Evidence of meeting #37 for Public Safety and National Security in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was groups.
3:55 p.m.
Liberal
Colin Fraser Liberal West Nova, NS
Thank you very much.
We'll move to Mr. Bow.
You mentioned two elements—shifting priorities away from smaller enterprises to larger criminal organizations and a redirection away from organized crime to more terrorism-related activities—and reallocating the resources based on those priorities. Are we seeing this in most western countries? Are they doing this shift, and what impact does that have, in your opinion?
3:55 p.m.
Director, Dalhousie University, Centre for the Study of Security and Development
I don't do enough comparative research in other places to say definitively that there is this sort of broader trend, but my expectation is that the answer is probably yes. Certainly there has been reallocation of resources into counterterrorism operations throughout the western world since 9/11, and there is nothing surprising about that.
The larger question is whether those increases have come at the expense of other kinds of law enforcement capacities or security activities. My impression is that in the United States, for example, that has not been the case. There hasn't necessarily been any diminishment of those capacities. If you look at the budgets for agencies like DEA , ICE, and the FBI, you'll see that there have been shifts there, but nothing like the kind of shift we've seen within the RCMP and its funding priorities over the last 10 to 15 years.
I don't know what the broader pattern is, but if we make that comparison with the United States, there has not necessarily been the same—
4 p.m.
Liberal
Colin Fraser Liberal West Nova, NS
You touched briefly in your comments on the integration of security networks. I'm wondering, between Canada and the U.S., do you feel we should be better integrated? Should there be more sharing of information between our two countries?
4 p.m.
Director, Dalhousie University, Centre for the Study of Security and Development
I think there should be. This is always a difficult thing, especially if your starting place is thinking about counterterrorism and the RCMP in particular sharing intelligence with their American counterparts. Certainly there have been lots of times when this has gone awry and when we have deliberately changed the rules in order to limit that sharing or tighten up the rules that govern it.
On the particular side of organized crime, the legal protections and the disclosure rules are very well established, and to the extent that they are an obstacle, it's a well-known one and there are workarounds in place, which are sort of tacit ones, I guess. What needs to be figured out is a new system whereby there is a formal structure for information sharing that's relatively efficient but has oversight mechanisms built into it. Instead of thinking about fixing the problem of problematic information sharing by just cutting it off, we could be thinking about a mechanism for having more extensive information sharing through which there would be some vetting, some thinking about what is being shared, by whom, and under what circumstances, and there would be more checks in place that could work relatively rapidly in order to make for timely information sharing.
4 p.m.
Liberal
Colin Fraser Liberal West Nova, NS
All right, thank you.
Ms. Lane, I'll turn to you for a moment. I appreciate your research on this issue. It's very interesting.
You mentioned that you don't want property violence and people violence to be conflated. Those are both reprehensible activities, in my regard, but I guess your point is that one is worse than the other. You say you don't want to conflate them. What do you mean by that? Is that happening now, and can you give examples of how it is happening?
4 p.m.
Deputy Director , Dalhousie University, Centre for the Study of Security and Development
It certainly is being conflated now, especially if you look at Canada's anti-terrorism legislation. Property damage that is political in nature and might be done by a group like Greenpeace or Earth First! counts as terrorism, because it is being done ostensibly to coerce a civilian population or to make a government make a decision.
The main problem with that is that there are social costs, but it's also not the most effective way to allocate resources. If you're focused on stopping the kind of terrorism in which people are killed, then adding this other area of law enforcement under the heading of terrorism means that in addition to wasting resources, you're using the resources you have to combat property destruction poorly, because you are alienating groups you could be working with.
There's a moral or a social question about whether or not property destruction should be counted as terrorism. More practically, though, it's just not a great way of stopping either the kind of terrorism in which people die or the property-damage style of terrorism.
4 p.m.
Liberal
Colin Fraser Liberal West Nova, NS
In theory, that may sound reasonable to some, but in practice, do you think it would be hard for the security agencies to figure out which is which?
4 p.m.
Deputy Director , Dalhousie University, Centre for the Study of Security and Development
No. It's interesting that the Squamish Five, a 1980s group I used as a case study, were never convicted of terrorist acts. They weren't considered a terrorist group at the time. They blew up a power station in B.C. and there was a truck bombing of a Litton Industries' plant in Toronto. They were obviously a terrorist group, but there wasn't any kind of legislation in place that identified them as terrorists. They were never convicted as terrorists. They weren't charged under terrorist legislation, but law enforcement had no problem finding them, surveilling them, and stopping them. They were actually stopped on the way to a different attack in Cold Lake, Alberta, so it's not necessary to identify these activities as terrorism to effectively prevent them.
As well, there are opportunity costs that go along with identifying this is as terrorism.
4:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
Thank you, Ms. Lane.
Ms. Watts is next.
Do you remember the question?
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
4:05 p.m.
Director, Dalhousie University, Centre for the Study of Security and Development
There are a million things I could say about that, but I'll just make a couple of points.
The first thing is that the overall pattern on organized crime is that there are ad hoc efforts to build teams around particular cases. Most of the initiative for those things comes from international partners, and the RCMP participates in those in an ad hoc way. They very much are about providing support for multinational operations.
There are two kinds of negative consequences to that approach. One is that it tends not to build sustained professional networks. People move into these groups and they work on an operation until their part is done, and then they lose the connections. There's very little long-term relationship-building that might provide some of the trust that makes it easier to establish functional information-sharing relationships.
The other thing is that there's no strategic priority-setting in an arrangement like that. The operations that they participate in are, for the most part, ones to which they've been invited by law enforcement agencies in other places, particularly the United States, so rather than having a set of strategic priorities, they're essentially piggybacking on other operations.
I would suggest that we ought to be thinking about having a program for setting up a set of long-term campaigns driven by Canadian priorities on these things. We should identify the organized crime problems we want to address, build task forces around them, and then make connections to law enforcement agencies in other countries to pursue those cases.
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
Dianne Lynn Watts Conservative South Surrey—White Rock, BC
I was involved in one case involving the cross-border sexual exploitation of children and youth up to Calgary and Vancouver and down to Seattle and that whole piece down there. At that time, it was ad hoc. I would think a strategic plan with strategic priorities is required, because once the resources are pulled away into counterterrorism, it leaves a vacuum on all of these other things, which could actually be a gateway for terrorism to occur. We shouldn't be leaving the vacuum, especially when we're talking about organized crime involvement in weapons, drugs, human trafficking, and things like that.
In your estimation, because you're doing some research on some of that and you've just spoken about some of the recommendations, what would you do immediately?
4:05 p.m.
Director, Dalhousie University, Centre for the Study of Security and Development
What would I do immediately? I suppose what I would do is put pressure on the RCMP to think more seriously about how their new set of strategic priorities in terms of Canada drug operations translates into a strategy for co-operating with the U.S. and other partners.
Most of it is framed in terms of how Canadian assets are going to be used. Very little of it involves any kind of a substrategy. Given that most of this is going to be driven by collaboration with agencies in other countries, how does that work and how are we going to make a case for allocating a second set of resources to sustain those relationships over time?
4:05 p.m.
Conservative
Dianne Lynn Watts Conservative South Surrey—White Rock, BC
Right, and I think that's the whole thing. I think we've heard Bob Paulson say that a lot of his resources have been pulled away and that therefore other things are sliding off the edge of the table. I think that's very valid, and when we do talk about national security, our border integrity is, bar none, one of the most important things.
I just want to switch to Ms. Lane. You made a comment—and I think my colleague here drilled down on it—about the different activities and different organizations in terms of forging relationships and getting information. It seems to me that these organizations, coming from where they come from, would really want to be protective of people's information and rights, and they wouldn't want to share that with the police. By making them do so, you're, in essence, making them informants.
4:10 p.m.
Deputy Director , Dalhousie University, Centre for the Study of Security and Development
Yes.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Dianne Lynn Watts Conservative South Surrey—White Rock, BC
I mean, that's exactly what you're doing, right?
4:10 p.m.
Deputy Director , Dalhousie University, Centre for the Study of Security and Development
Yes.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Dianne Lynn Watts Conservative South Surrey—White Rock, BC
It seems to me that doing that would be counterproductive to what you're actually trying to accomplish. Can you comment on that?
4:10 p.m.
Deputy Director , Dalhousie University, Centre for the Study of Security and Development
Sure.
You're right: it is asking people to potentially inform on former group members or on people that they know of in their community. However, I think if you had a candid discussion with some of these groups, as I did as part of my research, you would see the scrutiny that they live under now. They're well aware that law enforcement assets are trying to infiltrate their groups. They know that their emails are being read or their phone calls are being listened to.
If you ask them to participate in more of a dialogue, more of a partnership, in which both government and these groups have a common goal to not see this kind of violence diminish the impact of legitimate protest activity in Canada, that's something that people would be willing to work towards, with the caveat of not talking about property destruction as terrorism.
Nothing could be worse than the relationship that civil society groups and protest groups have with law enforcement and government now. It certainly is worth a try. You're right that it is kind of asking these groups to become informants, but they're already—
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Dianne Lynn Watts Conservative South Surrey—White Rock, BC
Which would be fundamentally against their core belief system, I would think.
4:10 p.m.
Deputy Director , Dalhousie University, Centre for the Study of Security and Development
That depends on the group.
4:10 p.m.
Liberal
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Dianne Lynn Watts Conservative South Surrey—White Rock, BC
I was just going to ask if she could submit her research paper.