Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  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 t

Public Safety committee  That depends on the group.

Public Safety committee  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 civili

Public Safety committee  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 To

Public Safety committee  Sure. I guess what I'm advocating for is actually a better situation than is currently existing with legitimate protest groups and government law enforcement. It is extraordinarily adversarial, and it's also combative and really expensive. During the Vancouver Olympics, the b

Public Safety committee  Now you're asking me to pitch my speaking points to a different audience. When I originally conducted this research, I was very aware that coming in with my research findings and saying “Hands off protest groups, and just allow vandalism to happen” was not a message that was go

Public Safety committee  Violence against property, you mean?

Public Safety committee  Yes, it certainly can be terrorism if it's done with the eventual goal of effecting political change by forcing governments to pay attention and that kind of thing. Certainly as written in Canadian law, then, property destruction can be terrorism. The difference is that terrori

Public Safety committee  Yes, there are really two ways of thinking about that. One is that it starts as a bottom-up process in which you engage in low-level interactions. The alternative mechanism could be a top-down thing, in which you go through anti-terrorism legislation very closely and say that rig

Public Safety committee  It's really difficult to know which parts of my research would be most useful to what you're talking about.

Public Safety committee  The third finding is that in lieu of spending a lot of money looking at activist groups from the outside and attempting to decide who among them might be willing to commit violence, it would be more useful and much less expensive to develop relationships with these mainstream non

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much for inviting me today. It's really an honour to present to you. My name is Andrea Lane, and I'm the deputy director of the Centre for the Study of Security and Development at Dalhousie University, although today I am appearing in my capacity as an individual.