Public Safety committee  I have not done those studies. I do know that my interactions with police agencies in this country suggest that they are well aware of this in the context of countering violent extremism or radicalization to violence, and they're already developing programs that think about this and implement this.

Public Safety committee  There are two answers to the question. The first is that, when we are looking at “radicalization to violence”, as the green paper says, having a sense of community context is going to be crucial to being able to understand any such pathway. Having a sense of how communities experience law enforcement, how they experience a worry that the community has been securitized, and how they engage with the whole issue of terrorism and radical violence would be relevant, even if not directly relevant to a psychological study of an individual in that sense.

Public Safety committee  It would depend on each study. I would imagine some of it to be so, yes.

Public Safety committee  There are at least two parts where issues of gender, in particular, as well as age come up. The green paper speaks about women and youth. My sense of the green paper's discussion is that women are seen as a protective factor, as individuals who can foster positive messaging and social inclusion within the community, and so forth.

Public Safety committee  I think the study you're referring to is a study that was done in Toronto, not by me but by my colleagues. They find that where there are existing counter-narratives in communities already amongst youth vis-à-vis radicalization or radicalization to violence, the circulation of those counter-narratives—people willing to talk about them and to use them—is, itself, suppressed when people feel they are being monitored and targeted by law enforcement.

Public Safety committee  What we know from the procedural justice literature, which is not about a no-fly list in particular, is that when people feel that the target of law enforcement is a biased target, in the sense that it's been chosen in a biased manner, that has a negative influence on whether people perceive law enforcement to be legitimate, and would then have a negative influence, we would posit, on the likelihood of co-operation with law enforcement.

Public Safety committee  We don't have evidence on that. That's a simple and clear answer: we don't know. I've seen no empirics that suggest that. That said, I think what we would want to think about, as a research matter and thus as a policy matter, would be how to distill a pathway to violent radicalization that doesn't presume what is thought about in the literature as a conveyor belt theory, as though somehow A causes B causes C and that this leads you on a conveyor belt to violent radicalization.

Public Safety committee  That's going to require us to think about what the process of radicalization to violence is, in and of itself. If we are able to distinguish, which the green paper suggests, radicalization from radicalization to violence, those metrics of success will have to be somewhere along the radicalization to violence line and not on the radicalization line.

Public Safety committee  When I referred to a public health model, thinking of primary, secondary, and tertiary approaches to dealing with the problem, that is exactly the kind of complex problem that is high stigma for the people involved and high risk for outcomes that we're thinking about. When it comes to, in a way, development questions for communities, it is about engaging with communities to hear their needs, about what they perceive as the needs they have, and the needs for their youth.

Public Safety committee  Thank you. Chair and members of the committee, I want to thank you for this invitation to discuss Canada's national security framework and with it the 2016 “Our Security, Our Rights” green paper. My brief remarks today focus on the importance of developing an evidence-based and “lessons learned” approach to national security.