Public Safety Committee on Oct. 18th, 2016

[The Chair (Mr. Robert Oliphant (Don Valley West, Lib.)), Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

I call this meeting to order. This is the 31st meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security.

Welcome to our witnesses today, who have come to help us with our study on the national security framework and revisions to a number of acts that we anticipate coming in the next while. Our study has just begun. We've had a couple of meetings in Ottawa. We're continuing now on the road with five meetings across the country this week. We're hearing from people who have expertise in the area of national security from a variety of perspectives. You have come to us either because the Library of Parliament has suggested you or because one of the political parties has suggested you. We're glad you're able to be here.

Tonight's meeting is an open-mike forum. We're hoping to have a number of citizens come and give their thoughts and ideas on changes, or not, to the national security framework.

We'll begin with 10-minute presentations. I think we'll start with the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies.

David and Robert, you can divide your 10 minutes as you would like. Please go ahead.

[Dr. David Bercuson, Director, Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary]

Thank you very much.

I will read from my prepared statement.

Canada's history of attempting to balance human rights against internal security stretches back to the late 19th century when Prime Minister John A. Macdonald hired a number of undercover detectives to keep watch on the Fenians. During the First World War, the Canadian government gave itself powers under the War Measures Act to literally suspend traditional British freedoms by cancelling habeas corpus, jailing German and Austrian Canadians, engaging in widespread press censorship, and greatly expanding the external security services carried out by the North West Mounted Police, which is now the RCMP, and the military.

There was wide banning of radical or anti-war publications and passage of an act giving the government power to deport British subjects for radical activities. Spying on labour unions and radical political parties such as the Workers Party of Canada, which was the legal arm of the illegal Communist Party, continued in the interwar period and was ramped up after the start of the Great Depression when communist activities and labour organizations sparked fear in Ottawa that a communist revolution was just around the corner. Communist leaders and others were jailed, publications were banned, and street demonstrations were met with harsh measures carried out by federal, provincial, and local law enforcement.

In the Second World War, the long-established pattern continued, this time added to by the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Japanese Canadians from the west coast to the B.C. interior, and in some cases as far east as Ontario. Their property was seized and deportations to Japan were liberally carried out after the war ended.

During the Cold War, intense internal security continued, focused once again on communist and other radicals, particularly after the Gouzenko spy revelations with a special royal commission and the jailing of a number of Canadians with charges of espionage. One of these was a member of Parliament.

During the 1970 October crisis, the federal government once again invoked the War Measures Act to enhance its power to surveil, arrest, and detain suspected supporters of the FLQ. The vast majority of Canadians supported these measures.

Indeed until the passage of the Canadian Bill of Rights in 1960 and the adoption of the Charter of Rights in 1982, few Canadians seemed concerned about placing limits on government powers to surveil, arrest, and so on individuals whose activities were deemed to pose a threat to Canadian security. There were some civil liberties groups, church groups, and others who protested such actions as unduly repressive, but most Canadians still trusted government to do the right thing and related to government as patrons of a paternalistic and trusted institution.

For reasons too complex to enter here—of course I'll be glad to answer questions you may have—Canadians' views of government have evolved rapidly since the adoption of the Charter of Rights. Canadian society has evolved into a charter-based society. Most Canadians are now acutely conscious that they have rights and that efforts to abridge those rights had better be based on solid evidence of malfeasance by real enemies of our society.

The problem is that defining who those real enemies are has become much more difficult in the age of the Internet, because Canadians still believe an important distinction exists and must be protected between those who speak or write of ideas that many Canadians find intolerable and those who actively engage in espionage or violent means of undermining the foundations of our society.

After the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, this problem became even more acute. After terrorist attacks across Europe and even in Canada over the past decade and a half, efforts to maintain our traditional approach of innocence until proven guilty have been sorely strained.

We are now living in an age that presents us with a very difficult choice, privacy or security—not privacy “and” security, because we are way past that. How do we protect our traditional rights and freedoms in an age when some disaffected person needs only access to the Internet to become a perpetrator of mass destruction?

Our governments of both political stripes have been grappling with this very difficult issue since at least the passage of the Anti-terrorism Act of 2001. Having spent three years on the advisory council on national security, I was exposed to many of the issues discussed in the national security green paper.

The discussions of the advisory council were classified, and are probably still classified now, so I am constrained about what I can discuss. The one issue I can raise, because it has been widely discussed here and in other democracies, is the constant failure of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to share information so that someone, at least, can piece together the big picture before it is too late. At the same time, this need to share information can cut right across Canadians' privacy rights. Government must decide which is the greater evil: to share, with the possible violation of privacy rights, or to refrain, with the possible danger of attack.

From what I know of the world of technology and security, the problems we face today will only get worse with the advance of new technologies and the increased ability of bad actors to use cyberspace as a means of manipulating our political systems, gathering our private and secret information, crippling our infrastructure, stealing our intellectual property, and damaging our economies.

Yes, so-called lone wolf attacks must be guarded against to the best of our abilities, which will of necessity violate privacy rights, but the danger from cyberspace is far greater to all of us. We must not lose sight of that growing threat.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Dr. Huebert.

[Dr. Robert Huebert, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary]

Thank you very much.

I have two points to make. I won't rehash what Dr. Bercuson has so eloquently brought before you in terms of the historical context.

The first one involves the ongoing challenges we face in terms of the ability of a long-term analysis of the evolving nature of the threat. One of the issues, of course, was that many of us who have followed the issues of terrorism and the manner that it is effected on Canada were struck by the ongoing difficulty we faced in even characterizing it when we first having the June 1985 attacks; of course, that was the Air India. Ultimately where this leads us to is this ongoing difficulty, partly because of the very nature of the issue we're looking at—i.e. terrorism and the need for secrecy—but also the fact that we do not have a good infrastructure within Canada that will provide any means of ongoing analysis not only of the current threats but also of the ability to anticipate and try to react to coming threats.

This leads me to my second point. When reading the green paper, one is very struck that almost every scenario and every issue that is being talked about is either about radicalization or about dealing with an individual who obviously is in the context of the current security threat. The issue we have before us is that when we are talking about and looking at the long term, we need to have the ability to not only deal with the type of threats that we are facing today—they are real, and they are dangerous to Canadian security—but we also need to have the capability of anticipating the unanticipatable.

We go through the context of trying to analyze and trying to provide some means of understanding of where the next issue is coming from. One can immediately start thinking of possible scenarios. As I was reading through the green paper, I tried to apply to some of the issues that we're dealing with, such as finance and radicalization. One sees, for example, in the United States some discussions about parts of the population not accepting the forthcoming election results. If this should give a re-rising to the militia movement that Timothy McVeigh was addressing, we of course can have a spillover effect into Canada that will go against the type of issues that we see before the green paper. One could conceive of a renewal of separatism—violent separatism, that is—where in fact we may have to deal with it.

The issue in my mind, going through the green paper, is where does it anticipate the type of threats that are not the immediate? How are we able to look at the issues so that we can say, okay, how can we consider and how can we give rise to this?

A related issue, and one that makes the green paper even more complex, is when we are dealing with state-based terrorism. We know from the various reports about the concerns that exist among some circles in Canada with the Chinese use of cyberterrorism and the issue of how we are able to deal with that. What this raises is another issue within the context of the green paper, and that is, how do we deal with alliances? Within the context of dealing with the issue of some of these suspected Chinese actions, and as we're seeing in the United States, Russian actions, we can only do so in the context of doing so with our allies and friends. This adds a complexity onto dealing with the secrecy; deals with evidence and all of the other issues, but it complicates it even more so.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

You have about one minute.

[Dr. Robert Huebert]

Yes.

What I would like to conclude on is that there is a need for a long-term capability, both within government and outside government, to be able to continually ask how we address the terrorism and the security threats of today, how we anticipate them into tomorrow, and how we do this with our allies and friends.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Now we turn to Professor Randall.

[Dr. Stephen Randall, Professor, University of Calgary, As an Individual]

Thank you.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I'm also a senior fellow at the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies—although we haven't consulted on this—and a former president of the Rocky Mountain Civil Liberties Association. Note, however, that I do not speak for either organization, but as an individual.

The green paper identified 10 thematic areas for consultation, and I wanted to try to touch on a few of those in the short time that I have. The past two decades or so have witnessed the development of an increasingly complex international and domestic security environment. Countries in the western world, in particular, responded in various ways to heightened security concerns, in many instances increasing the powers of security agencies and, in the process, testing the limits of constitutional protections for civil liberties.

In the Canadian case, we have seen in recent years the establishment of a number of new entities. We have the integrated threat assessment centre; the national security advisory council, external to government; the national security joint operations centre; and Bill C-51, the Anti-terrorism Act.

The current inquiry, if the green paper is our guide, focuses on terrorism and terrorism-related issues to the exclusion of other identified threats to Canadian security, including, among others that we have identified over the years, health pandemics, the impact of narcotics, narcotics trafficking, and natural disasters. National security 30 years ago was defined almost exclusively in military terms. That's no longer the case. Broad cultural, social, and economic factors have to be taken into consideration.

Let me touch on a few of the areas that the green paper identifies. First, let's look at accountability. I feel comfortable in saying that the current institutions and mechanisms in place in the Canadian context would appear to be adequate features of accountability. Of course, the devil is always in the details. It depends on how effective those institutions and agencies are in practice—from ministerial oversight and the judiciary down through parliamentary standing committees like this one.

In general, I think civilian oversight bodies work less well than ones established through Parliament, to which they must be responsible, and they must have teeth. Five years ago, I did a review for Public Safety Canada of civilian oversight bodies in the Americas. Civilian oversight organizations may have looked good on paper, but their access to information was generally limited and their recommendations were often ignored. In the final analysis, I'm more comfortable in ensuring that accountability resides in an elected parliament responsible to society.

My colleagues haven't touched on the issue of prevention and counteracting radicalization, so let me touch on that. Much of the focus here is on initiatives at the community level, involving education and mentoring. Certainly, my experience from my work in and on Haiti and Cambodia has been that empowering youth and women is a very constructive approach, but there are often cultural factors that make it more difficult for women to take the lead in certain communities.

The committee asks, picking up on where the Kanishka Project left off this year, what areas might be considered for research priorities. I think these areas would include social work, education, clinical psychology, sociology, and, for more technical security issues, computer science and strategic studies.

On the issue of promoting alternative narratives, it's unclear who's to be entrusted to create and disseminate those alternative narratives. Is this to be a top-down government approach or a community-driven initiative? I think this is an area where considerable caution must be exercised. I'm thinking here of the sensitivity surrounding the debate on Canadian values.

With respect to threat reduction, one of the questions is whether the CSIS Act should be amended to make it clear that CSIS warrants must never violate the charter. It seems to me this is a very grey area. The charter is not sufficiently precise on some issues to make that kind of legislation absolute. What we need to strive for is consistency with the charter, not something that is absolute.

On information sharing, which my colleagues have touched on as well, the Privacy Commissioner has taken a very hard stance on the need to protect the privacy of individual citizens. It's difficult to disagree with that stance. However, I am uncomfortable with the notion that the hands of government agencies should be so restricted that they cannot meet their mandates effectively.

It seems to me more than ironic that Chinese and East European hackers and individuals are able to access seemingly what they want at will, but Canada does not have legal provisions for accessing IP addresses or provisions for dealing with communications providers under national security circumstances.

I'm told that the CSE is very strict on passing, to other Five Eyes organizations, material that it knows pertains to Canadians. The difficulty is that, by the very nature of the means of bulk collection on the Internet, you don't know the nationality of the sender of the messages that are intercepted.

Regarding the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act, the Privacy Act already allows personal information to be disclosed in some situations, including national security, but the information must be relevant to the recipient's lawful national security jurisdiction or responsibilities. The act explicitly states that “advocacy, protest, dissent, and artistic expression” don't fall within the definition of “activity that undermines the security of Canada”, but if violent actions take place that meet the definition of “activity that undermines the security”, they can't be considered to be advocacy.

Unless I read this incorrectly, it strikes me that this suggests that one can advocate the violent overthrow of the Government of Canada, but unless it actually happens, the law doesn't apply. I think there needs to be some clarity here. The problematic word is “advocacy”.

The next area, that of investigative capabilities in a digital world, I've alluded to with respect to the IP addresses and communications providers.

With respect to Criminal Code terrorist measures, we know the terrorism peace bonds and the change of the wording to “may” commit from “will” commit have been the most publicly controversial developments of the past several years because of concerns that actions in this area may result in the restriction of a citizen's liberty without a formal charge or court conviction. Clearly the threshold for obtaining recognizance with conditions and terrorism peace bonds must be very high. These are very legitimate concerns.

My own thinking has evolved over the past years, certainly since 9/11 and recent developments. Given the international situation and the current threat assessments, I am increasingly inclined to lean more toward advancing security, as long as reasonable safeguards are in place.

I would caution against the use of closed and secret judicial processes and the use of anonymous witnesses. In the 1990s Colombia tried the use of faceless judges and protected witnesses in order to keep them from being murdered. I don't think Canada is at that stage. I think we need to have more faith in our judicial system.

In conclusion, I think we all recognize how complex, sensitive, and controversial these issues are, but times and circumstances have changed over my all-too-brief 72 years. I certainly don't want to see the charter compromised, but I also don't want to leave society vulnerable to acts of terrorism because we lack the courage to confront the issues in a rational way.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you very much.

Thank you all for your timing. That was very good.

We will now begin a round of questioning. I should have mentioned to the public gallery as well that there are headsets available, partly to help hearing in the room, but it also does provide simultaneous interpretation. Members of the committee may be speaking in either official language.

We will begin with Ms. Damoff for seven minutes.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you.

Thank you both for appearing before us today and providing us with the information that you have.

I want to start with the prevention that you brought up. Do you think we're investing enough resources, and when I say that, I mean financial resources, towards prevention?

[Dr. Stephen Randall]

First of all, I don't know how much budget has been allocated to that. I think you would also have to determine at what level we're looking at the financial commitments. If we're talking about federal allocation only, I think that wouldn't take into consideration what's happening at the community level with police, educational institutions, and community organizations. I think all of those have to be taken into consideration, but I honestly don't know what the budget is that's currently allocated to prevention.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

That leads into another question I have. It's to do with young people, in particular where they're living in poverty and may be attracted to gangs or a lifestyle because of their home situation or their.... I shouldn't say it's their home situation; it's because of where they're living, they're living in poverty, and they're attracted to a certain lifestyle because of that. When you talk about the federal government, community agencies, provinces, municipalities, there's a lot of investment that can go to prevention, starting really young. Do you see a correlation between poverty and radicalization to violence, and do you think there's a need to be reaching out to kids at a younger age?

[Dr. Stephen Randall]

I think the answer to the last part of your question is absolutely yes.

I'm not sure that Canada is in the same situation, relative to the poverty and the marginalization, that a number of European constituencies are in with regard to the marginalization of youth. I'm not a specialist in the area of social work, and I don't want to venture too far into this, but I know from my colleagues in social work who are working with ethnic and indigenous communities, some of whom are the more marginalized segments of our society, that there is a need, clearly, to engage in educational activities that bring individuals more into the mainstream of the engagement with their communities.

In my presentation I alluded to the need to work with youth and women. The green paper also alludes to this. In 1993 I worked with the United Nations in Cambodia, and then again for the Asia Foundation. I did a report for them on their funding of NGOs in Cambodia in the elections. What we found, universally, was that the women's NGOs were by far the most effective. These were all funded internationally by various international NGOs. They were by far the most effective in terms of reaching out to the communities and changing—or influencing, shall we say—perceptions within those communities. If you want poverty, Cambodia certainly fits very much into that context, as does Haiti. I think it goes without saying that this is a reality there.

I don't think Canada is in exactly the same level of desperation. I don't think we have a Paris situation of marginalized Algerian Muslims, in particular. Could that develop in the Canadian context? Yes. But I don't think we're that desperate yet.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I met a group from Hamilton who were doing a lot of programming with young people who were turning toward gangs. They found that they were very successful in turning them away from radicalization, but then they had their funding cut, so they didn't have the resources to be able to do that.

To the gentleman from the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies, you mentioned that we don't have good infrastructure in Canada. I'm just wondering, what is good infrastructure? What are some examples you can give us that we should be looking at?

[Dr. Robert Huebert]

I was referring there to the infrastructure on outside analysis of the changing security environment. For example, we used to have a government-based source of funding for, at the university level, what was known as the security and defence forum. That allowed expertise to be developed over at least a five-year period, if not ongoing. That was cut.

We've attempted to see a rise in some American-style think tanks. Some have been very successful. Dr. Bercuson, for example, is vice-president of probably one of the most successful think tanks that deal with this issue. However, they tend to be far and few in between. The Kanishka initiative was building up certain expertise.

What I'm saying in terms of the infrastructure is that as soon as we get outside of government—Steve mentioned some of the government-based threat assessments—and go to that independent thinking outside the box, we seem to move away from the ability to develop or support the type of expertise that takes longer than grants, in this particular case, of one or two or three years. When I'm talking about the lack of infrastructure, really I'm thinking in the context of where we seemingly have moved away from the willingness to fund something over a longer term, in substantial amounts of money, outside of government.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Would that be predominantly in academia?

[Dr. Robert Huebert]

You could get academics and you could also get practitioners—again, a variety of individuals. For example, going to Dr. Bercuson's think tank, you get ex-government officials working alongside academics. It's people with expertise in the field.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Can you give us any international examples? I only have about 30 seconds left.

[Dr. Robert Huebert]

Sure. You have American institutes like the Wilson Center and other types of think tanks like RAND that will be trying to think outside the box on rising threats. Those are two that immediately come to mind.

[Dr. Stephen Randall]

Could I just add briefly to this?

Some of you may be aware of the fact that a number of years ago there was a national initiative that involved Immigration and Citizenship Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and a number of other federal agencies to fund projects on immigration and integration. This was a national project. There were several nodes across the country. It was to look very specifically at the ways in which educational institutions, social institutions, and social services responded to newly arrived Canadians making that adjustment to Canadian society. It was, I think, an extremely effective initiative.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Miller.

[Larry Miller, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Gentlemen, thanks for being here today. I enjoyed all your presentations.

Mr. Huebert, you started out talking about the green paper. You asked a couple of questions; one was about anticipating the immediate threat. Right after that you mentioned the Chinese use of cyberterrorism, and you made the comment then that we need a long-term solution. Putting those three points together, could you enlarge on that a bit?

[Dr. Robert Huebert]

Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity.

One of the challenges we're always facing within the Canadian context, which Dr. Bercuson touched on in some of his comments, is that we do have a tendency to deal with the threat that has just occurred. In other words, if we look back to Air India, it took us a long time to recognize that in fact it wasn't an Indian threat—i.e. from India. There were Canadian-based terrorists, we know, in terms of some of the attacks on editors within B.C., the attack on the former premier of B.C., and so forth. It took us a long time to think in that context.

We also have had that difficulty making the mindset change when the Cold War ended, getting into the fact that we are facing some of these types of internal threats. It's always that anticipation of being able to look ahead in the context of where some of these threats are that don't fit within the examples of what we are specifically trying to face.

When we start talking about the Russian ability to hack into, say, the Democratic Party and what that then means in terms of a security threat to western liberal interests in North America, and when we start thinking about the Chinese ability to hack into businesses, is that within the context of any of the examples that the green paper gives? Are those the individuals of radicalization? No, of course not. But this is where we need to be thinking in terms of going beyond what we're dealing with right now.

[Larry Miller, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

Just to enlarge on that, are you saying that the green paper will not deal with that or are you just worried that it may not?

[Dr. Robert Huebert]

“May” not, because once again it's dealing with the specifics of probably what we're going to have to do on each of these issues. Once again, as soon as it goes beyond the specifics of the individual, and the focus is of course on the radicalization and the treatment of individuals within Canada, but as soon as we start getting cross-boundary, when we start talking about someone who's outside but perhaps operating with someone within Canadian boundaries, that's where it becomes more difficult, in my view.