CHAPTER 1

Introduction

“Thinking the worst is not defeatist. It is the best way to avoid defeat. Nor is it defeatist to concede that terror can never be entirely vanquished. Terrorists will continue to threaten democratic politics wherever oppressed or marginalized groups believe their cause justifies violence. But we can certainly deny them victory. We can continue to live without fear inside free institutions. To do so, however, we need to change the way we think, to step outside the confines of our cozy conservative and liberal boxes.” [1]

Michael Ignatieff
“Lesser Evils”
The New York Times Magazine
2 May 2004

This is the first national security report that the Committee has published since the recent federal election. The Committee has published nine reports in the three years leading up to the election. Eight of these reports were released during the Chrétien government, and one during the Martin government.2

The book is closed on the Chrétien government’s national security legacy. For the most part, that era was marked by spending restraint and Canada’s military was hit particularly hard by cost-cutting. The Committee continues to examine many of the security-related problems that began to alarm us late in the Chrétien mandate as well as events that have transpired since the Martin mandate began.

Mr. Chrétien’s successors have now had time to begin tackling national security issues.  To its credit, the new government has introduced some significant reforms, most notably the consolidation of much of the security file under the Deputy Prime Minister and the release of the national security policy.

Politicians and bureaucrats at the federal level deserve a measure of credit for introducing these improvements to security for Canadians in recent years. That being said, there are many important security issues that still need to be addressed. This is the Committee’s challenge to the government:

You have made useful adjustments; there is a great deal still to be done; our strong advice is to treat security and defence as major issues and get on with the job.

The Committee acknowledges that a number of measures have been taken over the past three years in an attempt to revamp Canada’s approach to national security.  However, it is the Committee’s contention that the government has, in many cases, fallen short in its response to both the increased and changing nature of man-made and natural threats to Canadians and has not sustained the kind of focus that it will need to mitigate these threats.

Successes and Failures

A Few Examples of Success

There have been some successes, including:

• The creation of the office of Deputy Prime Minister Responsible for Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. One of our key recommendations last fall was that the position of Deputy Prime Minister be made permanent and be given the national security portfolio.

Security issues now have an influential advocate with direct access to the Prime Minister. Progress has not been perfect, but we will address that in Chapter 5.

• The release of the National Security Policy ended the government’s habit of addressing security problems in a scattered, ad hoc fashion. It represents a good start, setting out goals and a rational process for achieving them.

It remains a work in progress. So far all we have is a skeleton here. Sinew and muscles will have to be added.

• The Committee recommended that the government focus on coastal security by, amongst other things, establishing multi-departmental operations centres, modernizing surveillance technologies and doing more to identify ships heading to Canada. There has been some progress in each of these areas. Operations Centres and new surveillance technologies are on the way. New regulations are in place to help identify ships heading to Canada.

But much more must be done. Responsibility for the coasts remains split between too many departments.  Both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Coast Guard could be playing much more useful roles in guarding our coasts. Nowhere is Canada more vulnerable.

• The government has finally acknowledged that the resources of the Canadian Forces have been drastically overstretched in recent years, and that deployments are going to have to be reduced while the Forces restore their capabilities (see Chapter 4, Problems 1 and 2, on pages 65-70). When the Committee first asserted that the forces were being drastically under-funded and badly overused and provided details, we were accused of exaggerating. When we insisted that our forces should be pulled back to give time for rehabilitation and rejuvenation, we were ridiculed. Now we sound middle-of-the-road on these issues.

Several military analysts have called for a baseline increase to the defence budget that over time works out to a number similar to our recommendation of $4 billion dollars plus inflation increases. [2]  What’s intriguing is that we have all come to an increase of a similar order of magnitude coming at it from different angles and using different methodologies. There now appears to be a consensus about the level of military funding necessary for a country of Canada’s size, wealth and interests. 

The federal government has yet to respond with anything resembling an adequate increase in defence spending. But in April, David Pratt, then Defence Minister, voiced the need to end the frantic cycle of deployments: “There comes a point where you have to say for the sake of your troops that we’re going to take a rest for a while.” [3]   There are signs that the government is starting to understand the seriousness of the problem.

Maybe it is a stretch to categorize acknowledgement of this problem by the government as a success. However the Committee believes that because of the size of the problem, acknowledging it is a necessary precursor to meeting the challenge.

A Few Examples of Failure

It should not be surprising – given decades of neglect – that the Committee’s list of problems that remain unsolved is longer than its list of problems on the road to solution. Just a few samples of problems that the government has yet to address adequately:

• The Committee recommended that the Department of National Defence get a permanent immediate increase of $4 billion to its baseline budget, with future increases geared to inflation. Though the 2003 and 2004 Federal Budgets did increase Defence’s budget, and provide one-time funding for operations and contingencies, these infusions amounted to a few small drops in a very large bucket.

National Defence is still overstretched and resources continue to deteriorate. There are plenty of worthy causes lined up to take advantage of recurring federal surpluses. Given Canada’s inability to protect its citizens and the country’s fast-evaporating influence in world affairs, one would think that national security would be placed at the head of the line. This has not been the case.

• The government has unaccountably failed to initiate a judicial inquiry into the potential security risk posed by the presence of organized crime in Canadian ports. This is a multi-disciplinary, multi-jurisdictional problem and only an inquiry will get to the bottom of it. Port authorities are well aware that their facilities are riddled with criminals whose mission it is to open up holes for smuggling. A vulnerability to criminals is, by definition, a vulnerability to terrorists. Does the government believe that an inquiry would be embarrassing? It wouldn’t be nearly as embarrassing, damaging – or deadly – as a terrorist attack.

• There has been no response to the Committee’s recommendations that mail be screened as a matter of course, or that fixed-based aviation operations (the area used for corporate, charter and pleasure aircraft) attached to major airports be subject to the same security checks as those imposed on commercial terminals. The front door has pretty well been closed to terrorists at Canadian airports. The back door is wide open.

Moreover, there has been an inadequate response to the Committee’s recommendations that airport workers be searched before entry into restricted areas of airports. It seems the side doors are open too.

National Priorities

It is no secret that both the Chrétien and Martin governments have been preoccupied with eliminating budgetary deficits and reducing the national debt. This is commendable. Nobody wants to leave future generations with a huge debt load run up by today’s politicians.

But there is more to governing than frugality. Sound accounting is important. But most important is a sound analysis of a country’s current needs, mixed with a vision for success in the future.

At the most practical level, a nation has a responsibility to defend its citizens from physical harm – that is the very essence of nationhood. The first national imperative is the same as the first human imperative: survival.

Beyond self-defence, it is in no nation’s interest to shrink on the world stage. Loss of influence not only means loss of respect; it means loss of political influence and economic opportunities. With the emergence of new global powers like China and India, the world stage is growing.  Canada can’t afford to shrink on that stage if it is to advance the interest of Canadians. But that is what is happening, because when global problems need contributions from all significant players, too often all Canada has to offer are words.

Kind thoughts and diplomatic gestures cannot replace a country’s capacity to help out when the world needs help. Tyranny, turmoil and natural disasters demand an immediate response.  We Canadians are quickly losing our capacity to respond.

The Committee believes that the federal government must come up with a more intelligent balance between fiscal prudence and the expenditures essential to protecting and strengthening Canada’s future. Canada is the only G-7 country currently running a budgetary surplus. [4] To a degree, that is something Canadians should be proud of. But smart countries, like smart businesses, save money where it needs to be saved, and spend money where it needs to be spent.

There is, and has been, money available to upgrade something as crucial as our national security. The federal government has run surpluses for eight straight years, and used most of the leftover money to pay down debt. [5] Canada’s national debt has been reduced by an astounding $61.4 billion over the past seven years, and the ratio of debt to GDP has dropped from its peak of 68.4 per cent (1995-1996) to 41.1 per cent. [6] A wise man pays off his mortgage quickly, but also spends money to fix his roof when it begins to leak. Otherwise, all those mortgage payments will have been for nothing.

Health Care and National Security

Beyond debt reduction, Canada has been faced with two outstanding challenges over the last decade. The first was to reform the country’s health care system. The second was to reform the country’s national security system. The new government has already made a major commitment to the provinces to meet the health care challenge. The jury is still out on the security challenge.

Reforming Canada’s health care system is a much greater priority for most Canadians because health problems come up regularly and repeatedly – it’s a rare day that average Canadians aren’t fretting about their own health problems, or the problems of relatives, friends and neighbours.

Catastrophic events, such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters, don’t come around often enough for many Canadians to turn their attention to the need to be prepared to deal with them. This may seem strange, given that nearly everyone insures his or her house against the rare possibility of fire, but this doesn’t seem to translate to the broader picture. Despite the profound implications for performance failure in the event of a natural or man-made disaster, when it comes to national security and defence most of us tend to trust in luck. And luck is notoriously untrustworthy.

The Marginalization of National Security

The body of this report will itemize some measures that the current government has taken to upgrade Canada’s security and defense capability. These measures are certainly not inconsequential. Still, given the imperative of improving Canada’s capacity to defend itself and achieve its objectives in world affairs, it is fair to say that the new government has yet to demonstrate that is prepared to match its resources with its stated objectives.

There are always issues that intelligent people within government know are important, but which end up getting marginalized anyway. Why? Because national governments are faced with hundreds of issues affecting millions of people every day. They cannot focus on hundreds of issues – or even scores of issues – at the same time. So governments push most issues off their main agenda for as long as they can. And it isn’t always the least important ones that get pushed.

There are many ways to marginalize an issue – confuse it, delay it, undermine the credibility of those who say it is important, promise half-measures to address it (usually at some point in the hazy future), promote other issues as far more urgent, or simply take advantage of public forgetfulness. To repeat, the issues that get marginalized are not always the ones that should get marginalized. They are often the issues that governments believe they can delay without paying a huge political price.

Military preparedness – indeed, preparedness for all manner of man-made or natural disasters – is that kind of issue. If Canadians had demanded that national security be given the attention that has been given to health care or deficit and debt reduction, there is no way that Canada’s armed forces could have atrophied so dramatically over the last decade of the 20th century.

Canadians do not want to think about going to war. They do not want to think that it is quite possible that something like 9/11 could happen here or that SARS or Mad Cow Disease may be just the tip of the iceberg. They do not want to think that our economy could grind to a halt because security concerns shut our border.

The fact that governments over the past three decades have been able to preside over the emaciation of the Canadian armed forces without political penalty – despite endless news stories about Sea King helicopters being unable to perform, military families forced to go to food banks, troops having to “hitch-hike” to war zones – should tell you how easily this issue is shunted to the sidelines.

Putting national security in its appropriate place on the country’s political agenda will not be easy. But the security of citizens is the primary role of government. It is why governments were first created. No government can abrogate this core responsibility. In order to maintain our integrity as a nation, we must understand the importance of ensuring the security of our citizens. It must become an issue of public debate. It is a moral imperative.

Why This Report?

If the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence has one watchword, it is perseverance. We regard the need to optimize the security of Canadians, and the need for Canadians to play a useful role in world affairs, as two of the country’s greatest needs.

There are many reasons why our Committee should persist in calling governments to account on how intelligently and diligently they are pursuing those goals.  Two great reasons are: (a) our successes; (b) our failures.

We persist because we are encouraged that over the past year the federal government has shown that it has understood the merit of some of our recommendations, and moved to respond to them. By rough count, there has been good progress made on approximately half of the problems the Committee has identified in the past three years.

We also persist because so many of our recommendations – well-received by the public, most military analysts, the media, and members of the Canadian Forces themselves – have been ignored, delayed or dealt with in other unsatisfactory ways by government.

We would be the last to argue that this Committee represents the font of all wisdom on how the government can best defend Canadians and contribute to a just and stable world. But we work hard at assembling good evidence, checking its veracity, debating its worth in solving the challenges at hand, doing the triage that is necessary in deciding what should be the priorities and what shouldn’t, and in communicating our findings to the government and the Canadian public.

The Public and the Politicians

We are trying our best to be demanding – demanding of both the Government of Canada and the Canadian public.

Our demands of the Government of Canada are simple:

If the government finds our reasoning to be sound, it should act to implement our recommendations. Otherwise, it should explain – publicly – why it either finds our logic flawed on particular issues, or why it cannot respond to sound logic because its hands are tied in some way.

Our demands of Canadians themselves are also simple:

We want a public debate on important issues of national security. Apathy is anathema to us. If Canadians do not supply sufficient pressure on governments to act on important issues, all too often those governments do not act.

The Need for Public Debate

“Don’t accept anyone telling you that secrecy requires keeping details of a security system secret. I’ve evaluated hundreds of security systems in my career, and I’ve learned that if someone doesn’t want to disclose the details of a security system, it’s usually because he’s embarrassed to do so. Secrecy contributes to the “trust us and we’ll make the trade-offs for you” mentality that ensures sloppy security systems. Openness demystifies; secrecy obscures.” [7]

Bruce Schneier
Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about
Security in an Uncertain World, page 278

During the three years in which our Committee produced its nine reports, members were constantly shushed when we started asking what proved to be the right questions about national security. We were not only shushed, we were scolded for having the reckless temerity to ask specific questions on security measures in public.

“The terrorists will find out where the holes are! Canadian lives will be put at risk because a group of lunatic senators were grandstanding in forbidden territory! The sky is falling!”

We were too often told that information could not be made public, when, in fact, it was already public. In fact, in some cases, we were denied information that was readily available to tens of thousands of Canadians even remotely familiar with the military, or airports, or border crossings.

Governments have, from time immemorial, developed systems to centralize power and hoard information. The Martin government has promised to be much more open and democratic. We hope it will be. And yet, our Committee continues to face a seemingly endless array of barricades in attempting to answer simple questions – questions that too many cabinet ministers don’t appear to be asking themselves.

During our third set of hearings, Thursday, July 19, 2001, witnesses from the government’s Office of Critical Infrastructure and Emergency Preparedness (OCIPEP) tried to sell us the line that in terms of the federal government’s ability to respond to disasters, everything was fine. Trust us. Everything was not fine. Events like the Eastern Ontario power blackout of August 2003 soon demonstrated otherwise.

When the Committee was examining airport security, officials refused to respond to our allegations that there were huge problems, maintaining that it was illegal for them to discuss such issues under secrecy provisions of the Transportation Act.  To be open with us would play into the hands of terrorists.

Nonsense. Every airport employee, their spouses and their friends and anyone else who frequented a coffee shop anywhere near the airport knew the security systems were porous, that airport personnel was infiltrated with members of organized crime, and that organized criminals were acting like football linemen for would-be terrorists – opening up huge holes for anyone with a mission to run through.

When ministers and bureaucrats failed Canadians, we went to people on the ground and asked them to testify. They came through. Pilots, flight attendants, union leaders, maintenance people, some police representatives ­(the ones who didn’t have a vested interest in toadying to airport authorities) told us the truth.

At first, this led to denial. David Collenette, Minister of Transport at the time, dismissed our report as a collection of anecdotes. [9] He missed one small point: when you accumulate enough anecdotes, you have a story.

The Media

The Committee is not in a position to make demands of the Fourth Estate, and rightly so. Indeed, independent thinking is at the heart of a free press, just as it is at the heart of a free society.

Thankfully, the Canadian news media have been exceptionally helpful to the Committee in bringing our work to the attention of both the federal government and the Canadian public. Over the past three years, the Committee’s work has appeared in close to 1500 media stories. [10]

Not only have media outlets disseminated our findings and recommendations, they have gone on to do something equally important: they have helped to validate them. The Committee doesn’t ask the public to trust that its recommendations are founded on hard truths, any more than the Committee itself was willing to trust government officials when they tried to silence our questions by saying: “trust us, everybody is safe, we know what we’re doing, we just aren’t at liberty to tell you for security reasons.”

The Committee said Canadian airports were not secure.  The Globe and Mail went out and scrutinized the situation itself.  In a four-part feature it ran almost a year after the publication of The Myth of Security at Canada’s Airports, the Globe referred repeatedly to our conclusions and provided new evidence to validate them[11]

The Globe’s series is but an example.  The Committee’s reports have been used by newspapers across the country in a similar fashion.  A representative sample of those papers includes the Calgary Sun, the Edmonton Journal, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, the London Free Press, the Ottawa Citizen, the National Post, the Vancouver sun and the Winnipeg Free Press.

Again, the Committee does not pretend to sit at the pinnacle of Mount Olympus when it comes to pronouncing on military matters. But – so far at least – the media has tested us, and found our concerns legitimate. It has also alerted the public, without whose support there can be no significant change.

How the Tide Turned

And it wasn’t just the Canadian media who backed up our conclusions. It took quite a while, but, one after another, Canadian military personnel began to step up and acknowledge that we had uncovered some hard truths.

In November 2002, the Committee recommended that all Canadian military forces be withdrawn from overseas duty as soon as current tours expire, that no forces be deployed overseas for a minimum of 24 months thereafter. There were howls of protest. A spokesman for then Defence Minister John McCallum dismissed a hiatus in deployments as not an option. [12]   “An unacceptable option,” criticized Opposition Leader Steven Harper. [13] “Not realistic,” stated retired colonel Alain Pellerin, Executive Director of the Conference of Defence Associations. [14] “It’s very naïve and irresponsible,” said then Alliance defence critic Leon Benoit. [15]

Our military leaders remained silent, for months. But in late May 2003, in a retirement address, Lt.-Gen Mike Jeffrey, then Chief of the Land Staff, said he was worried about the army’s future, pointing out that the commitment of two six-month rotations of about 1,800 soldiers to Afghanistan meant about a third of the army’s deployable forces were committed internationally. [16]

One month later, Rear Admiral Glenn Davidson, then Commander of Maritime Forces Atlantic (now Vice-Admiral and Canada’s Military Representative to NATO in Brussels), admitted that the navy needed some down time after sending 15 of its 18 major warships into the Arabian Sea on 16 deployments (one went twice) in the wake of September 11, 2001. [17] “We’re just taking a pause here,” he said. “If we are required to deploy off for another international operation or emergency somewhere, which would really skew things, that would be really difficult.” [18]

The Committee was not surprised that the government did not order a total shutdown of Canadian military deployments.  But it was pleased to see that the essence of our message finally got through: Canada’s Armed Forces, depleted and run ragged, was becoming like a rubber band that has been stretched too often – sooner or later they break.  It was past time for a strategic retreat, the better to fight again.

Moving Forward With Renewed Hope

This is a benchmark report. Before the last federal election, the Committee decided to publish the report as a scorecard – a rating of the Chrétien government’s progress, and lack of progress, in response to our earlier recommendations. The draft of that report was something of a bleak read.

When the government changed, and there started to be hints of progress in at least some of the problem areas in which the Committee had made recommendations, we decided to do some more research on where there had been progress and where there had not, and to redraft the report as more of a challenge to this new government to expand its efforts, rather that what would have amounted to a rather general condemnation a year earlier.

The Committee hopes that progress will continue to be made, and that it will be made with an increased sense of urgency. If that doesn’t happen, our restrained sense of hope may be battered enough that we will go back to the scorecard, where warts stand out more than beauty marks every time.

We encourage the new government to look at what this Committee still believes needs to be done, and respond publicly. This is too important an issue to either dawdle on, or try to hide in the shadows.

 “Obviously it's a good idea to keep recipes for ricin off government-financed research Web sites, and it's not a good idea to have target detail on critical infrastructure available for download. But adversarial review…can't work if ordinary citizens are denied the information they need.” [19]

Michael Ignatieff
“Lesser Evils”
The New York Times Magazine
2 May 2004

Reading the Report

The Committee has attempted to set out each recommendation it tackled in a simple format with four headings:

1. Problem

It will not come as a shock to the reader that a wide variety of problems have manifested themselves over the past decade with respect to Canada’s capacity to deal with crises at home and abroad. This section outlines the problems as the Committee assessed them.

2. Committee’s Recommendation

The Committee made recommendations as to how the federal government should deal with these problems. This section restates the recommendation or recommendations the Committee made. The recommendations have been rephrased for tense and readability.

A few of the Committee’s recommendations from the past three years were not included in this report – in retrospect they either seemed inconsequential or just plain wrong. They are described at the end of the report on page 235.

3. Government Response

This section highlights government statements or actions that the Committee has identified as being pertinent to the recommendation it suggested. In an effort to portray the most accurate government response possible, the Committee undertook to identify government responses in three ways: first, the past and current Chair of the Committee wrote relevant departments and agencies in July 2004 and requested pertinent information; second, Committee staff sought out information from publicly available statements and websites; and third, in some cases, Committee staff asked specific detailed questions of the departments and agencies to clarify their public statements.

In some cases the government has taken measures to address the problems the Committee identified, and in several of those cases the government proceeded in a manner either identical or very close to what the Committee recommended. Whether the government followed the Committee’s recommendations in these cases, or whether it figured out solutions on its own, really doesn’t matter.  What matters is whether the government has addressed these problems and moved quickly to fix them. In too many other cases it has not.

4. Challenge to the Government

This section sets out the goals that the government has yet to accomplish to solve the problem the Committee identified. In cases where the government has addressed a problem, or appears to be well on the way to addressing the problem, the Committee has attempted to give credit where credit is due. In cases in which the government has given no indication that it has addressed a problem, the Committee has challenged the government to do so, or explain to Canadians why it can not or should not.