Bill C-36 was debated and passed as the US military campaign in Afghanistan was in full flight—a heady and distracting time that saw no real public outcry. But the fact that there has been no sustained demand to repeal the Anti-Terrorism Act or, at the very least, to insist that the review be concluded, reminds Wesley Wark, professor of international affairs at the University of Toronto, of the Cold War, another conflict in which the public quietly accepted that the secret service and police had to engage in unsavoury practices. Alluding to Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, the dark satire about learning to “love” the bomb, Wark argues that “the bomb is back among us” in the form of Bill C-36 and that the general public has accepted a surveillance society and a constellation of strategies to wage a covert war on international terror without knowing much about what these entail.
Roach points out that the latest chapters in the evolving war-against-terrorism narrative—including the fbi’s mistaken view that some of the 9/11 terrorists had visited Canada; last summer’s bombings in London, England; and the ongoing provocations and calls to arms by Osama bin Laden—could result in the strengthening of Anti-Terrorism Act when the review is finally complete. “There is a dynamic at work,” he says. “With each act of terrorism, there are calls for more anti-terrorism law. I think well see calls to ramp it up even more coming out of the review.”
The report reflects the prevailing view in the US administration: that Canada’s anti-terrorism laws lack teeth, and that under the previous Liberal government, the sharing of vital intelligence about terrorist suspects suffered. Seemingly anticipating the US State Department criticism and in preparation for the May 2006 renewal of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (norad) agreement, on March 13 the bpg—established in 2002 with a two-year mandate that was extended to May 2006—issued its Final Report on Canada and the United States (canus) Enhanced Military Cooperation. The bpg recommends, at a minimum, turning norad into an “all-domain warning” system with a focus on air, land, sea, and cyberspace surveillance. At a maximum, according to Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia, the bpg advocates continental integration of defence and security. As Byers wrote in the Toronto Star on April 28, the bpg report “reveals that expanding norad to include maritime surveillance sharing is intended to create momentum toward complete military, security and foreign policy integration.”
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ith the Canadian intelligence services already operating with increased resources, it is hard to imagine what this brave new world will amount to. csis, the Communications Security Establishment (cse), the rcmp’s Criminal Intelligence Directorate, and J2, the military’s intelligence division, have had their budgets increased, while a new agency, Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada (psepc), was created in large part to coordinate the government’s response to and prevention of terrorist attacks. On top of all this, the mandate of the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre has been expanded to include terrorist financing.The scope of activity is intense at the cse, which analyzes information that the military has gathered at bases outside Ottawa (near Leitrim), in Newfoundland, on Ellesmere Island, and on Vancouver Island. The Canadian military gathers information using satellite-based eavesdropping technology to monitor and intercept phone and computer communications, including emails. cse linguists, political scientists, and other experts then sift through the millions of conversations and computer messages looking for evidence of an emerging terror plot.
The pressure to prevent another terrorist attack in North America is taking its toll on the intelligence-gathering community. “In 9/11 we had a case history of failed intelligence,” says former senior csis official David Harris. “So we have people going back to files with the possibility that something might have sneaked through. But that kind of thing significantly increases workload and destabilizes the organization.”
A premium has been placed on ensuring that the mistakes of the past are not repeated, that people like Ahmed Ressam—the so-called “millennium bomber,” who planned to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport before he was caught crossing the Washington State border in 1999—are detected earlier. The rcmp and csis are trying to increase their intelligence contacts among Arab and Muslim Canadians (Ressam had moved freely within Montreal’s Muslim community). “The difficulty,” says Harris, “is that it can take years to get an intelligence officer up to speed, while the problem is growing by the day. We have 2,700 csis people, but every year we bring in 230,000 human beings through immigration. You can’t just slip into these communities the way you might have into a local Communist party during the Cold War. And that is troubling.”
Just outside cse headquarters in Ottawa is an antenna dish that some security observers believe links the cse directly to National Security Agency (nsa) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. And there are suspicions that the cse has been illegally spying on Americans on behalf of the cia. Anxieties about questionable linkages do not end there. James Risen, author of State of War: The Secret History of the cia and the Bush Administration, says that basic international protocols would require the Canadian government to authorize, for instance, cia ghost flights carrying prisoners through Canadian airspace to “black sites” or secret foreign prisons where they are to be tortured, to say nothing of cia flights actually landing on Canadian soil en route.
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