Back in 1998, Ward Elcock, then director of csis, said that fifty international terrorist groups were active in Canada, more than in any other country, with the possible exception of the US. That’s no surprise to David Harris, a lawyer and a former chief of strategic planning for csis. “We offer everything a discriminating terrorist would want,” he says. “Good communications, ease of travel, a generous welfare system, a good health care system, an excellent banking system, and a wonderfully out-of-control immigration system.”
Anyone who can get to a Canadian airport can enter the country simply by claiming to be a refugee. That’s what the notorious “millennium bomber,” Ahmed Ressam, did. After landing in Montreal in 1994, he made a refugee claim, and immigration officials released him. He didn’t show up for his refugee hearing, instead obtaining a passport under a false name. Five years later, following a training trip to Afghanistan and a period spent plotting to bomb a Jewish neighbourhood in Montreal, he was arrested at the US border carrying a trunk full of explosives that he planned to detonate at the Los Angeles airport on the eve of the new century.
Since then, it has become harder to obtain a Canadian passport fraudulently. Moreover, refugee claimants are now photographed and fingerprinted. Other than that, says James Bissett, a former director of Canada’s immigration service, nothing has changed. “We haven’t reformed the asylum system in any way,” he argues. “Two thousand people a month are still coming into the country, of whom we know nothing. They usually come without documents, so we don’t know where they come from. Or they have false documents. We release them and tell them to show up in two or three years for their refugee hearings. We don’t track them down; we don’t know where the hell they are.”
Bissett is correct: Canada has warrants out for the arrest of about 40,000 refugee claimants who either didn’t appear at their hearings, or didn’t turn up to be deported after their claims were rejected. Few of these people are likely to be terrorists; most are economic migrants intent on bypassing the regular immigration program. Still, as the Ressam episode showed, allowing a steady stream of unidentified persons to enter Canada and disappear into the general population is a questionable practice.
Immigrants who come through regular channels are subject to security screening by csis. But Canada has one of the largest immigration programs in the world relative to its population, and the agency lacks the resources to check 250,000 people every year. In 2006, Jack Hooper of csis told the Senate national security committee that since 2001, some 20,000 people had arrived from Pakistan and Afghanistan, hotbeds of Islamic fundamentalism, and 90 percent of them had not undergone security checks. “The numbers are so imposing that there is no realistic way of filtering for people who would constitute subversive or other threats to the country,” says Harris. “We are not protecting our security and stability.”
Danny Eisen is more conscious of terrorism than most because his cousin, Danny Lewin, was on the first plane that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11. As co-founder of the Canadian Coalition Against Terror, Eisen tries to ensure that Canadians continue to take the threat seriously. “We haven’t fully looked this thing in the eye, even when it is staring right back at us at close range,” he says.
It is human nature to overvalue the recent past as a predictor of the near future. If house prices have risen for several years in a row, we assume they will continue to rise, and are taken aback when they suddenly fall. And since there have been no terrorist attacks originating on Canadian soil since the Air India bombing twenty-four years ago, we assume that will remain the case. The assumption is absurd. Canada is the closest ally of the US, inextricably linked to it both economically and militarily. It’s foolish to suppose we won’t be targeted because we’re nice guys. Al Qaeda has said we are a target, and we have no reason to think they’re kidding.
It is also human nature not to worry overmuch about improbable events. Yes, airport security is full of holes, but it’s still safer to fly from Winnipeg to Calgary than it is to drive. Colin Kenny is deeply concerned about the terrorist threat, yet he concedes that “you’re more likely to die from smoking than from being caught in the middle of a terrorist attack.” He worries nevertheless, because while it’s true that the odds of an attack happening on any given day are very low, the odds of one happening sometime are high. And if terrorists graduate to nuclear or biological weapons, the consequences of one successful attack will be horrific.
The average person feels helpless in the face of such unthinkable perils. One way to cope is to deny they exist. “When something threatens to overwhelm you and you can’t see an option to deal with it, you rationalize it or you deny it,” explains Robert Groves, a clinical psychologist in Ottawa.
That terrorism is associated with minority groups is also a problem for many Canadians. “Most Canadians are reluctant to speak ill of other people publicly,” says Groves. “So two things are happening: individual denial, and reluctance to be identified with intolerance.” He knows scientists who have moved to the countryside from Ottawa. Pressed as to why, they told him Ottawa is a likely terrorist target, and they don’t want to be there if an attack occurs.
The phenomenon of mass denial may be why Kenny’s warnings that our security apparatus is understaffed go unheeded, as do those of experts such as James Bissett about an asylum system that lets a stream of unidentified persons into the country.
Are we safer than we were on 9/11? John Thompson’s answer — yes, no, and maybe — is probably the only correct one. Yes, the Anti-terrorism Act works, and yes, police and security agencies are co-operating and communicating better than before. Al Qaeda is weaker than it once was, and is riven by internal dissension. But the organization is still in business. Moreover, the threat it poses changes with time; we may be fighting the previous battle rather than preparing for the next — worrying more about airport security than attacks from weapons of mass destruction, such as emps, nukes, or biological materials. We may also be failing to appreciate the benefits of prevention. Emergency measures to deal with wmd attacks, for example, pay for themselves when a chemical spill occurs. But most politicians would rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars after a disaster, when they can appear to be providing decisive leadership, than spend a few million before.
Canada, true to its character, needs to be reasonable in its approach to preventing terrorism. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms says we are entitled to freedom of thought and expression. It also guarantees “the right to life, liberty and security of the person.” That tells us not to choose between liberty and security, but rather to insist on both.
To deny the terrorist threat, however, is the worst possible strategy for dealing with it. A healthier approach is to recognize that the risk exists and isn’t going away. We need to remember that terrorists are determined and patient. As the Irish Republican Army said in a statement after failing in a 1984 attempt to assassinate the British prime minister, “You have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once.”
