To the Editor:
The time is overdue for Canada to articulate a national security strategy which sets out our core national values and interests, identifies the main dangers we face, and outlines the measures we must take to protect Canadians and their way of life.
While the government is busily working on a host of security and defence issues, the various departments and agencies responsible for security lack an overall strategy to ensure they work together.
Our main allies, on the other hand, have developed national security strategies which are updated regularly to explain the dangers they have to deal with and the policies they are pursuing. In Lisbon last week, NATO approved a new Strategic Concept to guide its future political and military operations.
Canadians do not seem to have much of an appreciation of the kinds of dangers they face in today's world. Their sense of security and detachment, bred from the end of the Cold War, has even survived the trauma of 9/11. Today they are preoccupied by the personal inconveniences of airport inspections. They need also to consider the much larger effort required to keep Canadians safe.
Canadians who travel abroad well know what distinguishes life in their own country - individual freedom, democracy, the rule of law, social justice, and economic opportunity. These are what need to be protected.
The three most important dangers Canada faces are physical attack or coercion, internal subversion, and an erosion of the beliefs and practices that give Canada its special character. The dangers arise from unbridled extremism, improperly regulated immigration, and friction due to resource scarcity. Like other democratic societies, we face enemies willing and able to use both traditional and irregular warfare against us, to borrow advanced technology to strike at us, and to employ any physical or psychological means available to convince the unwary among us that we need take no special measures to protect our citizens and way of life.
To respond effectively, a Canadian national security strategy must combine a home game and an away game, and should aim to achieve at least five objectives:
1) to reduce Canadian vulnerabilities by ensuring there is anti-terrorist legislation for the long run and by protecting immigrant communities from intimidation or recruitment by militants. We also need to protect our complex, critical and widely dispersed infrastructure.
2) to create layered defences through better surveillance of our enormous land mass, coastal waters and ports. The time has also come for Canada to establish its own foreign intelligence service and not rely on others for the information we need to protect ourselves.
We should work with the Americans on a common security perimeter to defend the continent, rather than putting so much effort into defending ourselves from each other. And we need to join someone's missile defence system - either the U.S. one we rejected so thoughtlessly a few years ago or the NATO one approved last week.
3) we should take the initiative against threats abroad through greater diplomatic involvement on international issues that engage Canada's security interests. After the enormous sacrifices made in Afghanistan, let us not now allow our armed forces to atrophy again. If Canadians are serious about their security, they will retain a serious capacity to intervene militarily abroad when the situation demands it. The Responsibility to Protect is just hot air without a capacity to intervene, i.e. R2P = C2I.
4) we need to address the factors that nourish security threats. The Islamist political program will not be defeated unless we work with Muslim communities to undermine support for radicals and with other democratic states to disrupt and defeat the terrorist networks. Mean-while, precious little of our $3.5 billion international aid budget is being spent helping the fragile and failed states which are incubating the security problems of the future.
5) and lastly, we should consider how to modernize the international security architecture. The UN needs real reform or risks collapsing from costly irrelevance. Taxpayers have alternatives - NATO is demonstrating remarkable competency in doing what the UN is supposed to do, and regional organizations are showing signs they can take on security tasks in their own neighbourhoods.
International law needs to be updated to reflect the realities of the war against terror, especially regarding intervention and the treatment of terrorist prisoners.
Achieving these objectives will be a challenge. But Canadians have always risen to the challenge once the stakes have been explained. In the dangerous world in which we live, it's time to think systematically about Canadian values and interests, security threats, and a national strategy for keeping Canadians safe.
Paul Chapinl, Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
