Canada's front-line national security agencies have been subjected to enormous and unprecedented stresses and strains in the past eight years. The fault lines are starting to show.
Remember that scene in John le Carré's classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold when the spy chief twists the knife in the wounded pride of his Berlin station chief, Alec Leamas, and wonders whether he's suffering from “metal fatigue” and needs to come in from the Cold War cold? Whether Canadian security agencies are suffering their own version of metal fatigue, after flying into the headwinds of post-9/11 threats for so long, is a question that's beginning to look urgent.
Much frenzied activity occurred after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to confront Canadian resource and capability gaps.
By Christmas of 2001, Canada had passed its first anti-terrorism legislation, reached to the tune of $7.7-billion out of our fiscal pockets to provide for our first national security budget, and forged a border-security deal with the United States that promised to somehow square the circle of heightened security and free trade.
In a second wave of activity, started in earnest in 2004, the Canadian government created a host of national security institutions, including the Department of Public Safety, the Canada Border Services Agency and the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre. All would suffer, and continue to suffer, from growing pains.
We toyed with the idea of creating a national security “czar,” but watered our wine with a national security adviser as a part-time post – a compromise that's looking increasingly unworthy.
We allowed ourselves to imagine setting up an independent foreign intelligence service to cope with the new global threats, only to have that idea swallowed up by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which wished to expand its mission beyond domestic frontiers (or at least did not wish a rival agency to form).
A notion took shape, at first foreign to Canadian traditions and strange to Canadian ears. Our hitherto little known and little understood security agencies would be Canada's new “front line” of defence, supplanting the traditional protective shields of the police and, in extremis, the military.
Controversy dogged the implementation of this new idea. An atmosphere of dark suspicion grew, especially in the aftermath of the Maher Arar affair, that Canadian spy agencies were either incompetent, illiberal or, worse, in cahoots with the Bush-era practices of the Central Intelligence Agency's extraordinary rendition and torture.
As the clouds of suspicion gathered, the fatigue level grew within the front-line agencies, abetted by a distinct lack of strategic thinking and planning by successive Canadian governments. And now we face a much-delayed moment of truth. The clearest evidence of this was revealed in two unusual speeches delivered recently by the heads of CSIS and the RCMP.
The new CSIS director, Dick Fadden, a seasoned bureaucrat with much experience of national security issues, gave a startling speech in Ottawa last month in which he suggested that the agency was confronted with a complete change to its rule book about how it operated. Mr. Fadden reacted bitterly to a perception of media bias against CSIS, attacked what he regarded as a general disposition in Canadian society to afford terrorism suspects a romantic halo, and charged experts with clinging to outmoded ideas.
Not only did Mr. Fadden seem to signal an abrupt end to a long, if cautious and very incremental, effort on the part of CSIS chiefs, starting in the late 1990s with Ward Elcock, to become more transparent and open to dialogue, but he also issued an ominous prediction: In a few years, Canadian critics of CSIS would be describing the agency as a born-again Stasi (the much-feared and omnipresent security service of the former East Germany). All because CSIS is now compelled to retain more of the intelligence it collects for potential use and exposure in court.
No such prediction can be allowed to come true – and it's unlikely it will. But the danger exists that a bunkered CSIS, unhappy in a new era of the “judicialization” of intelligence, will make such a forecast self-fulfilling. Mr. Fadden may have been trying to reassure his troops that he felt their pain, but he left a distinct and deeply worrying impression of a CSIS at odds with society.
Alongside the Fadden speech was an equally surprising address by RCMP Commissioner William Elliott. Mr. Elliott, the first civilian to be appointed commissioner, has kept his head down on national security issues. No longer. In a Oct. 30 speech, he was forthright in calling attention to threats emanating from both overseas terrorist groups – al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Somali Islamist insurgency known as Al-Shabaab – and self-radicalizing cells and individuals in Canada. But the most startling thing he said was that Canada needed a “paradigm shift” in how it dealt with threats, needed, in fact, to move from intelligence-based operations to law-enforcement actions and prosecutions in court.
Mr. Elliott concluded his speech by saying that “the next chapter in Canada's unfolding history of national security must be written by law enforcement.”
It would be easy to discount such a statement as a play for greater resources and attention. The RCMP could clearly use some help. But what his speech suggested was that the force at least has a plan for overcoming post-9/11 national security fatigue. It's a plan that would put Canada in broad alignment with some of the policies ushered in by U.S. President Barack Obama.
A next chapter written by law enforcement sounds a lot better to Canadian ears than a next chapter written by a CSIS driven into Stasi terrain. It's high time the government and the Canadian public give serious thought to what kinds of national security institutions and practices we need and want. Such a review is all the more urgent in the context of the coming retreat from Afghanistan and the reorientation of priorities that must follow.
Wesley Wark is a security specialist at the University of Toronto.
