Thanks to the members of the committee for this opportunity to provide input to the committee's ongoing consideration of Canada's national security framework.
I'm here in my capacity as the director of the Centre for the Study of Security and Development at Dalhousie—the successor research centre to the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies—but the views I'll be expressing here are my own, rather than those of the centre as a whole.
One of our core projects now is a comparative study that looks at the way that cross-national networks manage different kinds of internal or homeland security issues in both the North American and European regional contexts. It's a very broad study that takes in a number of different policy areas, and today I'm going talk a little about one slice of that. It's going to take us a little away from the themes that have been covered in some of the previous presentations. The argument I want to make here is based on an interest in broadening our view of what security questions we want to consider here as well as making the case for broadening and balancing our focus and thinking about how we want to weigh counterterrorism operations against other kinds of security priorities.
I'm going to be focusing mostly on cross-border cooperation and on border control questions, particularly the policing of cross-border criminal activity, with special attention to the trafficking of people, money, guns, and drugs.
The main point I want to make here is that some of the mechanisms for coordinated surveillance and enforcement activities that were set up in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, which were important initiatives, have been undercut over the last 10 years by reallocations of resources and shifting priorities by some of the agencies involved, and that has led to a diminishing of some of those law enforcement activities, or at least the cross-border coordination of them. I want to make the argument that it isn't necessarily a bad outcome, as long as those initiatives are replaced with new ones that respond more effectively to what we understand about how some of these illicit transborder flows actually work and are based on a different set of strategic priorities, which I will try to explain.
After 9/11, the top priority on both sides was demonstrating that the border was as tightly controlled as possible and, on the Canadian side at least, also that this was being accomplished without massively disrupting trade and travel or undermining Canadian sovereignty.
That led to the creation of a number of technical working groups on a variety of issues that were designed essentially to create new standards and procedures for border control and border patrol activities. These were enormously complicated and important policy coordination efforts. They were also very slow-moving, and in many cases dull and technically not very exciting politically, and for the most part they didn't get a lot of political or media attention. We tended to focus on cross-border law enforcement activities instead, and particularly a small number of initiatives that were flagship efforts, I guess, some of which predated 9/11, but many of which had been played up in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 as representative of a new approach.
Here in particular I'm thinking about the integrated border enforcement teams—the IBET program—and the shiprider program. These were played up politically, mostly based on having a particular symbolic value that came out of showing highly integrated operations at the front line, which could be reassuring to people who were worried about the adequacy of those border enforcement efforts, and also because they consistently produced tangible results in the forms of arrests and seizures. They looked good and they seemed to represent that the problem was being resolved.
Over the last 10 years or so, those programs have been diminished. They still exist on the books and people are still operating on those files, but far fewer resources are going into them. Here in particular I'm thinking of personnel, and that's because a lot of the people who had previously been assigned to these things, particularly on the west coast, have been reassigned to other things, and that is representative of a larger reallocation of resources within the law enforcement community.
There are two parts of this that I want to highlight for you.
One of them is a shift of priorities in terms of the RCMP's overall strategy for Canada drug operations and a tendency to refocus away from catching that one guy with the pickup truck at the border and thinking more about this as being part of a larger criminal network. It's thinking about how cases can be built that attack transnational criminal organizations at the centre and thinking about it more in terms of finance and building cases based on intelligence that lead up to the top of the pyramid, aiming at the head instead of at the toes of the organization.
At the same time, within the RCMP there's also been a redirection of resources away from organized crime in general and towards national security files, in particular on the intelligence side. There's a shifting both in terms of money and also personnel over to the intelligence side on national security files. Obviously, there are good reasons for that to happen, but there are significant consequences to the withdrawal of those resources from the organized crime files.
On the American side, there have also been some developments that have changed the landscape a little bit as well.
The main one, particularly on the west coast, has been the withdrawal of agency commitments to the IBET program and reallocation of those resources to the BEST, the border enforcement security teams, which is a model that was originally developed on the U.S.-Mexico side and has been now transplanted and spread to other regional directorships. Whereas the IBET program involved a number of different law enforcement agencies on the American side, none of which had a kind of clear lead within the program, the Department of Homeland Security's HSI, Homeland Security Investigations group, really dominates the BEST program and organizes it in a way that makes sense for them as an organization. That has consequences not only in terms of how they do their business but also on the participation of different agencies from both sides of the border.
One of the main things is obviously that the HSI's focus is on border patrol activities and law enforcement activities that are focused on the border area, and the RCMP just has fewer incentives to invest resources in that than it did in the previous version of the IBET-driven border co-operation. That, in combination with the shifting of resources within the RCMP, has meant that there's been a withdrawal of the commitment on the Canadian side from the BEST-centred border control activities. That is not necessarily a bad thing, because as much as the IBET looks great symbolically, they were really very much focused on catching low-level distributors and smugglers, and they really didn't do much damage to any of these larger transnational criminal organizations.
Obviously there's still a continuing need to have law enforcement activity at the border to manage those things, and I'm not suggesting we would give up on that entirely; however, there ought to be a shifting of resources to other things. I think the RCMP's larger strategic shift toward combatting criminal networks as networks makes a lot of sense, but it has to be followed through with a substantial investment of resources to support that activity; otherwise it looks, as it does in the eyes of many of the U.S. agencies that participate in, for example, the BEST, as a cop-out or rationalization for the withdrawal of participation altogether.
I want to make the argument here that there needs to be a shift of resources back into organized crime co-operation and that this shift has to be adapted to the new reality and new strategic priorities of the agencies involved. That means thinking about more of a task force model that involves cross-border co-operation built around attacking particular patterns of flows or particular organizations, and mostly it's going to focus on tracking money and long-term building of intelligence-driven cases against the leadership of some of these criminal organizations.
This is a costly and demanding thing, and it involves all kinds of political obstacles based on the differences in our disclosure rules and privacy rules. There are all those kinds of obstacles, but none of those diminishes the need to work out some kind of an understanding and to have a renewed commitment to resources to back it up.