Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence
Issue 17 - Evidence - Meeting of May 4, 2015
OTTAWA, Monday, May 4, 2015
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 1:01 p.m. to study and report on security threats facing Canada.
Senator Daniel Lang (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Colleagues, welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence for Monday, May 4, 2015. My name is Daniel Lang, Senator for Yukon. On my left is the clerk of the committee, Adam Thompson.
I would like to go around the table, invite each senator to introduce themselves and state the region they represent, starting with our deputy chair.
Senator Mitchell: Grant Mitchell, Alberta.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Senator Jean-Guy Dagenais, Quebec.
[English]
Senator Stewart Olsen: Carolyn Stewart Olsen, New Brunswick.
Senator Day: Joseph Day, Saint John-Kennebecasis, New Brunswick.
Senator White: Vernon White, Ontario.
Senator Beyak: Lynn Beyak, Ontario. Welcome.
The Chair: Colleagues, on June 19, 2014, the Senate agreed that the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence be authorized to study and report on security threats facing Canada, including but not limited to cyber espionage, threats to critical infrastructure, terrorist recruitment and financing, and terrorist operations and prosecutions; and that the committee report to the Senate no later than December 31, 2015.
During the course of our hearings, we have heard of the significant number of Canadians who have provided material support to ISIS, some 80 Canadians who were abroad and have returned, over 145 Canadians presently abroad and over 90 who are seeking to join the Islamist group.
We read media reports of radicalized Canadians, most of them above 18 years of age, who have slipped the police net to get abroad. At the same time, we are growing concerned about the failure to prosecute terrorism financing and these jihadists who are renouncing our values to those of ISIS.
Additionally, the committee has heard about the millions of dollars coming into Canada to support radical religious ideologies either at religious institutions, mosques or at colleges and university campuses. All the while, it is fair to say radicalization appears to be on the rise not just in Canada but around the world.
Joining us by video conference from Toronto, as we continue our look at terrorism and threats to Canada, is Professor Anita Anand, Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. Since 2010, Professor Anand has served as the Academic Director of the Centre for the Legal Profession at the University of Toronto, and this role has led to the development of its new Program on Ethics in Law and Business. She is a Senior Fellow, Massey College, and is cross-appointed to the University of Toronto School of Public Policy and Governance.
During the 2009-10 academic year, Professor Anand was a Visiting Scholar at the Bank of Canada and a Herbert Smith Visitor at the University of Cambridge. She's currently a fellow in residence at the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto, Ontario.
In 2015, Professor Anand was appointed by the Ontario Finance Minister to the Expert Committee to Consider Financial Planning Policy Alternatives. Previously, she conducted research for the Five Year Review Committee, the Wise Person's Committee, the IDA Task Force to Modernize Securities Legislation in Canada, and the Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182.
I would like to welcome you, Professor Anand. As we can see from your resumé, you are very busy. I understand you have an opening statement. Please begin. We have an hour for this panel.
Anita Anand, Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, as an individual: Thank you so much. Thank you for allowing me to present via video conference. I hope the technology doesn't let us down today.
In 2011, I wrote an article published in the University of Toronto Law Journal that assessed the Air India commission of inquiry final report, voluminous as it was. The article is one that I have circulated to you today, and it was based on the research that I did for the Air India inquiry. As you can see from my bio, my expertise is in the area of financial regulation. I asked in my report whether anti-terrorist financing and the laws relating to anti-terrorist financing in Canada have been effective. Has the legal regime been effective in combating and preventing terrorist financing?
This is the topic that I would like to discuss with you today. The specific question is the efficacy of the current regime, including the institutions and administrative bodies that dispense the law, in particular FINTRAC. The larger question is the issue of structuring law where the benefits of the law outweigh the costs. That's the larger picture and question.
In my research report, I concluded that the inquiry did not address the question that I had raised. In essence, it gave superficial attention to the important question of whether the anti-terrorist financing regime is indeed effective. Is it the case that the money the Government of Canada is spending on this legal regime is worth the benefits that the legal regime allows to come forward or encourages?
I argued, therefore, in favour of cost-benefit analysis as a means to undertake an examination of the efficacy of the regime. I readily admit that there are shortcomings in cost-benefit analysis, so I would like the larger point, the importance of assessing cost and benefits, to come forward despite these weaknesses that one might argue about with regard to cost-benefit analysis.
My remarks today are going to focus on two issues. The first is costs and the second is privacy. Both of these issues together, costs and privacy, in my mind, are burdens on Canadians and Canadian institutions. It is my position that burdens are important but only if they're justifiable in terms of the benefits that are forthcoming. I am going to argue today that we do not have evidence of the benefits of this very expensive and complicated regime.
The question of costs has been addressed since my 2011 article that I have circulated today, and since my research for the Air India commission, and this is a very good thing. It is an important development for people to be focusing on the issue of cost. So the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce, in its 2013 report, used the term "value for money." In essence, the term "value for money" is akin to cost-benefit analysis. It asks whether our money is going to important and fruitful efforts.
The Senate committee basically reached the same conclusion that I did in my earlier report. It stated:
. . . the Committee is currently unable to assess the efficacy of the Regime in terms of investigations and prosecutions . . . .
The committee also concluded that there is a lack of information on results and costs and that this is a significant deficiency. This lack of information should be read and understood in light of the FINTRAC annual reports because FINTRAC, the administrative body that dispenses much of this financing law, publishes an annual report where they provide the highlights and the successes of the administrative agency. I am looking at the most recent report from the FINTRAC website, where, by the numbers, FINTRAC indicates that 19 million financial transaction reports have been received, that 5,000 telephone and email inquiries have been answered, that 1,100 case disclosures of actionable financial intelligence have come forward, et cetera, right down to 16 administrative monetary penalties issued to encourage change in the non-compliant behaviour of reporting entities.
It is my position that this "By the numbers" summary of "success" does not justify the $64.3 million in direct funding that was provided to the CRA, the Department of Finance, FINTRAC, the Department of Justice, et cetera, in the 2010-11 fiscal year, and those numbers continue to be accurate.
What we have on our hands is a situation where a number of financial institutions are subject to the compliance regime established under the proceeds of crime legislation. I'm sure you know these entities already, but I will just name them: financial entities plus foreign subs — so banks, et cetera — life insurance companies plus foreign subs; brokers and agents; securities dealers; casinos; real estate brokers; real estate developers; agents of the Crown; money services businesses; accountants and accounting firms; dealers in precious metals; and B.C. notaries. I'm still at a loss to try to understand why B.C. notaries and notaries across the rest of the country, including myself, are not obliged to fall within this compliance regime.
The important point I am trying to make is that we have a pervasive compliance regime established under the legislation. This compliance regime is extremely costly to the institutions, and many of these institutions will be passing on the costs to their consumers. So banks, for example, in their reporting obligations to report transactions of over the $10,000 mark, et cetera, are going to be passing on those costs to consumers. Is it not just, therefore, the financial institutions that are losing here; it is also individuals all across Canada.
I would like you to consider that, while it may be important to be monitoring and catching terrorist financing and activities that lead to terrorist financing, I am not confident that this is the regime that will get us there, especially in light of the very high expense of running this regime.
So this is the first important point I would like to put to you today. Can we consider the costs of this regime? Can we consider whether the costs outweigh the benefits? On the point of benefits, I am not confident that the benefits, as reported by FINTRAC in its annual report, justify these costs.
When I see this list "By the numbers" published by FINTRAC, I say that a disproportionate burden is borne by Canadians in light of the costs to establish this regime.
I have often been criticized for beating a dead horse, so let me conclude on this point. I will go on now to look at the second important issue that I think is on the table, and that's the issue of privacy. Privacy is an issue I raised in my 2006 report to the commission, and it continues to be important today. I see that the Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, is right on the mark in terms of what I initially argued 10 years ago. She is saying that FINTRAC has many, many files on hand that have nothing to do with terrorism or money laundering. The investigators working in her institution have found everyday financial transactions of ordinary Canadians. Things like down payments for homes and cars and wire transfers for families overseas are coming forward under FINTRAC's regime. This goes to show that this is a very pervasive regime, very intrusive in the individual lives of Canadians.
I am arguing here today that the privacy concerns are well known and, in my mind, well founded. Suspicious transactions are reported that may or may not have a link to terrorist activity. FINTRAC receives and keeps information about these transactions. The Canadians involved may have no guilt at all and no reason to be in that database, yet they are in the database through no choice of their own.
Let me conclude with two points. Our expectations about what the law can achieve should be reasonable and well informed. That is, we should not advocate a specific set of legal reforms in the absence of evidence that this particular reform is warranted. The ATF regulation is costly. The burdens that it imposes may be justified, but in my mind they must be proven to be so. Otherwise, the regulation is nothing more than an experiment and likely a costly one.
Those conclude my remarks. I am open to taking any of your questions.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Professor Anand. It was a very complete overview.
I would go to Senator Mitchell and then Senator Stewart Olsen.
Senator Mitchell: My thanks as well, Professor Anand; very powerful and informative.
One of the questions you raised in my mind as you were talking about the apparent lack of effectiveness of FINTRAC and of that regime was this: What makes us believe there's something to be found in some massive way in any event? Maybe the fact that they're not finding and doing anything is because there's nowhere near as much of this going on as some people want to make us afraid there is.
Ms. Anand: I concur. I read this report closely this morning before coming here. Some of the other successes of FINTRAC, other than the ones I suggested earlier, go to your very point. What they're reporting doesn't relate to terrorist financing.
On the page under "Financial intelligence — tactical," FINTRAC says that it assisted the RCMP in uncovering a Ponzi scheme, where 350 investors were defrauded of $27 million. That's not FINTRAC's bailiwick. That is the RCMP and the IMET bailiwick, but we don't, in my mind — and I respectfully submit — need FINTRAC to be doing that business. That's not their legislative mandate, in my mind.
This goes to your point: What they're reporting as successes doesn't really relate to their mandate? Why? It seems to me that there may not be the information there that they think may be there or that was there when they were conceiving the legislation.
Senator Mitchell: To further pursue that, on the one hand we hear rumours or suggestions that there's money going from Canada to terrorist activities abroad. On the other hand, we hear there's money coming from abroad to any number of institutions, schools and organizations in Canada to promote terrorism in Canada. Doesn't that just underline even more the lack of any data or anything much beyond just speculation? Why would it be going both ways? If we need it to be sent here, why do we need to send it away?
My point is this: Is there any research that actually underlines the magnitude or the dimensions or the parameters of this presumed problem of terrorist financing in Canada?
Ms. Anand: I would say, as I argued in the article I circulated, that it is an understudied area compared to the other more militaristic areas of this broad subject. It is not completely clear from an academic standpoint what the channels of communication or money transfer are, and this is part of the problem. After 9/11, a legal regime was established without a full understanding of the direction of money transfers in and out of the country. In my mind, perhaps that problem needs to continue to be studied before we put $64 million on the books per year.
Senator Mitchell: That is a powerful point.
I'm very interested in your concerns about privacy. One thing you mentioned was how long this information is kept and there are no parameters. That's compounded by Bill C-51 and the sharing arrangements. Have you looked at C-51? Could you comment on privacy and its implications from that point of view?
Ms. Anand: I have been discussing this issue with my colleague at the University of Toronto, Kent Roach. Like him, I am very concerned about the privacy issues involved and the very broad wording of the proposed federal legislation. As we have moved through the years since 9/11, privacy on its own terms, whether 9/11 had occurred or not, has also become an increasing issue, given social media and the growth of the Internet, essentially. Even without 9/11, we would have likely had issues relating to privacy.
I find it striking that Canadians seem to care about privacy to varying degrees. For some people, it is a big concern that their private information is in the public domain, while others are less concerned and I'm not sure why. I think we'll see a growing trend towards Canadians becoming increasingly incensed by the lack of privacy and the intrusion into what used to be personal affairs that suddenly are in the domain of FINTRAC or an administrative agency because the law requires it.
I'm saying let's go back to the law and ask ourselves whether this is information that we need so we don't have to subject Canadians to the concern in the first instance about who has their information, what information they have and what they have to do to ensure they don't have this information.
Now, if FINTRAC were coming forward and saying, "Well, we have 5,000 or 10,000 cases that we're prosecuting and bringing forward based on the reports that we receive from financial institutions," I would say, "Okay, well, maybe the intrusion into people's privacy is worth it." However, when I see 16 monetary penalties issued to encourage changing non-compliant behaviour, I say that it is not worth it for Canadians. It surprises me that Canadians have not been more vocal about FINTRAC, especially given how vocal they're being on Bill C-51.
Senator Mitchell: Thanks.
Senator Stewart Olsen: Very interesting presentation. Thank you so much.
As you mentioned, the Senate Banking Committee recommended that the Department of Finance establish a supervisory body for sharing strategies and information government-wide. What do you think of that? I share concerns about FINTRAC, but perhaps not in the same way that you do. I'm just wondering what you think about a supervisory body.
Ms. Anand: That's a great question because it takes us right to the present day in terms of what reforms are on the table.
My concern with a supervisory body is the additional cost as we now have a supervisor to watch over the supervisor. In the way of administrative law, for example, a lot of my work deals with securities commissions. There's no supra securities commission to make sure that the securities commissions across the board are doing their job. It shouldn't be necessary. It shouldn't be necessarily to continually establish additional accountability measures, which are incredibly costly, to ensure that the regulator in the first instance is doing its job.
My viewpoint is that I'm very happy that there's concern regarding costs and accountability. However, this is a costly measure, and we are concerned about costs today and the burden it puts on Canadians as a whole. I would say that the supervisory body doesn't decrease costs; it increases costs, adding to the problem.
Senator Stewart Olsen: Thank you for that.
Between 2009 and 2014, FINTRAC identified 683 instances of terrorist financing. You noted that the efficacy of anti-terrorist financing legislation can be measured by performance indicators such as prosecution and conviction. Based on these indicators, you seem to say that we're not getting our money's worth. Why do you think that is?
Ms. Anand: That's another difficult question. Why is it that we're not getting our money's worth? It's not just 683. Could you just tell me what 683 was?
Senator Stewart Olsen: Instances of terrorism financing over the period of time from 2009 to 2014.
Ms. Anand: First, the math I would try to do would be the thousands and millions of paperwork, compliance reports being gathered over this same period. You can't look at 683 instances in isolation. You have got to look at it as a proportion, as a numerator. That's over a multiple year period, and I don't have data in front of me about the number of compliance reports received by FINTRAC over that period. To me, it is likely a very small proportion still.
That's not really the hard part of your question. The hard part of your question, like the questioner before you, is: What do we do about making this regime more effective? That's an answer I don't have today. It requires full-fledged study as to how we can make this regime more effective.
Senator Stewart Olsen: I was on the Senate Banking Committee that produced the study on FINTRAC. There were a lot of questions about privacy and privacy issues. FINTRAC detailed a lot of measures that should protect Canadians' privacy. Are you aware of those? Do you think they're inadequate?
Ms. Anand: Yes, I am aware of those, but I would say that the decision about whether Canadians' privacy is protected should rest with the individual citizen rather than the institution that has the information. What that says to the average Canadian — and I consider myself to be one of those people — is, "Don't worry; we'll take care of your privacy concerns." In my mind, decisions about privacy should rest with the individual, not with the regulator, because it requires a certain level of trust. I'm not confident that in all instances those levels of trust are warranted.
I appreciate the moves being taken to protect privacy and I think that's important, but when you have the Privacy Commissioner raising concerns about the information of individual Canadians resting with FINTRAC, I would also be raising my eyebrows.
Senator Beyak: You've already answered most of my questions. I was a real estate broker when FINTRAC came into being, and our concerns were that there would be a lot of time wasted on little things that bothered ordinary Canadians and not enough time — well, there wasn't terrorism at the time; money laundering was the biggest thing.
I'm concerned that over the period that Senator Stewart Olsen mentioned there were 425 money laundering charges with 11 convictions and 77 guilty pleas, yet only five terrorist financing charges and one conviction. Are we able to narrow the scope of their work? It seems to me like you're telling us that's the problem; namely, they're spending a lot of time and money on things that don't matter and not enough time and money on things that may matter, because we don't have the time to find them.
Ms. Anand: Frankly, I don't know what they're spending their time on. I think it's determined by the reports they receive. If they receive a volume of reports that relate to money laundering, then they will, in all likelihood, spend their time on the money laundering aspect. The same would go for the terrorist financing issues in that if they receive terrorist-type reports, then they will spend their time on that.
Is that the type of regime we want, a completely reactive regime, one based on what information is funnelled up from the financial institutions, real estate brokers and securities dealers? I'm not sure it is.
This goes back to the first questioner's point, which is that we don't know if they're effective because we're not quite sure what they're doing. Again, if this were just a little bit of money, I wouldn't have a concern, but we're going on 10 years now and I don't think it's justifiable for us to continue going along in this manner.
Senator Beyak: If you had to recommend something to us, how would you fix it? Are other countries able to overcome this problem? Are they doing something right, something we could learn from so we could focus these dollars to our concern, which is finding out if there is bad money coming into and going out of our nation?
Ms. Anand: I share the concern with you — and with all of you, in all likelihood — that we need to do something, but we're talking about the methodology and the means by which we do something about terrorist financing. As I said, I would need to go back and do a systematic cross-country comparison of legislation and results to find out what has been working and what has not been working. I would be looking at prosecutions and convictions. That's what we have to be assessing, instead of pieces of paper coming in through the door.
Lots of the time when legal research is undertaken, we look at laws only. We look at the paper. We look at what law was passed in 2011 versus 2015, and we can do that across countries.
I'm suggesting we layer on top of that a practical aspect of that research, so that we look at the law and the results and we build in the concept of results, efficacy and cost-benefit analysis that are systematic across countries, so that each country is evaluated using the same methodology, to come up with more comprehensive comparisons.
Right now, I could go to the differing regimes and download the annual reports of various institutions, but the methodologies would differ between those institutions, as would the laws. So we couldn't have a meaningful discussion about apples and apples; we might be talking about apples and oranges," and that would not be fruitful.
To answer your question, the bottom line is that we would not find the answer in this conversation. We would need to go back to the drawing board and look at other regimes that have been successful and ask ourselves if they're not successful, why they haven't been, and include our own regime in that discussion.
Senator Beyak: Thank you very much for all your hard work on this. It has been enlightening.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Thank you very much for your presentation, Ms. Anand.
We know that laws are never perfect. However, the government seems to have particularly focused on powers given to fight the funding of terrorism via Canada. We also know that terrorist organizations are able to rapidly reorganize themselves when they feel they are under surveillance.
Do you believe Bill C-51 gives sufficient powers? If not, do you have any suggestions that would allow us to improve it?
[English]
Ms. Anand: That's a very good question. I did not prepare remarks on Bill C-51 today, but I would be prepared to come back to you and answer that question, if I could, or email you a response once I've had a closer look at that question.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: In the report you published in 2011, if I remember rightly, you seem to say that that would be an overlap or duplication of operations? What would be the consequences of such a situation?
Ms. Anand: Thank you very much. I could speak a little in French; however I will answer in English.
Senator Dagenais: Not a problem.
[English]
Ms. Anand: The overlapping that I was talking about was in the money laundering legislation and the Criminal Code; we have very similar provisions. At first instance, that spoke to me in terms of a certain redundancy in legislation. The drafters of the money laundering legislation certainly had access to the Criminal Code provisions also, and it's very ineffective to have federal criminal legislation overlapping with other federal legislation.
The problem that results — it's not just duplication of terminology that we would be worried about but a question as to responsibility. Who is responsible for enforcing a particular provision, especially when it's overlapping? FINTRAC might say, "Well, this isn't us; this is the RCMP's responsibility or IMET, so it's not ours," and vice versa.
So unless there is a cooperative spirit, which there may be — but there may not be — on any given issue, you could run into difficulties in the administration of the law on these overlapping pieces of legislation.
Senator Day: Ms. Anand, thank you for being with us. You have posed a number of interesting points that you have us all thinking about. The first thing I wanted to say is don't feel that you're flogging a dead horse, even though some people might have said that, because your comments are very helpful to us and to committees like the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce. We have long memories here, and it is very helpful for us to have comments from thoughtful people like you.
I would like to focus my question on your point about the legislation almost seeming like an experiment, not that we knew where we were going or what the results would be or why we were passing the law.
As you know, when the anti-terrorism law was passed after 9/11, there were some sunset provisions. We also have the technique of building in different types of reviews, either departmental review or statutory review by the House of Commons and the Senate.
Do you have any comment in relation to those techniques as helpful techniques that go along with a Senate committee that decides to make a study? You saw the results of our Banking Committee. They felt they didn't have enough information to really make strong recommendations in certain areas.
We have just dealt with Bill C-44, and very soon we will be into Bill C-51 when it comes to us in the Senate. I would be interested in your comments with respect to those techniques to maybe provide a bit of a safeguard.
Ms. Anand: Just to make sure I have your question right, provide a safeguard to —
Senator Day: To the legislation by having sunset clauses or built-in reviews to avoid the problem that you're describing to us of passing legislation that may not be helpful in the first place.
Ms. Anand: What you're talking about here is that to ensure something is not an experiment, we need to be building in accountability mechanisms in order to undertake reforms on an incremental basis, as necessary, as the regime evolves. Is that correct?
Senator Day: That is absolutely right.
Ms. Anand: I'm a big fan of sunset clauses. I would say every three to five years an evaluation of a regime would be a very good idea.
The problem with sunset clauses, though, is that once they are implemented in the statute, people are quite happy. People like you and me, we're happy that there will be a review after a certain period of time, but in my experience, a review is done and then nothing changes. So the question is: What do you need in addition to a sunset clause? That, in my mind, cannot be legislated. You can't mandate reform, necessarily, unless you have the people on the ground willing to be proponents of reform.
In the legislation, if you didn't want to rely on individuals, you could then say, well, if there is a material issue with the regime in place, on the review mandated by the sunset clause, reforms must be suggested and considered, but you could never mandate that reform occurs because it depends on the people on the ground.
Yes, sunset clauses and reviews of legislation are important, but we need to ensure that our legislation is crafted so that reform is a possibility and that we don't just stop with the review mandated by the sunset clause.
Senator Day: I'm taking from your comment that you would prefer a sunset clause to a mandated review, because you have suggested things don't happen after a review. With a sunset clause, something has to happen or the legislation disappears.
Ms. Anand: Right. Yes, I'm partial to sunset clauses, though I haven't seen them in Canada, in any case, work extremely effectively, but it may be the best option we have. Reviews are also important. If we're faced with no option, I would take a review over nothing. In fact, I would think it's our democratic responsibility to have some type of review and/or sunset clause in every piece of legislation lest we have legislation that becomes stale, costly, inappropriate or irrelevant.
We're in an area of legislation that's on the rise in terms of volume, but I haven't seen the volume of review or retraction or amendment moving at the same pace. I think that you are in a very special position in that you can see that and do something about it, whereas I, as a commentator, simply can't, other than to comment.
Senator Ngo: Thank you, professor. Using the lens of the cost-benefit analysis, is Canada getting sufficient results, given the amount of money we have invested in information gathering, with regard to terrorist financing?
Ms. Anand: What you're essentially asking me is have I done a cost-benefit analysis on the entire ATF, anti-terrorism financing regime; and I have not, other than to look at the numbers that I indicated in my opening remarks. Even a cursory look at those numbers, in my mind, is sufficient to indicate that we have an issue with cost-benefit. We have very high costs. Those costs can be documented. We can do research on the costs that financial institutions and other institutions such as security dealers, real estate brokers, B.C. notaries, all of those individuals who are subject to the regime — we would need to tally up the costs that they bear on an annual basis and compare those costs to the benefits that we're seeing from the regime.
I'm saying that if we look at the annual report of FINTRAC as being an indication of the benefits — and I think that's a good place; where else would we look — the benefits do not likely outweigh those costs.
We have a Ponzi scheme that was caught. That's not terrorist financing. We have a contribution to anti-money-laundering schemes. Again, that's not terrorist financing. Let's focus on terrorist financing. That's a problem in the legislation that we're not addressing adequately.
I think cost-benefit analysis doesn't definitively answer your question, but it gets us part of the way there. It raises the red flag. It says that we need to look at this a little more closely.
Senator Ngo: FINTRAC, as you know, is the major component of Canada's effort to combat terrorist financing. What you're saying is that FINTRAC does not operate effectively. If that is the case, do you have any recommendations for making it more effective?
Ms. Anand: That's a very good point, and it would take me back to the study that I mentioned that I think needs to be done, and maybe that will end up forming part of your recommendations.
We need to study alternative institutional arrangements for monitoring terrorist financing. That study has to be a systematic, cross-country study and has to employ the same methodology on a country-by-country basis. I would be in a position to answer your question once I did that study.
But right now, FINTRAC is likely complying with the mandate it has been given in its legislation. That's not my point. I'm not trying to argue that FINTRAC is exceeding its responsibilities as legislatively given. I'm saying that if your goal is to prevent terrorist financing, I am not confident that FINTRAC, as it's currently structured, is the body to do it. The first step — and maybe this speaks to my being an academic — would be to study alternative arrangements, alternative administrative regimes for monitoring and deterring terrorist financing before trying to do a complete overhaul of our current regime.
Senator White: Thank you for appearing today. It's really appreciated.
I'm bouncing back and forth here a little bit. You talk about cost-benefit analysis, but having been involved with policing for 32 years, there is not a lot of business I would be involved in if we did a cost-benefit analysis. Often it's about safety, security or confidence in our society.
I do take note of the success of FINTRAC or lack of success of FINTRAC or concerns you raise around FINTRAC because I was in the RCMP when FINTRAC came to be. In fact, it was developed specifically because there was a need and no ability within the RCMP or other federal agencies.
In your work, have you walked back to why it was put in place before you stepped forward as to whether or not it's successful? I know you said you don't think they're exceeding their mandate, but are they meeting it? Much of it had to do with money laundering in Canada in the late 1980s, the 1990s and into the early 2000s, if that makes sense.
Ms. Anand: Yes, it makes a lot of sense. I appreciate your point of view coming from the policing or the RCMP area.
The legislative regime is complicated. Trying to do anti-money laundering and terrorism in one statute is a big mandate. Money laundering was an issue long before 9/11, whereas we're just trying to understand terrorist financing. The means for terrorist financing seem to be changing rapidly with the birth and growth of new types of terrorist organizations. I'm not sure that having both of those activities built into one statute and having one agency charged with both objectives is the right means to go about doing the evaluations. That would be built into an analysis that I would need to do, given the breadth of the mandate in each of those areas.
We'd need to look again at this overlapping legislation in the Criminal Code, which separates out some of the tasks of FINTRAC but not others. Why do we have that? Why are some overtly criminal and others are contained in the more civil-like statute? Those are the types of questions I'd ask from a law-making standpoint.
The second part of your question of whether FINTRAC is achieving its objectives, let's look at the legislative regime. We've got a mandate to prevent terrorist financing, but we've got a regime that collects information from financial institutions and other bodies. This is not a FINTRAC problem. This is probably a problem for the drafters of the legislation; we've got a mandate and a methodology that don't pair up well. The mandate is very broad, and the methodology — collecting tons and tons of paper from financial institutions — doesn't necessarily take you to your objective. So in my mind, we need to go back and look at the methodology and what FINTRAC is charged with doing every year in order to prevent terrorist financing.
Senator White: Thank you for that. In fact, I was policing when FINTRAC was developed, and certainly the discussion around terrorism financing never took place. It was around money laundering and checks and balances around funding that was going through Canadian banks. I can tell you that banks allowed individuals to set up accounts without the legitimacy that was necessary to identify the funds that were moving.
In essence, are you saying we're using a hammer when we need a screwdriver? Or maybe not a screwdriver; we don't know.
Ms. Anand: I guess what I'm saying is that we don't have the right tools. I'm not sure what we need.
Senator White: Because we don't know what the tools are possibly?
Ms. Anand: Right. Your statement says we know what tools we need: a screwdriver, not a hammer. I'd go back one step to say we don't know whether we need a hammer, a screwdriver or a chisel.
Senator White: Or a scalpel.
Would you suggest that parts of FINTRAC or all of FINTRAC would be better placed in another organization? In other words, there is a closer proximity between FINTRAC and investigations. The separation of the two often makes it difficult to understand what both are connected to. If I were to suggest that FINTRAC would be better placed in the RCMP or the CBSA — I don't really care where — somewhere where investigations are taking place, would it be better placed?
Ms. Anand: That's a good question, too. I look at the RCMP a lot in my day-to-day work in securities regulation, and I've studied IMETS and their development considerably. There have been a lot of issues with the ability of IMETS to detect and bring cases forward in the area of securities regulation and criminal activity in white collar crime, so I'm not sure whether there is the expertise in the RCMP at the current time to deal with issues that relate to terrorist financing. I raise that as a pure question, not a rhetorical one.
We would need to make sure, if removing terrorist financing from anywhere, that the expertise is there before we move it. One of the issues with securities in the white collar crime area is that we didn't do that analysis. We didn't ensure that there was a sector of the RCMP that was dedicated to white collar crime because of their expertise, not because they were told to go there.
The Chair: Colleagues, I would like to ask one or two questions before we conclude with this witness.
Professor, are you aware of the Financial Action Task Force, an international task force that's looking at the methodology for a number of countries on the question of anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism, that there is a change taking place now? If you are aware, perhaps you could comment because that might in part answer some of the questions that you asked at the beginning.
Ms. Anand: Yes. One thing I am very happy about in terms of the FATF is that it does take a global approach to these issues. It actually determines what countries, as a whole, should be looking at in terms of terrorist financing. I think that we need to be involved in those international movements in order to ensure that our standards and objectives don't fall behind and we're not complacent with the regimes that we have previously established. So, yes, I am a proponent of the FATF movement.
The Chair: In part, that will meet at least some of your objections at this point with respect to comparing apples to apples as opposed to apples and oranges?
Ms. Anand: It's true, but I don't think it goes the whole way in terms of addressing the issues that we have in our own country and the legislative regime that we are now subject to or stuck with.
The Chair: I would like to follow up further in respect to your observations about FINTRAC and its mandate. Like others around this table, when I was in the private sector, we were affected by the implications of FINTRAC when it first came into play, and the real estate industry is still affected.
When you talk about FINTRAC and the money laundering aspect of it and the minimal amount of information that has been provided to bring forward charges in that particular case, it really brings into question what FINTRAC does.
By the same token, we have learned as a committee over the course of our hearings that well over 600 transactions are related in one manner or another to terrorism; and yet very few charges, if any, as you have said, have been brought forward.
Am I correct in saying that it is not FINTRAC's mandate to bring forward charges or to investigate? It is their job to bring forward information that the intelligence community and then the law enforcement agency can take information and proceed with the necessary investigations and prosecutions.
The question I have is this: It is unfair to say that FINTRAC doesn't have any prosecutions, because that's not really their responsibility; is that not correct?
Ms. Anand: That's right. Let's go back to the mission of FINTRAC, looking at its annual report: to contribute to the public safety of Canadians, help protect the integrity of Canada's financial system, detect and deter money laundering and terrorist activity financing.
The Chair: Yes.
Ms. Anand: I agree. You are right; it is not FINTRAC's responsibility to bring these cases to prosecution. It is their responsibility to uncover terrorist activity or financing of terrorist activities.
What I was saying in terms of prosecutions is that we would need to look at the entire regime — not just FINTRAC itself, but FINTRAC and the RCMP — that would be bringing forward some of these cases and ultimately giving them over to the AG for prosecution, et cetera. There are multiple layers or multiple parties involved in assessing whether a regime is successful.
Again, I would say that we have a very costly regime set up, and FINTRAC is the start line of that regime that we have established. It is charged with collecting all those documents. Even with 600 transaction reports — or whatever the number is, 600, 550, 650 — this is a very small number of reports. I am hearing — from financial institutions that I deal with in the course of my work and study, from Canadians, from numerous parties subject to the regime that FINTRAC operates and facilitates — that this is unwarranted.
I raised that question too, as you know from being here today.
The Chair: Colleagues, I want to thank the professor for taking time out of her busy schedule.
We very much appreciate your coming forward and bringing your point of view. Professor Anand, thank you very much for appearing.
Joining us for our next panel is Dr. Robert Groves, an Ottawa-based clinical psychologist with over 40 years of experience.
Dr. Groves, we appreciate your taking time to join us today as we consider issues of radicalization and threats to Canada. I understand that you have an opening statement. Please begin.
Robert Groves, Psychologist, as an individual: Thank you for this privileged opportunity to share information and observations from my clinical work as a student of human behaviour. I have over four decades of experience as a clinical psychologist, including exposure to national security issues, extending back to my pre-psychology days in the Canadian military signals intelligence. In the course of my practice, I have served on many occasions as an expert witness in court, frequently testifying in cases having to do with criminal matters. My wide-ranging professional interest in corrections and security saw me regularly attending Kingston Penitentiary, where, for some years, I witnessed firsthand various manifestations of what might be called religious radicalism and its ramifications in that federal institution.
As the time allotted to this opening statement is necessarily limited, I shall focus my remarks on a few facts and observations deriving from this experience at the recently closed Kingston facility. My agenda is to stimulate different ways to think about and understand extremes of human behaviour in a Canadian prison context, hopefully thereby to provoke creative possibilities for dealing with associated behaviours, whether they be ideological or psychopathic.
Perhaps I might begin by reminding the committee of the multiple murder of June 30, 2009. That day, Mohammad Shafia, his wife, Tooba Yahya, and their son, Hamed, killed Shafia and Yahya's daughters — Zainab, 19 Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13 — and Rona Amir Mohammad, who was 50, the latter sharing the status of "wife" in the polygamous household originally from Afghanistan.
The victims' bodies were retrieved from the Kingston Mills locks, the crime soon being described as an honour killing. There was no evidence of remorse on the part of the perpetrators, who were convicted. Indeed, Mohammad Shafia's attitude following conviction seemed not to have been substantially different from the statement he made about his daughters soon after the murders. According to Postmedia, "he famously cursed his dead daughters as whores." A wiretap caught him adding — I beg the committee's indulgence — "May the devil shit on their graves."
In light of this, I was surprised, following Mohammad Shafia's conviction, to find this gentleman leading Friday Islamic prayers at Kingston Penitentiary. An old maxim goes, "By their fruit you shall know them." In general, one can tell a great deal about a person's formation, beliefs and values from the current and historical record of their behaviour. Clinicians routinely and thoroughly investigate histories before making a diagnosis.
In Kingston Penitentiary, Canada's only Muslim chaplain authorized to minister to Muslims would occasionally come on Fridays. When he did, the Muslims would gather for Friday prayers in the chaplaincy area of the prison. There would be a general atmosphere of jovial camaraderie among themselves and with non-Muslims.
In sharp contrast, when the imam was not present, which was often because he had many demands on him as the only Muslim chaplain in the federal system at that time, Friday prayers were led by Mohammad Shafia. This man was obnoxious in manner, demanding of the Protestant and Catholic chaplains and generally offensive. The normally pleasant atmosphere associated with the Muslims gathering for prayers was absent. Inmates on the same range as Shafia, who came to see me, expressed fear of him. They were not Muslims but believed that they dare not refuse to attend Friday prayers. This form of intimidation is what one finds routinely with zealot extremists. In other circumstances it's called bullying.
Bullying in a prison population is not unusual. In a religious leader, who has been convicted of murdering his other wife and three daughters, it raises interesting questions of management. How can a rehabilitation plan be reasonably prepared? How can inmates be protected from this particular kind of intimidation? Within the constraints imposed by the straightjackets of political correctness and sound-bite journalism, could/should such inmates be isolated from the general prison population? This is how sex offenders are protected.
Another inmate, a Christian, who came to see me on a regular basis, stopped coming. It turned out that he felt so intimidated by Shafia and some of his lieutenants that he chose to give up his relative freedom of movement on the range in the general population for a much more restricted life on a social isolation range. He could no longer come to see me. I had to go to his cell on the isolation range. He advised me that confinement was worth it to avoid the hassle of dealing with the Muslims.
No form of extremism just happens, nor is it congenital. It is manufactured and shaped by a multitude of identifiable drivers. For example, family-of-origin influences, values, beliefs, mental illness, sexual and emotional abuse, education, indoctrination, unmet universal needs for food, shelter, love and meaning. Any or all of these factors can render individuals susceptible to reactions, beliefs and behaviours outside those of mainstream society.
All human behaviour is a matter of choosing. What varies is the extent to which an individual is aware of making a choice. Persons with antisocial personality disorder know right from wrong much better than most people. They have simply ignored their conscience habitually until it goes silent. It no longer disturbs them.
Terrorists and criminals are bullies who have much in common. They subscribe to the notion that the end justifies the means. Minimal attention is paid to adverse consequences of their behaviour on others. Responsibility for their actions is often externalized, that is, blamed on others, particularly the victims: "She made me do it." Ownership of one's own behaviour is absent.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Groves. Could I ask a question on your opening observations?
Mohammad Shafia was in prison, as you indicated, for the killing of his three daughters and his wife. Could you perhaps go a little further? How does someone like that just become the leader in a community, in this case within the penitentiary, to be able to lead a religious organization and be put in that position? Do they just appoint themselves?
Second, to give context, how many people are going to such a gathering?
Mr. Groves: The number varied but it would be around 25, and most of them came from the range that his cell was on.
I would say he was self-appointed. He doesn't have an official role. The people on his range that were not Muslims came to Friday prayers because they felt they had no choice.
I know these things because some of them were coming to see me for professional counselling on other occasions. My office was right in the chaplaincy area and they would come to see me in that area. So I saw them both when they came to see me and when they came down to Friday prayers.
Senator Mitchell: I'm struggling with what exactly is the point that you're making here. If it's true and I take you at your word, in one sense this is a problem with the administration of that prison. In another sense, you've acknowledged that there's bullying in prisons. In another sense, it could be like any other gang leader in a prison.
I don't think he should be doing it either, but have those 25 people who tended to attend been radicalized? Did they leave and threaten radical terrorist activities once they got out of jail? Did they go abroad to fight with ISIL? Is there a process going on in prisons that is effectively radicalizing people?
Mr. Groves: I cannot speak to that firsthand because the people who shared information with me were not, even though they were on that range. My point is that particular kinds of bullying present special problems. The tradition, for example, to protect sex offenders from the general population is to isolate them. The protection here that I felt was needed was of the people in the general population, not the movers and shakers of Friday prayers.
I think Corrections Canada does an excellent job, generally speaking, in implementing policies that work well in the prison system.
This is a problem that I believe has not been looked at or one may not even be aware of its existence. I know that the study that reported no particular problem with radicalization in federal prisons that came out, I think, in 2013 said that it wasn't a problem. My point is that the problem may not be manifest in the expected ways.
In Kingston, in federal institutions, no one left there during my time because they had life sentences. They would leave to go to another institution once they fulfilled their rehab program, that is, move on to a lower level of security. I don't follow them. I only worked with the people that were in the prison.
Do they go on to radicalize? I don't know that that is even the question right now because how would you follow them if you don't know who they are?
Senator Mitchell: So we need more research.
Mr. Groves: That's one issue, yes.
Senator Mitchell: You made an interesting juxtaposition of this fellow on the one hand and a very positive influence from an imam.
Mr. Groves: Yes.
Senator Mitchell: You will be aware that the government cancelled support for most clerics in the system.
Mr. Groves: I am aware of that.
Senator Mitchell: Are you saying there is a strong role to be played by clerics, Muslims and others, in the prison system that might actually contribute to calming effects, rehabilitative effects, inhibiting radicalization, drawing out the very profound positives of any religion but the Muslim religion included?
Mr. Groves: Yes. I do not agree with that policy of the government. I think that the value of the chaplains that I saw operating is undocumented. The interactions between inmates and chaplains were extremely precious in turning people around in their thinking, in their social responsibilities, in understanding their own violence, et cetera, and I can testify to that personally. When a chaplain suggested that they come and see me, I was unfettered in the sense that I volunteered. I made no notes and I did not interact with the administration, so if they were talking to me it was completely safe to do so. That just added to the benefits of having already been seeing the chaplain of their choice.
Senator Stewart Olsen: You have already stated there was a report that said that prison radicalization is not a problem in Canada. Do you think it is a problem?
Mr. Groves: I would answer both yes and no to that. I don't think it's fully operational at this point, that it is in development. The subtleties of bullying are well known in many other kinds of settings. That they are operating in this religious area or political ideal area, along with sex gangs and all the other kinds of bullying that goes on in prisons, is alarming to me.
It is not easily identified. It took me about three or four years to get a picture of it. I mention this Shafia case only to illustrate how it operates.
Now, I did see other kinds of gang bullying. The guards more or less follow that closely and have it pretty well in hand.
Regarding this kind of behaviour, I don't know that the warden even knew it was going on or knew what its importance was.
Senator Stewart Olsen: This next question occurred to me as you were talking about the chaplains coming in and you coming in. How are they vetted? Is there a vetting process?
Mr. Groves: Oh, yes.
Senator Stewart Olsen: No one, say a chaplain that would come in, would be preaching? How is that vetted, because in our country, we don't usually —
Mr. Groves: Well, at least in Kingston pen, you can't get in unless you are cleared by Corrections Canada and by their local in-house managers. It took two years to get me cleared, even though I have no criminal history and no particular zealous ideas. That was considered longer than average.
The process is pretty much like vetting people in other security situations. They contact your references and investigate your curriculum, whatever you are claiming to be a reason to be in the prison. My concern is not at that level. I think it would be in recognizing people who are very clever at concealing their ambitions.
The Protestant chaplains, like the Salvation Army and the unspecified non-denominational ones, were vetted the same way as I was, even though I wasn't coming in as a chaplain. But that's not a concern. It is the ability to recognize what you are looking at.
The Chair: Can I follow up? I don't understand this. You are in an institution, in an area that is maybe 100 feet by 60 feet wide, and you have a situation where an individual — we all know what his background is and we would not want him to be around any of our children, obviously, or any of our associates — is allowed to hold court with up to 20 other individuals, and the administration wasn't aware of that?
Mr. Groves: I don't know if they were. My impression is that if they were, they weren't troubled by it.
This is a very short, unassuming individual. He wasn't physically threatening to anybody. It was this influence about something might happen if you don't conform, the tactics of all bullies, only it is done psychologically, not physically. In some other bullying it is done physically; somebody sets out and knocks you about if you don't do what they're asking.
It is subtle looking. They would come down to the chaplain's area. There's a large meeting room in which they came with their prayer mats and garments — I don't know the name of all those things. First of all, on Fridays there's often reduced staff — not guards, but managers. They're not necessarily working five days or up until 3:00. These prayer meetings would take place at about three o'clock in the afternoon. I don't know how much it was observed except by the guards opening the doors to let them through. Catholics would gather for mass; Protestants would gather at other times. They weren't monitored.
What is monitored with great alacrity is theft. So if they steal the hymnbooks out of the chapel, which some do, or hide shivs in the binding of a book or things like that, the guards are very astute at noticing those things, but ideas and beliefs, I don't think so.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Thank you, Mr. Groves, for your presentation. Do you know what method of assessment is used by experts who study radicalized prisoners in order to determine whether they have abandoned all of their radical religious ideas before being freed? Are they good enough actors that they can outsmart the process?
[English]
Mr. Groves: I am aware of the assessment process that is conducted on each prisoner coming into the system. That's a very thorough one that looks at the personality and general features of the inmate and their attitudes toward many different things. I am not aware that there is any serious look at beliefs, radical or otherwise. I do not know how one could assess, for example, in front of the Parole Board, change in attitude that was evidence-based rather than just something someone said. That's an angle that I believe needs to be explored. How do we do that?
In psychotherapy, you observe changes in the person's behaviour as well as in what they say. In rehabilitation, as you probably won't be surprised to know, inmates try to figure out how best to look good to their parole officers so that they move to the next level of reduced security. Anybody would do that.
I think we don't know enough about how to identify or tag toxic ideas. We know about it in sexual behaviour. We know about attitudes towards sexual activity, and we know if someone is addicted to various things, like food, sex or violence. But we don't know how radical ideas operate in closed populations. We can observe it. I observed some of it, but I have no confidence that Corrections Canada has a way to canvass that issue. And this is no criticism of them; I just believe they don't have a way. So they don't find it. You can't find something if you don't know what it looks like.
Does that answer your question?
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: For some time now, we have known that the threat of terrorism is real, especially when we are talking about jihadists.
Do you believe that people should be preventively kept in custody if they do not give up their religious ideology or their desire to promote jihadism?
[English]
Mr. Groves: I'll start by giving an example from my work. I have done work that used to be called, in the 1970s and 1980s, "deprogramming." It was a method of changing or shifting the thoughts of individuals who had been subjected to a cult leader. It required many supports. You had to have a family willing to pay for such intervention because it's not covered generally by insurance. You had to have other members in the circle of the family to provide follow-up support for the change in beliefs because part of what gets done is not just by threat, but the intimidation is that you're not allowed to think independently. So you have to regain that ability. You don't even know that you've lost it.
Okay, now to jihadists and religious extremists of one kind or another. I don't believe that it's different in kind. I believe that the impact of radical ideas on susceptible persons is connected to many things, such as poverty, homelessness, powerlessness, all those factors that the United Nations recognizes in its concept of health. The five determinants of health include all of the factors that I believe, if absent, render persons susceptible to radical thinking, delinquent acting out, all kinds of non-social behaviours.
However, using the customary assessment tools that we have available now doesn't capture the passion involved in changed thinking. Some of the people I've interviewed whose families have brought them to me and who were, for a period of time, converts did not recognize that they had radical ideas. They believed they had the truth: "We've found the truth." On the one hand, one has to respect a person's right to seek and find the truth, but, on the other hand, you have to do it within a socially acceptable framework. That's the piece that separates people who have objectives that are not in keeping with the values of a society like Canada's.
So we have to start talking about that and not hide behind this sort of political correctness, because it's not Muslims that are the problem; it's radical people who will stop at nothing to achieve what they believe is right. So if they come here — I mean in a simple minded way, since I don't have to do all of the foreign diplomacy and so on — they would have to want to subscribe to how we live here to even get in the door to demonstrate that their statements are valid. I don't know how you would operationalize that.
Senator Beyak: Your 40 years of expertise are very much appreciated by this committee. Thank you.
Other experts on radicalization have said some of the same things as you, that we need the find ways that are not politically correct perhaps in the prisons, maybe separate wings for people who are radicalized in any form. Do you have any suggestions that the committee could take forth on that issue?
Mr. Groves: I believe that the first step is to recognize that the general population of inmates is at risk when such a person is in their midst. If you were to separate them, as sex offenders are, you would be protecting the general population, not the radical inmate. We don't want to do that, I believe. There's resistance to doing that because, immediately, other radicals can accuse you of mistreating Muslims. They generalize it to all Muslims; they don't consider that it's just being done to one radicalized inmate.
I realize that some innocent people are incarcerated but, by and large, not many. So for the most part, everyone in a federal institution, a top-security institution, is there for violating a serious law in Canada. Well, that should be a clue to some things. We do study inmates. Many of them are there because they killed somebody when they were high on drugs. When they get down off the drugs and are weaned off them, they are in great regret for what they did. Many are not and they have to be followed closely. I found that those who voluntarily chose or elected to come and see me, not the administration counsellors available in the prisons, were serious about personal change. They even maintained contact with me after they go dispersed across the country. So the first thing is to recognize that this is an issue and that the security of the inmates matters.
The next step, I believe, has to be commissioned research to look at how attitudinal change is accomplished. One of my studies in graduate school was to look at how to change smoking behaviour. Well, we never got a very good answer. The final conclusion was that you have to decide you're not going to smoke. It starts with a decision. It's not, "I'm trying to quit," because you satisfied that criterion as soon as you said it.
Senator Beyak: Something I recently learned that I did not know about is that some parents in Canada allow their children to watch jihadi videos and even beheadings. Do you treat children as well? What do you think the long-term effects will be and what can we do to curb it, if it is factual?
Mr. Groves: I did my clinical training in England. At that time, the child welfare approaches were probably among the best in Europe, for certain.
When I got back to Ontario, the legislation for child welfare was woefully deficient and was reformed. There was a white paper on what to do and good legislation got enacted. But it took a long time to get emotional abuse recognized as grounds for intervention.
I think we're into that now again with this business of exposing children. Everyone knows you shouldn't expose them to pornography but this is pornography of a kind, and it's addictive because it's compelling and unchecked. I believe, from my value point of view, that it is abusive of that child's freedom to choose how they want to think and how the world operates.
However, we're a long way from ever being able to intervene on those grounds. Whose idea is right? An abusive idea takes a long developmental process before its manifest as "Oh my goodness, what a distorted world view you have." Intervening at the outset is extremely difficult.
I'll leave it at that.
Senator Beyak: I appreciate your frankness.
Senator Day: Mr. Groves, thank you. We read that radicalization in prisons is becoming a serious problem. I'm hearing from you that maybe it's not as serious as some of these articles might suggest; and I'm not thinking of the general population within the prison but after these individuals leave. Have you any opinion about whether this is a lingering transformation to Islam? They were there because they were there to protect themselves and felt they had to go. They're not truly fundamentally converting to something, so as soon as they leave presumably it's no longer a problem. Do you agree with that?
Mr. Groves: Of the inmates I referred to, I would agree that that describes the majority of them. They were young Muslims who were searching. Because I don't speak Arabic, I could not understand what was being said in the social interactions, but I could see that they were very much like other young people in mid-adolescence or mid-twenties. I believe they take away things. They might not be radicalized in the extreme form, but I think they're sitting ducks to be susceptible to others in the larger community.
Their belief systems at that age are not firmly established. They couldn't radicalize me because I have pretty sound beliefs that have undergone many years of psychoanalysis and so on. No one will change them very much unless you show me there is a valid reason to. But if you are at the beginning of your adult-thinking life, you don't know the answers. So when someone comes with them, it seems like a good deal. That's true whether it's taking risks in life or believing certain creeds or accepting the authority of some holy book or whatever.
All I can speak to is that I don't know of any way other than the probation period after release where tracking is such that they're following curfew and that the grounds for release are being met. It doesn't have anything to do with who they meet with, what they think about and what kind of planning they have. It's around things like getting jobs and keeping their noses clean.
Senator Day: You have a unique experience having been in a maximum security environment. A lot of these people are in there for a long time.
Mr. Groves: Yes.
Senator Day: Did you have a chance to compare your views and observations with others that might have had similar observations at a medium-security prison? For example, they get out a lot sooner and, therefore, if there is a social problem outside prison, those medium-security prisons are more likely to be part of the problem because there are more of them coming out more quickly. Do you have any thoughts or observations there?
Mr. Groves: I've had some experience with career corrections people who work in medium security and were involved in the follow-up. Often there are trial releases, such as day passes and things like that, to check out their willingness to follow the rules. One woman who had 30-some years' experience in the system said that the younger they came in, the worse the outcome outside. The older inmates kind of settle into a secure lifestyle such that not much impresses them. Somebody might come in with some radical ideas that are contrary to their own way of thinking, and they're not influenced. It's that younger group, and, whether they're in medium or in max — it's hard to describe the environment — they're in a society that is very frightening. Even the tough criminals who have been in more than once consider it so. Kingston was considered pretty bad news.
I'm not sure. I might be wandering off your question.
Senator Day: Well, you've prompted another follow-up here.
Millhaven has replaced Kingston Penitentiary. Is there a way to segregate these younger inmates? If the root of the problem is the exposure of the younger inmates to the more seasoned, radical types, is there a way to segregate? Can that be done just by the warden saying, "We're going to do that"?
Mr. Groves: Yes. He has complete authority. There is a prison advocacy organization, so if the prisoners don't like it, they can complain. I'm not saying they're totally ineffective, but about administrative decisions like that, they hold.
The facility itself was revamped to the tune of many millions of dollars in anticipation of inmates moving there. The concept of Millhaven is two-fold: One is assessment, the unit that looks at new inmates, and a relaxed movement in the rest of the population. It would be hard to segregate them except at certain hours of the day. All of the communication goes on in the yard, in the hallways and central areas of the prison, so I don't know if you could restrict exposure or protect, say, one age segment of the population physically. I think that would be very difficult to implement.
Senator White: Thank you for being here today. I listened with great interest as you were talking about what's happening. If this is happening in our population generally, we would look at a peace bond against the individual who is recruiting, in particular those people who are extremely susceptible. For instance, we know mental illness is at an extremely high rate in federal institutions, based on the inspector general's report. So, really, it's saying that we're not doing what should happen inside even if we would not allow the same thing to happen outside.
Mr. Groves: I agree.
Senator White: As a follow-up, then, we should realistically be looking at forcing that to occur inside as we would expect it would happen if, in our community today, we had someone who was radicalizing susceptible, often mentally ill people, or at least people who are susceptible to changing for the worse. We would do something about that. So you would support the government putting pressure on Correctional Service Canada to not allow this to continue.
Mr. Groves: Correct.
The Chair: I want to follow up quickly. It's a question of identifying those individuals so that you could take that corrective action, is it not?
Mr. Groves: Yes, that is the problem.
There has been a maturing of radicalization in the sense that 25 years ago you could spot radicals anywhere. The bus driver could pick them out. Now you can't do so as easily. That's why I mentioned the fruit business; you have to see what gets produced by what they do and then study how they do it.
There are social scientists who are addressing those issues, especially in universities in the United States, but it's fraught with funding difficulties and all these issues about correctness and integrity in reporting. So how to identify who is doing this and who is susceptible is a real problem.
Senator Ngo: I am following up the questions from Senator Day. A number of the reports state that radicalized prisoners are likely to form their own gangs in prison, given the light sentences given out by judges in Canada. Do you think it's possible that a prison can be used to develop a terrorist cell and therefore can pose a serious threat when these prisoners are released?
Mr. Groves: Is it possible, yes. Is it happening from what I observed in Kingston? I would say no. I observed the ingredients, the variables that would next lead to that.
There wasn't a gang. The range that Shafia lived on operated as a reluctant group, so there wasn't a gang yet of radical Muslims out to conquer the whole prison population.
Although all prisoners believe they're innocent — you know, it was just bad luck that they got caught — many of these people expressed views that they really did believe that their behaviours were acceptable, even though the Criminal Code of Canada defines very clearly behaviours that are not acceptable, like terminating someone's life.
So there is resentment and emotion — arousal — in relation to the act of being in prison at all. I believe that when that settles down, there would be more organized behaviour among believers of any radical creed. That's a vulnerability in our institutions.
Senator Ngo: You mentioned that Mr. Shafia is leading a group of 23 prisoners.
Mr. Groves: About that number, yes. It is an estimate.
Senator Ngo: You say that those 23 prisoners do not consider themselves to be Muslims.
Mr. Groves: No. I would say at least a third of them were going to Friday prayers only because they felt threatened if they didn't. I mentioned one of the inmates who came to see me on a regular basis stopped coming. I inquired what had happened. He had elected to be on an isolation range so he didn't have to deal with Shafia and the Muslims.
Senator Mitchell: The threads you are weaving are very interesting, and they're focused, to some extent, on this Muslim fellow. What about other radical ideologies? What about White supremacists? We had a meeting in Toronto and an academic made a powerful point that White supremacists are far more prevalent. What about in prisons? Is that not an issue as well?
Mr. Groves: In my experience, I met one who was already beginning to change his belief system. He was Roman Catholic by birth, and he went to see the Catholic priest. It was initially part of his rehabilitation plan, but that priest had many years of experience in prisons and worked very successfully with him.
So when the priest suggested that this fellow come and see me, he did, and he talked about how he got into this White supremacy way of thinking, which was the influence of another adolescent in Hamilton where he was growing up. They both came from quite extreme poverty: single-parent homes and many of the variables that you find associated with any kind of extreme behaviour.
I did not see many who identified as White supremacists in Kingston pen, but you hear about them. I don't know if that's apocryphal or real. I didn't find that in Kingston.
The Chair: Colleagues, I'm going to thank the good doctor for taking the time to come before us. He certainly has given us a lot to ponder with respect to an area that not many of us are familiar with. So we certainly appreciate you bringing it forward to us.
Joining us on this panel are Christian Leuprecht, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Economics, Royal Military College of Canada; and Clark R. McCauley Jr., Professor, Department of Psychology, Bryn Mawr College.
Professor Leuprecht, it is good to see you again. I understand the area that you are going to be speaking on is a matter of particular study and research that you have been involved in.
Professor McCauley, as this is your first appearance before our committee, please allow me to extend a special welcome.
I understand you both have an opening statement. I would invite Professor McCauley to begin, followed by Professor Leuprecht.
Clark R. McCauley Jr., Professor, Department of Psychology, Bryn Mawr College, as an individual: Thank you very much for this opportunity to address you. I am going to say a few words about radicalization and how I have come to think about it, and a few words about lone actors and then a few words about foreign fighters.
There is a way of thinking about radicalization that makes it seem like it is a continuum from bad ideas to bad actions, as if the bad ideas compel the bad actions. I have come to think that that is wrong and that there are really two separate problems —the radicalization of ideas and the radicalization of action.
The reason Sophia Moskalenko and I came to think like this is that if you look at polling data, for instance, the Pew polls of U.S. Muslims, you find that about 10 per cent of U.S. Muslims believe that terrorist bombing, suicide bombing, against civilians in defence of Islam is often or sometimes justified, which is a pretty radical opinion. If you project that 10 per cent out, it is 10 per cent of a million-plus adult Muslims and you have got 100,000 people, but the number of people who are actually doing anything that the security services are concerned with is maybe in the hundreds.
So it's clear that radical opinions are easy and radical action is hard. Some people get the radical action without radical ideas. Some people join a militant group for power and status or because a loved one asked them to join or because it's safer than to be on the streets by yourself. Some people join a militant group without radical ideas to start with, and the great majority of people with radical ideas never move to radical action, and that's what makes me say we need to think about these as two separate problems — radical ideas and radical action.
A few words about lone actors. We have been doing a study comparing lone actor jihadists in the U.S. We looked at 11 lone actors and 11 what we called pseudo lone actors. These are people who are caught up somehow in the legal system with connection to an informant or an undercover agent. Psychologically, these people are not loners; they see and feel themselves as part of a small group that includes the agent or the informant. The interesting thing we notice different about them is that 11 out of 11 of the ones who are pseudo lone actors are involved in some kind of a bomb plot, and only 2 out of 11 of the real lone actors are involved in a bomb plot.
I can't but conclude that law enforcement and security people are kind of pushing individuals in the direction of bomb plots, and I think this is a mistake. I'd suggest that if there's anything like that going on in Canada, that kind of push to get the bigger offence, it's probably a mistake because the communities these Muslims come from know that these are not — how shall we say — the world's most sophisticated people, and they know that this kind of pushing must be going on. It doesn't do the government any good in the eyes of Muslims.
Now about the foreign fighters. I can tell you about some data we have gotten from recent Internet polls. I'm sure you have heard of the Pew polls I mentioned a while ago. These cost about $1 million apiece for telephone polling of a representative sample of U.S. Muslims, over a thousand people. They're slow, ponderous and expensive, so we've been trying to do Internet polling, which is cheaper with a faster turnaround.
In a poll in the summer of 2014, we found out that something like 40 per cent of U.S. Muslims favour U.S. Muslims going to fight Bashar al-Assad in Syria. That leads me to a suggestion that maybe we ought to be ready to see volunteers go to fight against Bashar.
Then in the fall of 2014, after ISIS got big in the summer, we added a question: How do you feel about ISIS? We found that only 15 per cent of U.S. Muslims who had heard of ISIS were favourably disposed towards ISIS. That leads me to the suggestion that maybe the Canadian government and the U.S. government could try to distinguish between going to fight against Bashar on the one hand, which we might be ready to even encourage, as opposed to going to fight for ISIS, which we might like to discourage. Rather than trying to keep down all travel from U.S. Muslims who want to go to participate in the fight in Syria, I think maybe this distinction would serve us better.
That leads me to still another thought, which is that the number of Western volunteers in ISIS is actually pretty small, and a great percentage of those Western volunteers come from Europe. A very small percentage come from the U.S. and Canada. That means if we were able to cut off all of those volunteers entirely, it would do practically nothing to the military power of ISIS, which makes me think that maybe we shouldn't work so hard. Maybe we shouldn't make it illegal for U.S. Muslims to try to go and fight even for ISIS.
I'm led to think, for instance, of the case of Zehaf-Bibeau, who was trying to get to Syria. When he couldn't get renewal of his Libyan passport, then he attacked the Canadian Parliament. Isn't that a lesson for us? If you keep people who want to fight from going, you make them choose between doing nothing and fighting at home. I think we could better afford to have the volunteers go from here and keep track of them and their passports as opposed to trying to make it illegal.
One advantage would be that when some of these volunteers become discouraged and disillusioned, they can make very good public relations material for us when they return with their story of disillusionment, and that would be very useful. But it is hard to make a useful piece of public relations from somebody who is speaking from a jail cell.
So, you see, I'm feeling kind of doubtful about the growing policy of making U.S. Muslim volunteers who are fighting in other parts of the world an illegal matter and trying to put all those people in prison.
Thank you for your attention. Those are my thoughts.
The Chair: Thank you, sir.
We'll move on to Mr. Leuprecht.
Christian Leuprecht, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Economics, Royal Military College of Canada, as an individual: We live in a diverse country, so I think ultimately we're always going to have challenges with people reaching out to groups across the world with whom they feel they have an affinity and are supporting their cause in one way or another, whether the government approves or not. Similarly, we will always, as a result, also have a challenge with groups or even quasi-state actors reaching back into Canada to fund certain institutions or possibly even causes of which we might not be too enthusiastic.
Given that Canada is becoming an ever more diverse society and given that we are a wealthy and free society, there is always the risk that people will avail themselves of the freedoms that our Constitution affords them, either to try to fund or otherwise provide support for organizations that run directly counter to our national interest, or for them to avail themselves of the freedoms in this country to fund causes and organizations about which we are, shall we say, apprehensive.
One of the things we tried to do in the study to which the committee has access and the two articles that came out of our survey work, both of which were published in major top-tier journals, is that there is a remnant of individuals within the particular community that we sampled that appear to have sort of a lingering sympathy for the cause but are also willing to act on that sympathy. The proxy question that we developed showed clearly that a small remnant of people are willing to go beyond simply legal measures. I think this is what the empirical evidence and symptoms bear out when we see people being arrested for certain types of actions. So as Dr. McCauley pointed out, we need to distinguish between the problem of mass radicalization on the one hand and the small remnant of individuals who are willing to take sympathies and translate them into action.
I have a few particular thoughts on this. Our survey work showed that the problem is not so much any one particular religious institution. I don't think any diverse society would serve us well to identify any one particular religious group's institution, but rather that the individuals that showed the greatest predisposition towards the willingness to break the law on their sympathies were individuals who engaged in regular small-group type of study.
To some extent I think this makes sense, because if you think about politically motivated violent extremism, you often think about this as a language. You can take in a language on the Internet and pamphlets and whatnot, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense until you have an opportunity to talk to someone. It's this ability to interact that helps reinforce the particular stereotypes that people have and translate them into action.
I would refer the committee to the work of my colleague Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian who has long taught in London about the concern that somehow a growing proportion of individuals from any one particular ethnic or religious group — for instance, Muslims — will necessarily lead to a greater diffusion of Muslim-type norms or a greater risk necessarily that we will see a greater threat with regard to radicalization of particular individuals. I think this bears out in terms of endogenous effects, because we would see some sort of correlation between people moving to action and the diversity of the societies in which they live — for instance, the growth of Muslim populations in European countries.
He has shown, I think fairly convincingly, that there is no immediate demographic concern here in that regard. But we also learn from this that endogenous effect — so the laws, the policies and the context in which people operate — is what will have the major influence in whether they go with the mainstream normative flow of our societies or whether they're going to decide to resort to actions on the margins.
We also showed in one of the two papers, based on the data, that with regard to the problem of mass radicalization, when we talk about individuals who are looking to move from thought to action, there is not necessarily an immediate social policy solution that would mitigate that particular risk. I'll get back to countering and preventing violent extremism in a moment, so I want to couch that with a caveat.
What I'm apprehensive about is government throwing a whole bunch of money at programs in the hope that somehow that will solve the problem. There are lots of people who are poor, alienated and do not engage in these types of action. So that, in itself, is not the monocausal problem.
When we talk about inflows of money — which for me is certainly a concern and over which recently the National Security Advisor also voiced concern — the challenge here is one of reciprocity, that Canadians and Canada would not be allowed to fund the types of activities that some governments, para-government institutions or individuals from certain countries are funding in Canada. I've always thought that this needs to work on reciprocity, but it is very difficult to curtail this type of funding coming in from abroad because it doesn't tend to come directly from countries; it tends to come via a number of different actors. So the origin can often be difficult to trace.
In terms of outflow of terrorist financing, there is the problem of destination, so it might be helpful to think about whether we can establish a list of individuals who are associated with organizations and that providing money to them becomes essentially an offence.
This is what I call "terrorists, too, need to go to the dentist." It is hard to demonstrate that any particular money that is funnelled to individuals is then used necessarily for violent purposes. But there may be a listing opportunity here, just as a deterrent effect. I will get back to this in the recommendations.
There are two types of fundraising that we need to distinguish when it comes to individuals. One is the prevalent problem of travel, individuals who go around and all they need to do is raise a couple of thousand dollars so they can get on a plane. It's relatively easy to do that, and it's very difficult for our security services to catch on that that's what's going on. In many ways they raise the money perfectly legally; it's just the action that is illegal. There is a challenge there.
We then, of course, also have the challenge of individuals who fund organizations. I have a paper on al Shabaab that I've shared with one of the committee members, and I'm happy to share more broadly, where we're trying to show that the individual funding problem and the group funding problems are two distinct problems, so we shouldn't conflate them.
The problem of funding organizations has become less because increasingly terrorist organizations are relying on own-source funding. If you look at ISIS, it doesn't primarily need to draw on funds brought in from abroad the way, for instance, the Tamil Tigers used to do. I think this is a general trend.
I also want to point out to the committee the convergence of organized crime and terrorist financing. This is somewhat amorphous. The empirical evidence here is a bit sketchy. Especially with regard to Hezbollah, we have some pretty convincing work, especially with regard to the United States.
We have also have Mokhtar Belmokhtar in northwest Africa. He's also known as "Mr. Marlboro" for a reason. So organized crime — in particular, issues such as contraband cigarettes, contraband tobacco, or untaxed tobacco, as some populations groups in this country like to refer to it — is an area that is amorphous but is a concern the way organizations set up organized crime operations, not just in North America but across the world, and in particular the concern with Hezbollah in order to fund their activities. So going after illegal activities and organized crime also has a direct repercussion on being able to undermine funding for terrorist organizations, although the links in Canada are somewhat amorphous on the particular issues.
The last point I want to raise is this: Why is it that in Canada we don't have any investigations on this? To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been charged in this country for offshore money laundering and no one has been charged for offshore tax evasion. Arthur Cockfield, at Queen's, has done very interesting work on this. Only one person in this country has ever been charged for terrorist financing, and that particular case was like taking candy from a baby because he was so overt and it was such a small sum.
This raises the following question: If we know we have a challenge here, why is it that on the legal side it seems to be very difficult to do anything about it?
Here are my recommendations and some of the thoughts that I would put forward. One is that these types of financial investigations are very complex. I am not convinced we have the requisite professional development mechanisms to build the skill sets and recruit the skill sets into our national security organizations — in particular, on the law enforcement side — that are necessary in order to get a handle on this particular issue.
Some countries do somewhat better at this — the Americans, for instance. One of the reasons they do better at this is because they have a completely different professional development recruitment mechanism to make sure they can actually have specialized units that can deal with this particular problem. But even for the U.S. it's a challenge because it's often just very high-value targets.
You're already familiar with my argument that I think the RCMP is doing far too much and that we should get out of the contract policing side and actually have an organization that can focus on federal priorities.
The listing regime: It took until 2012 in this country, to the best of my knowledge, to list the Taliban as an organization on our terrorist scheduling. This shows that the process is exceptionally inefficient in the way we go about listing organizations.
This is a particular problem. I will circulate this to the committee. This is violent extremist organizations in northwest Africa. The little boxes show how organizations morph within just three years. So even if you make it on the scheduled list of illegal organizations in this country, all you need to do is change your name and you're off the list, because it will take us years to get you back on the list. This is exactly what organizations do, but they usually don't change the name in order to evade financing; they change the name because they split internally. But our system is simply way too inflexible to keep up.
The data-sharing challenges: We have a great financial intelligence tracking agency. It's very difficult for this agency to share the data they need to share with law enforcement so we can get the appropriate investigations.
We need to generate more research. Part of what the survey work is driven by is that we don't have a whole lot of good empirical patterns for law enforcement to go on. We can demonstrate that there are triangulations of behavioural patterns associated with people who engage in this type of activity. We need more research so that law enforcement, when they want to get a warrant or go in front of a judge and they want to arraign someone, and the judge says to them, "Well, you're just profiling this individual," we can say to him, "No, we're not," because we know that this particular pattern tends to be disproportionately associated with people who engage in financing or recruiting or whatever it might be. I think we have incipient research here that we can demonstrate this is an issue.
We need longitudinal survey data. In no Western country that I'm aware of do we have consistent longitudinal survey data to see whether there are problems of radicalization in communities. You need a baseline to detect a change within communities that might be of particular concern to us. But by virtue of not having a baseline, it's very difficult for us to detect any shift in thinking.
I would also suggest that at the federal level we're only now coming around to the fact that all security is local, just like all politics is local. So we can't have the RCMP and CSIS trying to counter violent extremism in local communities. It's like having the federal government take out our garbage. There is a reason for not having the federal government take out our garbage.
We need to get around to what federal institutions can do to reinforce local capacity of local actors and provincial actors. I think we're coming around to that, but I'm not convinced that we're coming around quite as quickly as we can.
As a closing thought, there's a lot that we can do on the capacity building side, in particular working through the UN counterterrorism executive directorate and the work that the Department of Foreign Affairs does and the financing that the government has provided for that capacity building.
Ultimately, if you have a challenge with terrorist financing, it's partially because we have a challenge with these organizations proliferating. Rather than sending our Canadian Armed Forces to go firefighting across the world, we need to be more proactive. The government has done very good things here that aren't getting enough press and I think that any future governments would continue to do, but there's more to do on the capacity building side. We have a very good whole-of-government effort going on that.
Thank you for your attention.
Senator Mitchell: Professor McCauley, I really enjoyed your take on a number of conventional wisdoms that showed we need to always be pushing our thinking. In the context of the 11 not really lone actors versus the 11 really lone actors and the outcomes, you talked about government pushing people to bomb plots. I think I probably missed that. In what way were you suggesting the government was pushing people to bomb plots?
Mr. McCauley: When you have two out of the real lone actors, only two have any connection to a bomb plan, whereas 11 out of 11 of the pseudo lone actors, the ones who are interacting with agents and informants, are involved in some kind of a bomb plot. This is a statistically significant difference already, despite the small sample size. It leads me to think that the security people who are involved with the informants and the undercover agents are pushing to get a bomb plot because then they can talk about a weapon of mass destruction; it's a bigger offence and makes a bigger play in the newspapers of the good work that's being done.
But the downside is the communities these people come from note that these people who are up on bomb plots are not the kind and character of people who could get to the idea of a bomb by themselves. So they know that there must be pressure from the security side pushing a suspect in the direction of a bomb plot. The downside of this in the Muslim communities is considerable.
I don't know if something like that happens in Canada. All of our cases were U.S. cases. But it's a strong enough result that I thought it was worth bringing to your attention.
Senator Mitchell: That's very interesting. You're saying that by virtue of this external intervention of police and security forces in an undercover role, they're actually elevating the intensity of activity and then arresting before, when they get enough evidence to suggest something serious might actually happen when it wouldn't have happened if they hadn't been agents provocateur.
Mr. McCauley: Yes. I'm not a lawyer, but I think this verges on what sometimes gets called entrapment.
Senator Mitchell: Thank you; that's very interesting.
Professor Leuprecht, a lot of what you're talking about is premised upon — and I'm not disagreeing with you at all — the idea that there's a whole bunch of terrorist financing going on out there. At the same time, an earlier witness today — and it happens all the time — says and you say that you're not getting any results and your financial data gathering agency never finds anything and you haven't done enough research. Why is it that we always jump to the conclusion that there is all this terrorist financing going on if there's no evidence that it's going on?
Mr. Leuprecht: We don't have a lot of open source evidence. With Hezbollah we're starting to get there. I'd be happy to share with the committee some of the work that we've done in that regard to demonstrate the specific links. There is also a very good book published by the National Defence University Press called Convergence with regard to organized crime and terrorist networks.
I would also say that part of this is a sampling issue. Just because we are not arresting people doesn't mean that the phenomenon is not occurring. The challenge is that it is a very complex phenomenon to investigate and to bring to trial at the standards of evidence that would be required to obtain a conviction.
I can share with the committee some of the open source documentation on this but it is a challenge. In terms of funding to organizations it might be less of a challenge than it has been in the past because organizations have their own funding, but you obtaining a couple of thousand dollars to get a plane ticket, in essence that's funding. It becomes partly a question of what you consider to be terrorist funding. Does obtaining funds to leave the country qualify as terrorist financing? It's the challenge that much of these monies aren't illegal monies. It's essentially the converse of money laundering. With regard to money laundering, you're taking illegal money and trying to make it legal. Here you're taking legal money and using it for illicit purposes, and this is a considerable challenge to demonstrate.
As I say, even if we can show that it goes to someone abroad, to be able to demonstrate that it was sent abroad for the purpose of supporting a violent extremist organization as opposed to for somebody to pay their rent can become very challenging.
Senator Mitchell: You're very intense about that. So where's the evidence that you've seen? It can't be proven, you said, to a certain level, but have you seen documents, investigations or reliable authorities that say that millions of dollars or thousands of dollars are going to organizations abroad or, as I think you've implied, are coming to organizations here? Are certain religious institutions getting a lot of money, or are we just speculating about that? Is it just a logical possibility?
Mr. Leuprecht: We do know that this is occurring.
Senator Mitchell: How do we know that?
Mr. Leuprecht: It is more difficult to ascertain the level at which this particular type of activity is occurring. We do have the evidence by some of the people who have also appeared in front of this committee who have expressed concern about some of the monies flowing into this country.
Senator Mitchell: They've said it, but it's not evidence.
Mr. Leuprecht: This is inherently the challenge when you work in a world where much of the available intelligence is not intelligence that is necessarily available in a way that can be shared in the current parliamentary process. As you know, I have suggested that we need a mechanism for certain members of Parliament to be able to have more classified, cleared availability and access to this type of data.
I'm not saying that we adopt the U.S. model, but the U.S. Congress is able to be briefed on this. We have an organization in the United States, so we have both Treasury Board and the Department of State that systematically try to keep track of these activities and shifts in these types of activities.
Senator Mitchell: I'm sponsoring a piece of legislation to set up that kind of an organization.
Mr. Leuprecht: We need more transparency precisely in relation to that because otherwise it also becomes very difficult to figure out. It's the ready, fire, aim problem that we're talking about here. We're trying to target something where it's not exactly clear what it is we're trying to aim at. It makes it very difficult when CSIS and FINTRAC can't share the appropriate intelligence with the RCMP. How do we expect the RCMP to run an investigation when the people who hold the pieces can't?
I'm happy to share with you the work that does exist that can be traced at least back to North America. In at least one of the Hezbollah plots, we have two individuals from Canada who were connected to that particular plot and who were subsequently arraigned in the United States and convicted.
The Chair: Can you provide us with that information?
Mr. Leuprecht: I can, gladly.
Senator Stewart Olsen: Thank you both for being here. It's very interesting.
Professor Leuprecht, based on some of the things that I've seen, I don't think you think the current programs for dealing with radicalization are very effective. Can you expand on that? Can you deal a bit with the outreach and the social programs?
Mr. Leuprecht: You're thinking specifically of the countering violent extremism paradigm?
Senator Stewart Olsen: Yes, dealing with countering it.
Mr. Leuprecht: First, I think the paradigm is quickly shifting from countering to prevention. If we're talking about prevention, it's ultimately a multi-level governance effort because it's going to be a local effort.
How do we go about this? We have some examples. We have the U.K. Channel program, the Belgium program, the LinCT Program in L.A., and at least two pilots in Canada. We have very little on the metrics as to what extent they are effective.
We have these hub models that you're likely familiar with on countering people who are susceptible, especially youth, to falling into the criminal justice system. We try to get the employment and student counsellors and mental health folks all together to get early intervention going. You are probably familiar with this. Should the RCMP and CSIS plug into these types of hubs or set up their own hub specifically directed at countering violent extremism? Does it undermine the efforts and the relationships with communities? We don't know. We need to actually engage with those communities on an academic level.
What type of activities are the most effective? With the U.K. Prevent program, for instance, I had great apprehensions about it, as did many people in the U.K., of teachers identifying kids that they think might be susceptible and then handing them off to the Prevent program. I think you get a huge amount of false positives as opposed to focusing on the individuals.
Then there is the challenge of focusing on communities versus focusing on individuals, and finding those needles in the haystack and working actively with them.
All of that is to say that I think we have a nice program and we have a nice effort. On the law enforcement side we do a very good job of working together. With countering violent extremism, on the prevention side we still have a lot to learn not just about the whole-of-government approach but an effective multi-level governance approach. In a federation, this is going to look different in different provinces because the challenge is different and because the organizations and the legal frameworks are different. I don't see enough of the agility and the nuances in that particular approach.
I'm also concerned that there are a lot of unfunded mandates here. We're going to local communities and telling them this is what we need them to do, but we're not providing the adequate resources or the types of training needed. My argument is that national security is ultimately a federal government responsibility, so the federal government needs to step up both with professional development and with training for local individuals, but they also need to step up with resources. We can't expect the Edmonton Police Service to stand up a counterterrorism task force to counter violent extremism and then say to local taxpayers, "It's your problem, so you need to fund it all." I don't think that's on in a federation. We haven't done anywhere near enough to figure out how we can support effective local efforts federally so that the taxpayer knows they're getting value for the money.
Senator Stewart Olsen: Professor McCauley, in your research and your discussions, when you took a sample size and you deduced that maybe 100 people might build a bomb, you weren't suggesting that that's nothing or that we shouldn't be vigilant, were you, because 100 people who are really radicalized, or 50 people or 10 people, can hurt a lot of people. I am not 100 per cent sure. Are you suggesting that perhaps we're putting too much effort into detecting and countering? What exactly are you suggesting?
Mr. McCauley: I certainly do not mean to suggest that a bomb is not a public danger or that it's something we should be careless or unconcerned about. However, I want to connect this with what Professor Leuprecht was just saying. I am concerned about what happens after a particular individual is identified as potentially on the way to extremist action. What happens next? Because what happens next has a big effect on the likelihood of Muslim communities cooperating with public authorities to try to identify such people. What happens next can make a big difference in the level of cooperation you get. You can't do community policing in a community that feels alienated from and suspected by various authorities that are hoping to interact with the community.
I'm saying that when the Muslim community gets to see that some pretty simple-minded people have been pushed in the direction of a technology that all of their Muslim acquaintances and family know that they're incompetent in, namely bombing, and when they see that individuals who are identified somehow as potential problems are then pushed in the direction of something larger than they ever would have considered under their own steam, this does not help the relation between the community and the authorities. It's that relation at the local level that is the key that Professor Leuprecht was just talking about, the key to successfully identifying and preventing radical action.
Have I helped at all there?
Senator Stewart Olsen: Yes. I'm not sure I agree with you, but certainly you have explained your position. Thank you very much.
Mr. Leuprecht: Can I have a rejoinder? The only open source study with which I am familiar is the Istanbul bombings of 45 years ago where two people were ultimately convicted, but Turkish intelligence estimated that about 400 people knew this was going to happen and did not act, did not tell anybody or share that information. So it's not just about that latent sort of remnant that is moving to action. It is about the larger group of individuals who either know that something might be up or who may even be providing some sort of support for that individual, whether that is in terms of engaging in violence or recruitment or funding. The issue in terms of the pyramid is broader than just that tip of the pyramid. I think we don't do enough to engage on the lower levels of the pyramid. If we want to disable the tip of that pyramid, we need to engage more on the levels below the tip.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: My first question is for Professor Leuprecht. Having listened to your presentation, I believe that you are saying that there is a lot foreign money that is transferred to Canada or to other peaceful countries. I think that some of this money may be used to fund propaganda in universities where recruitment is well and truly possible.
In your opinion, is there more information available on this phenomenon that you have partially explained? Should we be worried about it and should we tighten security around this?
Mr. Leuprecht: I am not aware of formal studies that could help us to understand the scale of the situation apart from evidence presented before your committee.
My worry is that there is a possibility that certain religious groups, for example, come to Canada and, in the medium term, influence certain institutions where they spread their message. This is not a concern for the immediate future; however, in the medium term, we fear that this may influence the way that people interpret their religion's holy books.
Some countries have taken very concrete measures. That is one of the reasons why the United Kingdom now delivers licences to preachers, in order to try and establish a kind of public regulation of people who may be funded. However, I do not believe that we are faced with an immediate problem regarding sums that could be used to fund institutions that would actively spread rather violent extremist propaganda. Our problems here are not as significant as they are in the United Kingdom.
Senator Dagenais: My second question is for Mr. McCauley. Mr. McCauley, what measures should we take regarding the 80 radical Islamists who are back in Canada and who can make their way into schools?
[English]
Mr. McCauley: I think the best program I have heard about for dealing with fighters returned from foreign jihadist wars is the one run by Denmark. They take a social work approach. They try to support the returnees in a reintegration into society, kind of a halfway house approach. Rather than trying to make going broad illegal and instead of trying to imprison foreign fighters when they return, they try to bring them back into Danish society and get them jobs and a new chance, as they see it, in Denmark.
Mr. Leuprecht: Countering the violent extremism of individuals who return is something we have not thought about strategically. We just think about people who are already in our communities. We haven't thought enough about the fact that 90 per cent of the people who return are either heavily disillusioned and/or have serious mental health problems, are shunned by their communities, friends and, in many cases in Europe, by their families. If we don't have an active intervention problem, we risk that these individuals might engage in actions that we would rather not have them engage in. We also know that 10 per cent of returnees do return as very hardened ideologues.
Again, I think we haven't thought systemically about how we engage with individuals like that who might come back and engage in action, financing, recruitment or any other activities back here? If they are citizens, it will require us to have a very well-thought-through strategy and to make sure it also is within the rule of law.
Senator White: Thanks to both of you for being here today.
Mr. Leuprecht, I think I have heard you suggest otherwise around the contract policing part for the RCMP, which I appreciate because it is looking at it from a national or international perspective. I am asking if you agree or disagree that contract policing is also about the communities and provinces that have looked to the RCMP to provide a resource they couldn't otherwise afford. If you have looked at it from that perspective, what would the solution be to replacing the RCMP and the provinces they're contracted out to and the 800 communities they police in presently as a front-line police service?
Mr. Leuprecht: I think the system works fine in Ontario and Quebec with regard to provincial policing. Historically, there are provinces out West that, as you know, have had or have systemically thought about this.
It would be a matter of the federal government coming to a financial arrangement with the appropriate provinces to be able to do this; but given that we don't actually have one national police force, every division is pretty much, as you know, more or less an autonomous actor.
Given that two thirds of what the RCMP does is on the contract policing side, it pulls so much attention, so many resources and also some of the most severe problems that the RCMP runs into. With regard to individuals who engage in activities that they shouldn't be engaging in, it often comes, it seems, from the contract side.
If money is the only problem, I think we can find a financial arrangement and we might still be able to do things. The federal government might fund a national police college.
Senator White: Which we have, by the way; the Canadian Police College. That's as national as it gets.
Mr. Leuprecht: Ontario and Quebec currently do the training for their provincial police forces. So that P.E.I. doesn't have to set up its own training institution, for instance, we can fund a national training institution.
Some provinces won't buy in. Quebec and Ontario will probably keep doing what they're doing. Other provinces may buy in. Some provinces, like B.C., may decide to set up their own institution.
Senator White: P.E.I. has a provincial police college as well, Holland College.
My argument is not whether you're right or wrong, Mr. Leuprecht. Why wouldn't we shift toward a European model of one police service, one country? The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Norway — I can go on and on. If we're looking at a best-case scenario, why is the model of — we have 198 police agencies in this country now. I'm not sure another 15 will make us better or worse, but why wouldn't we shift to one?
Mr. Leuprecht: We live in a federation, and some of the countries you just cited are not federations. The federations in Europe that we do have, the division of powers is quite different than it is in Canada.
I recently published an article in Canadian Public Administration on the asymmetry of our national security system. Asymmetry in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. There is no evidence that a centralized system necessarily gives you better outcomes, and I think a centralized system isn't going to be an option in our federation. I think that's a bit of a straw man as an argument.
Senator White: So who is doing it right? You talk about things we're not doing right, and I haven't heard you say, "Why aren't you looking to Australia and New Zealand?" Who is doing it right? This is the third time I have heard you tell us we're not doing it right.
Mr. Leuprecht: I am currently working on exactly this question and on a fairly substantial study to demonstrate what different countries are doing and the outcomes that are being produced.
I can tell you that no police force in a democratic country that I'm aware of has the magnitude of remit that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has and that comes with the institutional cultural challenges that the RCMP has. I think that compound effect is not giving us optimal outcomes in terms of the type of national security investigations that we are asking the organization to do.
I think the litmus test here is the two attacks that we saw in October. You have seen Commissioner Paulson come before a parliamentary committee and say that this is, and I'm paraphrasing, essentially breaking his organization, just trying to provide the necessary search capacity.
Just imagine if he had a more challenging type of security environment. If we are breaking the organization, after two of these types of attacks, to kind of get a handle on the problem, I think it suggests that perhaps the organization is not as agile and not as flexible and doesn't have all of the capacities in its current institutional setup that we need it to have in order to cope with these challenges.
Senator White: A 10-word response only, no question, if I may, Mr. Chair: Australia would say the exact same thing, and they have exactly the model that you are suggesting. They would say it is breaking them as well.
Senator Day: Professor McCauley, you were making a very interesting argument with respect to foreign fighters leaving our homeland to fight somewhere else. In Canada, we have been spending quite a bit of time and effort in passing legislation and getting ready to try to arrest those individuals and put them on no-fly lists to prevent them from going. Your argument was an interesting one, that maybe we should be encouraging them to go, but then I heard Professor Leuprecht mention that 10 per cent of those foreign fighters do come back and will present a problem here as hardened ideologues. Do you accept that 10 per cent figure?
Mr. McCauley: I'm not sure that 10 per cent is exactly right. Some small percentage will represent a threat, but this is a small percentage of those who return. A lot of people who go will not return. They'll either die, or they'll decide to stay wherever they have gone to and not wish to return.
So we're talking about really quite a small percentage of all of those who want to go abroad that are likely to ever come back. I don't think it would be that hard to keep track of that 10 per cent, and it would be a lot easier to keep track of them if, instead of making their departure illegal, the departure was legal, but the return from foreign fighting would be something the security services would have a special remit to be concerned about.
It's a lot harder to keep track of people who have already gone underground, you might say, in order to go abroad. It is a lot harder to keep track of them than if you say something more open like, "Okay, you want to go fight. We're not going to prevent you. We're not going to put you in our jails. We're not going to spend money on you in our jails, but when you return, we're going to interview you and watch you very carefully.
Senator Day: Would you go so far as to say, "We'll buy you a ticket to go"?
Mr. McCauley: I don't think you should do that because it is likely to undermine the motivation. The psychology of it is that when somebody pays you to do something, you feel less commitment to that action than if you had gotten on to it on your own steam.
Senator Day: I am being facetious. I don't think our partners would be too keen on us supplying foreign workers to the enemy either.
Mr. McCauley: Senator, they're not all our enemies. The distinction I was trying to make earlier is that Western countries are glad to have U.S. Muslims volunteer to go fight Bashar al-Assad. It is only joining ISIS. Luckily for us, at least in the American Muslim data, it is much more popular amongst U.S. Muslims to go fight Bashar than it is to be favourable toward ISIS. I think we have a chance to split this, to make a distinction, to say, "Look, you can go, and we encourage you to go if you want to go fight Bashar. We discourage you from going if you want to go join ISIS, but if you insist on going to join ISIS, we're just going to pay special attention to you on your return."
Senator Day: "Just let us know when you come home."
Mr. McCauley: If you know who is gone and you have passport data, it is not that hard to keep track when they come back.
Senator Day: Thank you for that.
My other question is to Professor Leuprecht. In relation to the study that you did, could you tell us if you got into identifying the respondents according to whether they happened to be Sunni or Shiite or where their country of origin was, the kind of information that might help you in coming to some conclusions that certain groups have different points of view than other Muslim communities?
Mr. Leuprecht: That's a very interesting question. Dr. McCauley may want to weigh in on this as well. Iranian expats, for instance, showed up as particularly moderate, even more moderate than the general overall baseline within the study overall. There is nothing necessarily about a particular religious trend that makes, for instance, Shia more predisposed. A lot seems to have to do with the endogenous effects. When you leave a country probably for reasons of a religious-inspired, authoritarian regime, then you are probably not going to be particularly predisposed to the ideas that that particular regime is pedaling.
So, yes, we do have very clear nuances, and I'd be happy to point those out to you specifically in the report. That's important because it shows that we can't just paint the Muslim community with a broad brush stroke.
Senator Day: Absolutely.
Mr. Leuprecht: So whether you are Sunni or Shia seems to matter. Your country of origin seems to matter. How long you have been in Canada seems to matter. At what age you showed up in Canada seems to matter. There are a number of determinants.
If I may, on your previous conversation with Dr. McCauley, I do think, to some extent, we have an obligation toward people who do travel abroad. The state protects people from their own stupidity all the time. We make people wear seatbelts and whatnot. To some extent there's an argument to be made that we have a certain obligation, but we definitely have that obligation for individuals who are under 18. When we see teenagers leaving the country or attempting to leave the country and we're unable to stop them, then I think we, as a state, have failed in our obligation to make sure that we protect people from themselves. As you know, we have lots of special provisions for people who are minors, and I think, on this particular issue, we are not, at least in the current environment, either doing enough or able to do enough.
Senator Day: We have new legislation coming that will give us the power to do that. Thank you.
Senator Beyak: Professor Leuprecht, I noticed in your paper on homegrown Islamist radicalization in Canada that you said a good deal of government policy, especially in the U.K. and Western Europe, has been geared to the response that if we make them happier by including them, by outreaching, with social housing, it will solve the problem of radicalization. You disagree with that, and I do as well. I wondered if you could explain what is wrong with the approach and why you feel that the outreach solution isn't the answer.
Mr. Leuprecht: It gets us back to our earlier discussion that these are two separate problems — the problem of mass radicalization and the problem of individuals who are looking to move to action. There are lots of things to be said about people who, for instance, feel alienated from our society for socioeconomic or political reasons, but we can show that that doesn't seem to have an immediate causal connection to the individuals who engage in action. If this was the causal driver, we would see a much bigger problem than we actually do. I think we need to be careful to make sure that we adequately support and target our efforts with the outcomes that we have in mind.
Mr. McCauley: There is a lot of talk about how individuals and small groups are moved to action via the Internet. Depending on who you listen to, a whole lot of different aspects of the Internet get discussed. Is it chatrooms? Is it social networking? Is it tweeting?
After looking at some cases closely, I have come around recently to the view that two kinds of video are the primary radicalizing influence to action. One I call the "victim video," where you see horrific things done to Muslims, usually in Muslim countries and usually with U.S. ordnance. Sometimes you get videos of small pieces of shrapnel marked "Made in USA" along with horrific scenes of carnage. These are Muslims-as-victims videos.
Then there are jihad videos, which you might say are the answer to the problem raised by the victim videos. These are of people doing something about it — taking up arms. Take a look at the "Russian hell" videos. Google that and you will see a good example of such jihad videos. They're full of camaraderie, action and success. The message at the end is always, "You don't have to do nothing. You can do something. We do something. Come join us."
To the extent that I have an answer to the question, what is it that pushes or moves people into action? It is not about the Quran. It is not about the Hadith. It is not about some kind of high-level abstract political science analysis of the condition of Muslims in the world. It is these emotion-arousing victim videos and jihad videos. That is what I would point to.
The Chair: I want to follow up because our time is coming to a conclusion. A question has to be asked. Underpinning a lot of the movement across the world is a continuous belief system that is being taught in some quarters. Now, we have been told that within Muslim communities — and I use the plural "communities," because there are many communities within that religious denomination — two areas have come up in discussion over our hearings. One is the Wahhabi doctrinaire and the other is the Salafi doctrinaire, an extreme jihadist doctrinaire that is taught in some quarters. We don't know where or by whom, but obviously it is giving the basis and the moral authority for individuals eventually to take the action that Mr. McCauley just referred to and that Mr. Leuprecht talked about. I would like to hear your comments on that. It would seem that that's the area for the beginning of this — work with the Muslim communities such that that type of doctrinaire should be denounced every day, day in and day out, so that it doesn't become the reason and the immoral foundation for the actions that we see later on.
Mr. Leuprecht, I would like to hear your comments and perhaps Mr. McCauley as well.
Mr. Leuprecht: A German study just came out trying to get a handle on these numbers. It is estimated that the Salafi jihadists in Germany number about 200, but they disproportionately show up in the disconcerting types of activities relative to the very small numbers they constitute.
From a comparative perspective, I would also draw your attention to the following: If the problem was the same across the world, we would see roughly the same number of people per capita leaving. But we know, for instance, that in Belgium and Germany, two countries that border one another, it is estimated that each has had about 600 people or so leave. These aren't huge numbers, but Germany is a country that is about eight times the population of Belgium. It suggests that for the type of material, which Dr. McCauley just referred to, to take root and for this type of discourse to take root, there are things we can do on the policy side that can make it more or less enticing for a small remnant of people to buy into that particular discourse.
That's where we then get into issues of systemic depravity, unemployment and hopelessness within communities. That's where we get into issues around what sort of wardrobe we do or don't condone in terms of public spaces. Canada needs to think long and hard about that environment. We are always concerned about an environment that causes people to leave. There is interest in the ones we would see in social science, but I'm really interested in the zeros, in all the people who aren't doing anything.
In Canada, we seem to be doing reasonably well on the zeros. What do we need to continue to do to reinforce to make sure we get those zeros?
Senator Mitchell started that discussion. Inherently, non-events become difficult to measure, but there's something interesting to study about non-events of very small numbers in different contexts. I would say that we are doing many things right in this country and that we could be doing some things better.
Mr. McCauley: I have heard numbers of people inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C., talking about Salafist ideas and Wahhabist ideas as the centre of gravity of the terrorist threat. I think this is completely misguided. You don't have to have a religious interpretation to feel outrage when people you care about are victimized.
Now, it doesn't hurt to rationalize your revenge or your efforts to help the people you see as victims. It doesn't hurt to have a religious story to tell, but the story comes second, as I understand this to work. The story is a rationalization. People don't become jihadists because they're Salafists. I'm not an Arab scholar, but I believe that the great majority of Salafists in the world are retiring and not political at all. They're like Orthodox Jews in that they want to withdraw from modern society, not engage it or attack it.
In my view of this, every religion has some ideas that are available to justify violence. The fact that you hear those ideas from the people who use violence does not mean that those ideas are the cause of the violence. I believe that it is only rationalization.
The Chair: Thank you, sir.
I thank both our witnesses. It has been a very interesting panel today. We have had a very good day today with regard to different points of view. We appreciate the time and effort that both of you have put in, and I thank you for coming.
(The committee adjourned.)