Conclusion: The Need for a Re-think

• Author: Craig Forcese; Kent Roach
• Pages: 495-520

495

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Conclusion: The Need for a Re-think

I. A WASTED OPPORTUNITY FOR CONSTRUCTIVE REFORM

e terrorist attacks of October  motivated a radica l reform of Canada’s

anti-terrorism law and policy. Unfortunately, the government squandered an

opportunity for constructive and sustainable change. Instead, it quickly en-

acted politicized legislation unanchored to any publicly available account of

what went wrong, either with respect to the  terrorist attack s, or to more

horric experiences of the past — most notably, the Air India bombings.

We still have no clear explanation for why one measure — passport revo-

cation — was deployed against Couture-Rouleau, w hile others, such as peace

bonds or prosecutions, were not. Ocials told parliamentarians it had some-

thing to do with evidence, but we do not know if the October attack s were

yet another example of a failure to convert intelligence to evidence, identied

as Canada’s Achilles heel by the Air India Commission in .

We also do not have a clear accounting of what the government knew

about Zehaf-Bibeau, the Ottawa attacker. Nor do we know why the siloed

and fragmented security apparatus on Parliament Hill was not consolidated

or augmented in light of prior attacks and threats. We know that some intel-

ligence about a possible attack was circulated in t he days before the Ottawa

incident, but we do not know whether there was an adequate response. Per-

haps there are mundane explanations for al l these questions, but at present

Canadians do not even have those. A nd yet, the government told Canadians

in the winter of  that its new laws would make them safer. Canad ians

were asked to believe that the government’s new laws would do this, even

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while the government dismissed and disc arded recommendations from for-

mer prime ministers, ministers, reviewers, and commissions of inquiry.

e government seemed indierent to evidence of past failures, meas-

ured either in terms of underreactions, such as the A ir India incident, or

post-/ overreactions, such as the treatment of Maher Arar. ese incidents

produced inquiries that made many recommendations about how to restruc-

ture our security strategies so that they actua lly worked and were subject to

adequate whole-of-government oversight and review. ese commissions also

proposed means to make sure that, in making us sa fer, security services were

not making us less free.

And yet, even as it loudly banged the drum on security, the only gov-

ernment ever in a position to act on these suggestions continued to disregard

evidence and lessons tabulated from a close study of mist akes made in the re-

cent past. e government also had no time for the more distant McDonald

Commission on RCMP wrongdoing in the s, whose recommendations

gave rise to our long-standing security a rrangements limiting CSIS to the

collection of intelligence. Now under the radical reforms of , CSIS will

be able to engage in physical action, even including illeg al acts that violate

Charter rights. ese da ngerous new powers are not matched with increased

oversight or review.

II. IGNORING THE AIR INDIA COMMISSION

e Harper government deserves credit for appointing an inquiry in 

to get to the bottom of the Air India debacle. Unfortunately, however, the

government has only paid lip service to the commission’s  report and

recommendations. In particula r the government has done the following:

) In Bill C-, given CSIS sources a nd the director of CSIS a veto over

whether condential CSIS human sources c an be compelled to testif y

or to provide any identifying information in subsequent proceedings,

including terrorism and immigration proceedings. Justice Major in his

 Air India report specically rejected such an approach on the basis

that CSIS would make premature promises of condentia lity that would

make terrorism prosecutions more dicult.

) Preser ved CSIS’s discretion not to disclose its information about possible

terrorist activity to the police or others in government. e government

did this, even though it had the logica l opportunity to include such re-

forms in Bill C- while enact ing a very expansive permissive regime for

information sharing.