Researchers studying terrorism in Canada may lose federal funding

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Their work doesn't garner as many headlines as police taking down aspiring jihadis, but for the past four years a handful of academics have been paid by the government to study Canada's homegrown terrorism problem with an eye to giving communities and authorities the tools to prevent people from becoming radicalized.

During a closed conference session in Vancouver last week, lead researchers of several studies funded by the five-year Kanishka Project, named after the Air India plane blown up by terrorists 30 years ago, discussed their findings, as they have done roughly eight times in the last several years.

Now, the two directors of a national network of academics created by Kanishka say they have absolutely no idea whether the government will renew the $10-million program when it ends next March.

They say the success of its groundbreaking work into the sociological factors underpinning extremism in Canada is already evident in the way communities are reporting young people to police before they act on their radical beliefs.

Lorne Dawson, co-director of the multidisciplinary Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society (TSAS), said if Kanishka's funding isn't renewed the federal government's understanding of Canadian extremists will be much poorer. The loss would come just as real gains are being made "working toward a more systematic body of knowledge based on reliable empirical evidence from the analysis of many, many cases, large comparative case studies."

"They made a big deal about its launch, but this is the same Prime Minister who said he didn't believe in studying the root causes of terrorism," Prof. Dawson said on the phone from his office at the University of Waterloo. "There's just no getting away from sociology and terrorism – why that's bizarre is because terrorism studies have been dominated by political scientists, psychologists, international relations scholars, all of whom are inexperienced with, and a bit hostile to, sociology.

"And yet the actual research has consistently shown that sociology is the better way to go."

Dan Hiebert, TSAS's other director, said some of the seven or eight federal departments that benefit from Kanishka-funded research would continue to seek out leading academics if the program's funding isn't renewed, but "we stand to lose the convening of a really multidimensional process within the government of Canada."

Prof. Dawson said it makes sense financially for the government to continue researching and investing in certain preventative measures developed through Kanishka funding. For example, he said paying community members and a researcher to run a "countering violent extremism program" in a large city for a year would cost about half a million dollars. In contrast, the government has said in the past that investigating a single Canadian suspected of extremism costs roughly a million dollars, he said.

"Let's say [the community is] dealing with eight individuals in the course of a year who, you had serious reason to believe, were moving along the path of radicalization and you convinced three to stop," Prof. Dawson said. "Well, it doesn't take much to realize that you're potentially saving millions and millions of dollars, not to mention resources spent often on things that aren't going to go anywhere."

Public Safety Canada declined a request to interview Minister Steven Blaney, but spokesperson Jean Paul Duval said in an e-mailed statement that plans for Kanishka's fifth and final year are under development. He wouldn't comment on the program's renewal, saying his department "will continue to enter into partnerships with various communities in Canada as a means of fighting radicalization to violence."

"Increasingly these projects are publishing results, creating resources including websites, and informing public discourse about terrorism and violent extremism, their impact on Canadians, and promising tools and approaches to act," Mr. Duval said of Kanishka's roughly 30 projects to date.