Mr. Speaker, it is disappointing when old ghosts from the past come back to haunt us.
All these ideas were trotted out hastily, out of political opportunism, following the events of September 11. Today, they are resurfacing in an even more dangerous form, once again in a context of political opportunism, simply to give the appearance of having done something. Those who support these ideas simply want to look like they are on the side of those who want to look like they are doing something.
Although the members on the other side of the House accuse us of being soft on crime and other fictions, I am sincerely convinced, like my colleagues, that randomly killing innocent people can never be justified, not even strategically as part of a military strategy. There can be no justification for it.
We cannot fight an enemy until we identify it. Terrorists are not an organized army with headquarters, troops and equipment. They cannot even be identified by their physical characteristics.
Take the Boston Marathon terrorists, for example. The image they projected was that of charming young men. They could have been our children. In a crowd, there was no way to differentiate them from others, yet after the crime was committed, they were identified as transporting what might have been bombs. Walking down the street, most people would not recognize them and would think that they were ordinary young Americans.
This proves that resources need to be focused on properly identifying young people who are going astray and who are potentially dangerous. This requires considerably more police resources and intelligence. The police need funds to cover the expenses involved in occasional travel to remote regions to identify the recruitment and training centres of the groups that support these people.
There is also a lot of work to do to ensure that instructions for making bombs are not so readily available to anyone on the Internet.
Over the course of history, mistakes have been made. For example, in the Second World War, Canadians of Japanese origin were detained in camps for the entire duration of the war. With the benefit of hindsight, we now realize that the allies were able to defeat the Japanese thanks to the efforts of Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans, who managed to break the Japanese navy's secret codes. This is what made the great allied victories possible.
The upshot is that businesses, fishers and people with prosperous companies on the coast were bankrupted in the small villages in the centre of the country. Their lives were completely destroyed. Years later, they were given an apology, but their lives were, nevertheless, ruined.
When one considers the Liberals’ position, the debate makes us—especially those of us from Quebec—think of the good, old Liberals, the Liberals of 2001, who passed this insane measure.
Clearly, they are not in a position to be too critical because they came up with this in the first place. So much for the charter.
Regarding yesterday’s arrests, there is only one thing to be happy about: that the police officers who arrested the two terrorists had not already been laid off as a result of the government’s short-sighted cuts.
Indeed, if they were not operational, in a few months, we could be talking about a terrorist attack on a train in Toronto. That would be a bombshell. We have undoubtedly headed off a disaster thanks to our police and law enforcement efforts.
The solution is not to pass legislation to arrest more people, but to put a stop to the cuts the government is making to the resources available to Canada’s police forces.
There are a lot of examples internationally. It is coincidental that the two Boston terrorists were Chechens. The Russians have always had a specific technique. In the 1930s, the entire Chechen population was deported to Siberia. They returned years later, completely destroyed and penniless. A third of them died in exile. They were never again made full-fledged Russian citizens.
That caused a whole host of problems that led to civil war and terrorist attacks. It does in no way excuse the wanton killing of people, but it does, to some extent, help to explain the root causes of the problem.
Over the course of the two recent wars in Chechnya, the Russian army engaged in neither interrogations nor temporary detentions. It carried out preventative executions. That only made the problem worse. As soon as compromises are made when it comes to human rights, society takes a step backwards.
Maher Arar and his family’s lives were ruined. Even though mistakes were acknowledged and his name was cleared, he is still living with the burden of what happened. Indeed, two months ago, he was still wearing an electronic bracelet around his ankle and he could not enter the Confederation Building because his photo on the computer screen had a red border around it. How long will it take before he is once again a Canadian citizen with the same rights as other Canadians?
We always end up regretting actions that are taken arbitrarily. It is time that the government started thinking before it acts and investing the necessary resources to address this problem. I am really fearful that somebody, like the terrorists that sought to derail a train, will wreak havoc in Canada. A stupid bill like this will not prevent that from happening. Resources need to be allocated appropriately and there needs to be better coordination between services in order to identify criminals and prevent such things from occurring.