Preface

• Author: Craig Forcese; Kent Roach
• Pages: 7-14

vii

Preface

is is a book we never expected to write. In October , we were both

happily working on other research projects during our academic sabbaticals

from teaching at law school. In the wake of the t wo October terrorist attacks,

we knew things would change in Canada. We hoped they would change for

the better. We feared they would not.

In the immediate aftermath, we wrote “if the attack on Parliament and

on Canadian Armed Forces members constituted a failure by the state to

exercise its fundamental ‘night watchman’ function, it was probably not a

failure of law.”

But we feared a legal overreaction based on the false idea that “legal xes”

would prevent reoccurrences. e Criminal Code, we argued, grows in girth

“not because the evil of humans is ever mutable, but because high-prole

manifestations of that e vil demand a new political response of some sort . . . . It

will be next to impossible for parliamentarians to resist the lure of new legal

enactments, some responsive to these recent events and some more distantly

related.”

We endorsed the need to learn lessons from the attacks, especially an-

swers as to why there was enough evidence to keep Mar tin Couture-Rouleau

o ights (or more specically, revoke his passport) but not to prosecute

him. We predicted a reawakening of government interest in the  Air

India Commission report that had examined Canada’s most deadly act of

terrorism.