Statement by David Harris
Senior Fellow for National Security
Canadian Coalition for Democracies
Ottawa - 19 June 2006

A statement made by Canadian Ambassador Michael Wilson in Washington, DC on 15 June 2006 regarding my service with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was factually incorrect, and serves only to distract from the serious national security issues faced by Canada and the United States. I am taking this opportunity as a first step in correcting the record both with regard to Ambassador Wilson’s assessment of Canada’s security situation, and my own service and involvement with CSIS.

The message from Ambassador Wilson’s entourage in Washington on June 15 when pressed by reporters to comment on the state of Canada’s security was, “We’re secure”. This optimistic assessment would seem to contradict Senator Colin Kenny, chairman of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. In an article on the same day in the National Post entitled “So many threats. So few officers”, below, Senator Kenny demonstrated his respect for the ability of Canadians to handle the truth about Canada’s serious terrorism problem when he said, “The public doesn’t need calming. The public needs the truth”. He went on to assert that CSIS faces particular challenges, that the “RCMP is … vastly understaffed”, and that “[w]hoever is responsible for the current mess, it is this government’s job to repair it”. These are strong words, especially from a respected Liberal senator criticizing the national security legacy of the recently-ousted Liberal government.

Ambassador Wilson told the Associated Press on 9 June 2006 that “we’ve also got a very good system for screening every applicant [for entry to Canada]”. This statement appears to directly contradict the testimony made a week earlier by Jack Hooper, CSIS Deputy Director Operations, before the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence (SCONSAD). Deputy Director Hooper told the committee, “Over the last five years, in the order of 20,000 immigrants have come from the Pakistan-Afghanistan region. We are in a position to vet one-tenth of those”.

The message “We’re secure” differs significantly from the message of Deputy Director Hooper who testified, “All the circumstances that led to the London transit bombing … are resident here in Canada”. The deputy director of CSIS chose not to hide from Canadians the fact that 90% of immigrants from the world’s foremost terror-producing nations are entering our country without scrutiny by CSIS, and that Canadians are no safer from terrorist attack than Londoners were before 7/7.

Ambassador Wilson’s confusion about my past CSIS involvement is of less consequence in terms of national security. Nonetheless, it is revealing that Canada’s senior diplomat in the United States should be reduced to making an ad hominem assault of a sort that has no place in a debate about the substantive concerns raised by, among others, CSIS and our Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. I appreciate that Mr. Wilson found my testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims to have been uncongenial to his mission. But I had hoped that he would address these difficult issues on their merit, especially considering the Harper Conservative government’s commendable record to date in starting to resolve the lapses identified.

I remain curious about how Ambassador Wilson and associated officials dealt with legal issues of secrecy and privacy in making public statements to reporters about my history of employment and involvement with CSIS. If Mr. Wilson chooses to persist, I would respectfully ask the government to relieve me, in writing, of my secrecy obligations under Canadian law, so that I might defend myself in public by disclosing the full nature and extent of my history of involvement with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

I further regret that, in an apparent breach of journalistic standards and ethics, producers of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The National television news program broadcast journalist Alison Smith’s report of Ambassador Wilson’s incomplete and potentially damaging assertions, without having made any effort to contact me for comment.

None of these corrections are meant to diminish the fact that there have, at times, been overreactions by US personalities who have called for the closing of the Canada-US border. However, fear grows from distrust, and Canada must present a consistent and honest picture of security preparedness and the steps being taken to improve it.

I look forward to Ambassador Wilson’s accepting my invitation to discuss these issues in an open forum in order that Canadians and Americans may gain a clearer picture both of the threats that exist from a weak security legacy, and the encouraging steps taken by the present government to openly address them.

For further information, please contact

David Harris
Of the Bar of Ontario
Senior Fellow for National Security
Canadian Coalition for Democracies
PO Box 72602 - 345 Bloor St. East
Toronto, ON Canada

Tel. 613-233-1220 Ottawa
Tel. 416-963-8998 Toronto
Email: admin@CanadianCoalition.com
Web: www.CanadianCoalition.com

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Backgrounder

So many threats. So few officers

Colin Kenny
National Post

Thursday, June 15, 2006

As a Liberal member of the Senate, I should concede from the start that Canada’s current security and intelligence weaknesses cannot be blamed on Stephen Harper’s government.

Far from it. The holes in Canada’s ability to defend its citizens from man-made and natural disasters go a long way back, certainly to the budgetary cuts made under my own Liberal government in the 1990s, and back beyond that. Security has always been the easiest portfolio for federal governments to underfund, since Canadians have by and large felt safe in the myth of their peaceable kingdom.

Having conceded that this government has inherited many of our security problems, however, let me be blunt: Whoever is responsible for the current mess, it is this government’s job to repair it.

The Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, which I chair, is bipartisan. We see our job as producing fair, honest reports about the things that are wrong (and right) with security in this country.

So far, our committee has witnessed a combination of the good, the bad and the ugly from the new government. The good includes the government’s announced commitments to increase Canadian Forces personnel and to replace outdated military equipment. The bad is that budgetary commitments to both these ends fall short. Words without money are worthless. Beyond that, even some of the words forthcoming represent an ugly approach to relating to the public on security issues.

Responses to the arrest of 17 terrorist suspects in Toronto last week from the most senior members of government — including the Prime Minister — were not encouraging. The essence of responses from the top was that the fact that arrests were made should reassure Canadians that everything is under control — so calm down.

The public doesn’t need calming. The public needs the truth. The truth is that it is probably going to take us a decade to get up to speed on monitoring and countering the potential threats at our airports and sea ports, along our borders, and in neighbourhoods likely to incubate terrorist threats.

It will take that long even if governments do the right thing, because countering terrorism effectively is going to require a lot more personnel, equipment, coordination and training.

While the government is ramping up in these areas, it is going to need a lot of support from Canadians. One of the lessons learned in Toronto last week is that the police are unlikely to succeed without information from people who live their lives in proximity to would-be terrorists, or at least get close enough to notice that something is amiss.

This is important because to accomplish their mission, terrorists only need to be lucky once. The police need to be lucky all the time. The public is far less likely to be attentive if the message is that everything is fine out there. It isn’t.

Consider this: CSIS Deputy Director (Operations) Jack Hooper told our committee recently that “Over the last five years, in the order of 20,000 immigrants have come from the Pakistan-Afghanistan region. We are in a position to vet one-tenth of those … We believe we will need to be increasingly active abroad to collect the information that will inform us about threats resident in Canada.”

He also said that CSIS used to estimate that there were about 10 threats to Canadians’ security for every one the agency was aware of, but that the ratio had probably increased: “I think there may be more unknowns now than ever.”

The government should be honest about where it needs to go from here. The public should know that it takes a tremendous reserve of trained personnel to ferret out terrorist cells. In Toronto, 400 security professionals were needed to arrest 17 suspects.

Canada is short of these kinds of people. Mr. Hooper told the Committee that, despite welcome new permanent funding for CSIS missions overseas, the agency is still short-staffed outside Canadian borders. Moreover, he said, CSIS has been stealing from its domestic personnel in recent years to bolster its overseas presence. In other words, CSIS has grown weaker at home and has yet to build up sufficient strength overseas.

The RCMP is also vastly understaffed:

- 29 RCMP personnel are responsible for tackling crime at 19 Canadian ports — ports that handle approximately 240 million tonnes of cargo annually, valued at more than $100-billion dollars.

- 100 RCMP personnel are responsible for tackling crime at the 89 airports within the National Airport System.

- There are 139 ports of entry across Canada where border personnel work alone at least part of the time.

- The RCMP Commissioner told us that at any given time his force can only investigate about one-third of the organized crime units that it is aware of.

This government is talking tough on security, which has finally become a political issue. But it needs to put its money where its mouth is. Our committee estimates that the RCMP needs more than 5,000 additional personnel to do its job. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is just now getting back to its mid-1990s strength and is not nearly ready to tackle post-9/11 challenges.

The government has put some seed money into improving these situations, but not nearly enough. It should focus its get-tough resources on intelligence and surveillance against plots to destroy the state, rather than routine crime, which statistics show is already on the downturn.

We are one of the six countries on Osama bin Laden’s notorious list. Some people will not be happy until there is a check mark next to the word Canada. No government should want that to happen on its watch.

- Senator Colin Kenny is chairman of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence.

kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca

© National Post 2006

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Statement by Jack Hooper, Deputy Director Operations
Canadian Security Intelligence Service
to the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence
(SCONSAD), May 29th, 2006

Good morning, honourable Senators. I am very pleased to be here with you this morning. Before I begin my opening remarks, I want to pass on the regrets of my director, Mr. Judd, who very much wanted to be here to address you personally. He cannot be. I will do my very best to represent him and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which is very grateful for this opportunity. I do have some brief opening comments, which I will confine to two general issues:

- First, the current threat environment related to terrorism; and

- Secondly, our organization’s specific interests in Afghanistan.

Terrorist activities inspired by the “Al Qaida ideology and operational doctrine” are currently the most prominent and immediate terrorist security threat faced globally and domestically. It is a phenomenon that has been manifested in many parts of the world.

In 2005 reported terrorism incidents of all types and affiliations reached an historic high. Many of these were rooted in the Al Qaida ideology and its operational doctrine.

The vast majority of these incidents did not occur in Western jurisdictions.

However, that trend has been changing and it will likely continue as attacks over the course of the past five years in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, and other countries bear witness. As well, terrorist conspiracies in these and other Western countries have been foiled before terrorist action was undertaken.

The threat of this kind of terrorism is global, complex and sophisticated. The individuals and groups involved are often internationally inter-connected and highly mobile. Most troubling, as we have seen most prominently in the London transit attack last summer, is that the individual operatives can be born and raised in the West and be thoroughly assimilated into Western society’s values.

They are often technologically sophisticated in their use of both materials and the Internet. The latter is used increasingly as a multi-faceted tool for communications, recruitment, proselytizing and the transfer of techniques. It has been estimated that, at any given time, there are approximately 4,500 terrorist-affiliated Web sites accessible on the Internet.

There has been, as well, a growing trend towards non-terrorist criminal activity by these individuals and groups to either generate revenue or acquire materials in their terrorist planning.

Canada is not now, nor has it ever been immune to the threat of terrorism. In fact, the committee will know that prior to the events of 9/11, the most significant act of terrorism in contemporary history, if you measure it in terms of casualties, had its roots in Canada. I am speaking of the Air India bombing, which resulted in the deaths of 329 people.

Similarly, Canadian citizens have not been immune more recently as witnessed in the deaths of Canadian citizens in the 9/11 attacks in the United States or in Bali. As well, Canadian military personnel and a diplomat serving in Afghanistan have been killed and wounded in terrorist attacks there and the threat to our forces there remains high.

We have not been immune from terrorism in other ways as well. There are residents in Canada that are graduates of terrorist training camps and campaigns, including experienced combatants from conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and elsewhere.

As well, Canadian citizens or residents have been implicated in terrorist attacks and conspiracies elsewhere in the world. For example, a young man is now awaiting trial here in Ottawa because of his alleged involvement in a bombing conspiracy in the United Kingdom. Others have been involved in terrorist plots against targets in the United States, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Singapore, Pakistan and other countries.

Canada has been named on several occasions as one of six Western “target countries” by Al Qaida leaders, most recently last summer.

Let me conclude with a few words about Afghanistan. It is a country that has been of interest to CSIS for a number of years. It continues to be of active interest to us for three basic reasons.

First, it has a long-standing association with the global terrorist phenomenon, particularly Al Qaida, dating back to the days of the Soviet occupation. Many foreign nationals were active participants, along with Afghan nationals, in the anti-Soviet campaign. Many of them continued their links with that organization after the Soviet withdrawal. And a good number of them, have since migrated elsewhere in the world, including to our country.

Second, the deployment of Canadian Forces to Afghanistan has resulted in our Service taking an active role to support our military colleagues in the country. While I am not at liberty to discuss the operational details or methodologies of that support, I can say two things about it.

This support has been principally focussed on the acquisition of intelligence to help the Canadian Forces defend themselves against terrorist attacks in that country. This intelligence is known to have saved lives, uncovered weapons and arms caches, and disrupted planned terrorist attacks.

The third reason we have a continuing active interest in Afghanistan comes back to concerns for the stability of the region, more broadly speaking. Afghanistan is the current venue where the terrorist designs of a number of organizations rooted in Pakistan, the central Asian republics and the subcontinent are planned and operationalized, and where individual activists seek support and sanctuary.

Our historical investigations have taught us at some point, this condition of broader regional instability will be the progenitor of terrorist threats in Canada. Therefore, we have to orient our collection programs not only tactically in response to current circumstances in Afghanistan, but strategically as well to better situate the Canadian security intelligence community against future threats.

In the here and now, terrorism and insurgency is being brought to Canadians in Afghanistan. At some future point, if we are to learn the lessons of history, their practitioners may bring violence to the streets of our cities.

With that said Senators I will end my remarks and take your questions, bearing in mind that I may have to be somewhat circumspect on some of my responses.

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Related: War Against Islamo-fascism, Canada

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