expenditure of words, Elcock has been firm in committee appearances that CSIS has the right, under the CSIS Act, to place agents on foreign soil. Sure CSIS has that right. But what does it matter? What good is a right if the agency doesn’t have the wherewithal? The bulk of CSIS work overseas deals with background checks on immigrants applying to come to Canada. But even if performing that task satisfactorily were enough (which it isn’t), CSIS doesn’t have the personnel.
The Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), in its 2000-2001 Report on
CSIS released last October, showed CSIS provided 125,928 background checks on potential immigrants and refugees to Canada, and reviewed 161,895 citizenship applications. CSIS has been overwhelmed just doing this job. The agency took an average of two years to report back to Citizenship and Immigration Canada on cases that raised security concerns.
And vetting would-be Canadian citizens is definitely not enough. “Persons of interest” don’t normally go through regular immigration channels. They often show up without any papers, demanding to be treated as political refugees. Most political refugees are legitimate and end up proving their case. But some, whose backgrounds are unknown to us, are released, pending applications and appeals, and disappear. We need to have a better idea, in advance, who the dangerous ones are. Ideally, we need a better shot at nabbing then before they get on a plane. But we certainly need to be able to pick them out and identify them if they make their way to Canadian soil.
We need a legitimate spy capacity. CSIS has nothing like the resources needed to infiltrate “other” cultures, either at home, or abroad. For too long our police forces and security agencies have been reflections of the mainstream - what used to be a vast white majority in this country, which is no longer so vast. This country rightly welcomes people of all races, creeds, and cultural backgrounds. But our police and security agencies must be able to move discreetly within every culture, and right now they can’t.
The time has come to start building the language capacity, and the cultural capacity, of CSIS, the RCMP, and other bulwarks of the security of all Canadians. A revamped CSIS needs vastly enhanced domestic and foreign capabilities if Canada is not going to continue to be a security sieve.
Even if the government gets started now, this is going to take considerable time.
It will also cost real money. It takes at least a quarter of a million dollars a year to keep a trained agent overseas in countries where the cost of living is low, and a lot more where the cost of living is high. These aren’t big bucks in terms of the value of what the government has a mandate to protect - a country and its people - but they were apparently too big to muscle their way into the December budget. We Canadians are counting on luck, rather than intelligence, to solve a crisis. That is the way of the ostrich.
Senator Kenny is Chair of the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence. He can be reached via email at kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca