Thursday 23 October 2014

Coming home to roost

It would appear that Stephen Harper got the direction of causation backwards.  Earlier this month, when he committed Canada's military to a combat role against ISIS/ISIL, the Prime Minister asserted that it was necessary for Canada to join its allies on the front lines in Iraq and Syria, to prevent terrorism from spreading to home soil.  The authorities are not yet being definitive on the motives behind this week's despicable and cowardly murders in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Ottawa; however, given what we know about the perpetrators -- two troubled young men who were recent converts to Islam -- it's all but certain that they were motivated by anger at Harper's decision.

As conservative governments go, Harper's Tories are something of an anomaly.  Most right -wing governments will gleefully slash social programs, but tend to leave intact or even boost funding for activities that they see as core functions of government: a strong military, and a tough approach to law enforcement at home.  The Harperites, however, in their deficit-slaying zeal, have taken the axe to those things too, leaving the military and the security services chronically underfunded.

That's why Canada's initial pledge of "up to 65" military training personnel to work with the Iraqi Army turned out in practice to be just 29 soldiers.  It's why Canada's contribution to the air campaign against ISIS/ISIL consists of six thirty-year-old CF18s -- and it's why it may be necessary to send eight aircraft, to allow for cannibalization of parts as the planes become increasingly hard to maintain. In the international arena, Canada's foreign policy under Harper's direction is bellicose rather than belligerent -- Harper may talk the talk, but he's left the armed forces in a position where they can't walk the walk.

Lack of funding may also explain why this week's attacks were able to happen.  The Canadian intelligence agency, CSIS, has a list of about 90 individuals who are perceived as domestic terrorist threats.  Both of this week's killers were on that list*, but the agency lacked the funding to keep them under anything like proper surveillance.  The only step that had been taken was to revoke their passports.  This may have stopped them from traveling to Syria, but that simply meant that they carried out their homicidal urges closer to home.

There's more.  The shooter in Ottawa was able to march right into the Central Block of the Parliament buildings.  A couple of years ago, the Harper government was warned that security on Parliament Hill was scandalously lax -- it's much harder to gain access to most private office buildings than into the heart of the Canadian government.  For budgetary reasons, nothing was done to beef up security in response to those warnings.  As a result, the shooter got a long way into the building before he was shot, not by one of the security guards who belatedly appeared, but by the normally ceremonial Sergeant-at-Arms, a retired military man now being hailed as a hero.

None of this is meant in any way to pin the blame for this week's atrocities on Harper: that blame lies only with the two murderers who carried out the attacks. But it seems hard to deny that Harper's obsessive deficit cutting has left Canadians more vulnerable than they need to be. Harper has today pledged expeditious steps to tighten domestic anti-terrorism efforts.  Too late, alas for Corporal Nathan Cirillo of Hamilton and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent of St-Jean-sur-Richelieu.  RIP.

* Update/correction, 24 October: It now turns out that the Ottawa killer was not on the CSIS/RCMP priority watch list, which has precisely 93 names on it.  However, he was a "person of interest" to the security services, and when he applied for a passport recently, they stalled the application out of fear that he planned to travel to Syria.

And a puzzling and sad note: his mother is a senior public servant in the Immigration Department. She had lost contact with her son for five years or more.  Then, just a week ago, he showed up in Ottawa and they had lunch together.  

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