| Stéphane Dion's Turnaround on Terror |   |
The Liberals stand accused of putting ethno-politics ahead of public safety
Everyone assumed it was a done deal. With two components of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) about to expire, Stephen Harper's minority government thought they had the support of the Opposition Liberals to renew the legislation. Then, about two weeks before the vote, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion had a change of heart; no longer would his party support extending the measures. In a House vote on Feb. 27, the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Québécois ruled the day, 159-124. Now police can no longer hold terror suspects for up to 72 hours without charge, and material witnesses can no longer be compelled to testify at investigative hearings.
Canadians are asking why these important measures in Canada's counterterrorism strategy were overturned. And there's speculation that Dion caved to certain ethnic voting blocks, which have been very vocal in their opposition to the ATA, putting the safety of Canadians at risk for his own personal benefit.
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day calls it "one of the more disturbing flip-flops" he's seen. In politics you often see changes of positions on things, he explains, but when it's a case of putting politics before the security of your citizens, it's very serious. As to why Dion did this, Day will only go so far in his guessing. "Somebody whispered something in his ear a few weeks ago and, for reasons he has yet to explain, he did a total backflip, and has left Canadians more exposed to terrorist threats," he says. He doesn't want to portray this as the "end of the world," but in the legislative cycle it will take about a year to replace the laws, "presuming Mr. Dion won't flip again," Day says.
Dion and his supporters have tried to portray themselves as protectors of personal rights and the Constitution by letting the laws lapse. But in one respect, that makes little sense. The part of the law dealing with the investigative hearing was recently upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court. Dion is also flying in the face of the Liberal-dominated Senate, which supported extending the measures, and Liberal members of the House committee that reviewed the ATA and recommended a five-year extension rather than the expected three.
That's because, contrary to what some Dion supporters have alleged, there's no reason to think the world is a safer place today than it was when the ATA was passed by the Chrétien government, in response to the 9/11 attacks. Day thinks the threat is even greater today: "Clearly it has increased by what we see happening in allied countries, the U.K. and Spain, and, of course, what is going on in the Middle East, the explicit threats to Canada by al Qaeda, the arrest of people in Toronto last June who allegedly were planning to blow up the Parliament Building and behead the prime minister and murder people in Toronto," he says. Canada's increased commitment in Afghanistan has also increased its profile internationally.
Speculation over Dion's motives started on Feb. 21, a week before the vote, when The Vancouver Sun published an article naming the father-in-law of Liberal MP Navdeep Singh Bains as a potential witness in RCMP investigative hearings related to the Air India inquiry. With the ATA gutted, many believe the Air India inquiry is now in jeopardy. The father-in-law, Darshan Singh Saini, is a former Ontario spokesman for the Sikh terrorist group Babbar Khalsa Panthak. Bains was instrumental in Dion's successful leadership bid at the Liberal convention last December, delivering some 250 Sikh delegates to candidate Gerard Kennedy, who later threw his support behind Dion and managed to bring an almost unprecedented number of his delegates with him, close to 90 per cent.
When Prime Minister Harper mentioned the newspaper article in the House of Commons, he was quickly shouted down and didn't finish his speech. But the implication was pretty clear--Dion's change of heart was payback for that support at the Liberal convention. The next day in the House, Bains tearfully demanded an apology, but Harper merely retorted that if there were any factual errors in the article, he was open to hearing them. The Liberals didn't answer.
University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper was following the situation closely, and found the Liberal silence telling. "This is a privileged forum, so he or anyone else in the Liberals could say anything they wanted, and he said nothing. It seemed to me this was not just implicit, but explicit, confirmation that [the Sun article] was right. And that would mean Dion owes his position to some guys who have some questionable backgrounds," Cooper says.
More fuel was added to that fire the day of the vote, when National Post columnist Jonathan Kay published an op-ed citing unnamed sources who claimed deals that played out at the Liberal convention were cut months in advance, and included support from Sikh, Tamil and Muslim organizations, in exchange for a promise to water down the ATA. The Liberals have vehemently denied the charge, and on March 2, Dion published a lengthy reply to Kay in the Post, attacking the substance of Kay's assertions. In an e-mail to the Western Standard, Kay writes that he stands by his unnamed source, whom he claims is a person very high up in the Liberal party.
Ultimately, whatever Dion's motives for his turnaround on this legislation, Canada now has to deal with the consequences. David Harris is a former chief of strategic planning with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and currently a senior fellow for national security at the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, serving as their counsel at the Air India inquiry in Ottawa. In a word, he says he is "appalled" at what has happened. "I don't know what it will be like for the members of Parliament to have on their conscience the destruction in substance of the [Air India] inquiry, if that comes about through the elimination of the investigative hearings, which is a possibility," Harris says.
Beyond that, he's worried Canada may be sending "a deeply disturbing message to the international community," by softening on terrorism prevention--"to our friends, of course, vis-à-vis our commitment to helping to defend ourselves, let alone the western world, and to the enemy by raising questions about whether we are, as some have alleged, a terrorist haven in the making," he says.
The issue of messaging is very important, Harris believes, because our greatest adversaries are highly sophisticated and are watching developments closely. (Not that they had to watch this one too closely; the loss of these anti-terrorist measures made international headlines in London's Guardian, newspaper, in the Washington Post, on the Arabic Al Jazeera network and elsewhere.) They recognize which jurisdictions could be useful as bases of operation and/or targets. "If you show that you are not willing to establish the infrastructure to protect yourself, they will take note of that, especially if they feel that this weakness could allow them to drive policy through the application of violence," he says. He cites the Madrid train bombings in 2004 as an example, which influenced Spain's national election. "In a way, this kind of thing can actually be an invitation to bloodletting," Harris says.
That may not have been the message Dion intended to send to the world, but sometimes actions speak louder than words.
More articles by Kevin Steel
China
Syndrome
What
really happened to Maher Arar?
Tolerating
Intolerance
Western
Front - February 12, 2007
Conservative
Enough?
Citizen
Dion
Whaddya
Know?
No
More Mr. Nice Guy
Taking
the Hit
A
Stroke of Luck