Good evening.
Thank you very much for inviting me to speak here today. It's truly an honour to be here. Out of respect for the work of the committee, I will try to make my comments brief.
I'm not a lawyer. I will leave the nuances of Bill C-51 to people who are far more qualified than I. What I am is a researcher. I've been studying terrorism for over 20 years now, and it's in my capacity as a researcher that I come before you today to offer my thoughts.
There are just a few points that I would like to make.
The first and the most important is that the danger posed by violent extremism and terrorism is real. The threats to Canada and to Canadian lives are real. I've been following the discussions in the House, and lip service is often paid to these being real, but I'm not certain that we are actually embracing the realities we're facing.
The challenges we face are unprecedented. Those challenges would include, for example, living in a hyperconnected world where borders are meaningless to terrorists. They would include the rapidly expanding use of the Internet for recruitment and for other nefarious purposes. They would include a rise in the kinds of behaviours that have not been experienced at the level we're seeing now, such as, for example, homegrown terrorism, lone actor terrorism, and the potential violence that might be attributed to returning foreign fighters.
These are all examples of the kinds of things that have changed the context of terrorism and our conversations around it. The nature of these threats suggests that we need to modernize our thinking about our approach to counterterrorism. I would argue that Bill C-51 is necessary as part of a larger process that recognizes the new dynamics in this new context, in addition to, for example, Bill C-44 and others that will inevitably follow.
Second, in studying terrorism, one of the things that I think has been most striking and particularly challenging over the years, for as long as I've been studying it, is the speed with which terrorists adapt to detection techniques. They are constantly changing tactics and constantly coming at us with new ways of thinking and doing things.
Many of the methods that we are currently trying to use to deal with these threats have become outmoded. For example, increasingly, there is no group to infiltrate. Increasingly, there is no head of the snake to cut off. There is no one with whom to negotiate. The tools that we've traditionally relied on as standard ways of trying to disrupt terrorism are not as useful to us in these contexts.
At present we are faced with a rather extreme version of Louis Beam's idea of leaderless resistance, where we've gone beyond autonomous cells and simply have individuals who at any particular moment might pop up and commit heinous acts. Also, this will inevitably change, so we are perpetually playing catch-up. It's difficult to determine what will come next. It has been suggested, for example, that the next wave of terrorism may be more technological, so that we're dealing with people and what they can do with technology, and they may not have any kind of ideological purpose other than that. Then we try to embrace and conceptualize what difficulties that might bring.
What we do know is there is learning taking place on the part of these individuals and groups, and that in all likelihood the next attacks will be different. The next attack will likely not involve storming Parliament. The next attack will be something else. We need tools, such as those proposed in Bill C-51, that are adaptable and that allow for some flexibility in responding not just for now, but for the future.
A third point is that the upshot of all this is that we need to get as much information as we can. Accurate, complete, and real-time information is needed to keep up with ongoing potential plots. This means that in certain circumstances we're going to need to use those scary words of “coalition”, of “integration” from different sources, to fill in pictures, to fill in gaps, and to give us the information we need. It also means living up to our obligations as international partners in terms of the sharing of information.
There are of course potential concerns. I'm not blind to them; nobody who has been following them can be. They have been catalogued at length in front of this committee, but I don't believe that they are insurmountable, nor that they should be insurmountable.
It has been argued that we cannot arrest our way out of the problem of terrorism, and that it would be preferable to dissuade people from this path before they've gone too far down the path to violent extremism. This is most certainly true, but we're playing catch-up again.
We don't have good profiles of who is likely to turn violent. We have many theories and many ideas. We are developing many models and we're working on many projects, but right now we simply don't know. In the interim, we need the ability to act quickly, decisively, disruptively when necessary, in part at least in response to changing conditions on the ground.
We're not talking about acting haphazardly. We're not talking about acting randomly. We believe that with any luck our tools will continue to evolve such that we can be more targeted in how we collect information. As an example, colleagues and I are working at SFU to develop a series of algorithms that allow us to parse information on the Internet in a much more effective way so that we're not just targeting out there, but trying to actually use a series of key words and phrases, and trying to be more specific in how we look for information. With any luck, the same technology that terrorists are using to recruit our young people can also be used to minimize ad hoc intrusions into privacy.
We need to be creating a framework for the future, one that's flexible enough to deal with the nature of the threat that we may not even be aware of yet. This bill, I think, reflects the times that we live in and casts an eye towards threats that may not be that far down the road.
Thank you for your time.