Threat Plans

"I'm not suggesting the government has ignored issues, but ... we haven't put the big picture together. We haven't identified enough of what we see as the overall strategy to deal with threats, whereas if you go to the U.K. or the U.S., they have articulated a grand strategy and they've tried to make sense of the bits and pieces. The gap makes Canada an "attractive haven" for terrorists and criminal organizations." Paul Chapin, Macdonald-Laurier Institute

The United Kingdom, no less the United States, has been well infiltrated by volatile, incendiary, determined Islamists. From the mosques and community centres where messages of hatred and exclusion are routinely received by Muslims living in both countries, to the acceptance of Muslim scholars in academia whose messages of conciliatory prose mark them as 'moderate' while their agenda is secretive and managed, to the lawmakers who present as reasonable and trustworthy.

And both those countries have been severely impacted by monumentally traumatic terror attacks, costly in lives and in self-confidence in the ability to protect themselves from terrorists. Canada has thus far been fairly successful in apprehending planned attacks before they could be carried out. Mostly due to the lack of professionalism and organizational skills of the amateurish jihadist attempts, to date.

A slow but steady normalization of the Islamic presence within Western society, which began with welcomes and pledges to honour diversity and the expectation that despite differences a gradual melding would occur and all would live together in equanimity and mutual respect. And then the realization that what was parochial was meant to become mainstream, that those Muslim academics and scholars and lawmakers felt entitled to have the established social compact altered to suit their plans, and this was just and anticipated, in good will.

The greater Muslim community, the ummah, is prepared to go along with what their entitled and elite peers prescribe, for what do they know other than what they are encouraged to accept? A relatively few outspoken and courageous members of the Muslim community who find it possible to honour their heritage and religion, while cleaving with passion to their new countries' values fight a rearguard action of hopeless denial.

In Europe, a population that pledged to itself that it would never again lower its social character and self-regard to reflect the paranoia of xenophobia finds itself drowning in a stifling atmosphere of startling unfamiliarity with its passing scene, and mourning the loss of its nativist culture, its indigenous values, viewing its landscape suddenly become exotic, not as it is fondly recalled and belatedly mourned.

Canada, congratulating itself on its ability to entice, encourage and engage immigrants to transform themselves into Canadians, while assuring them that they are expected to proudly retain all aspects of their original culture, heritage, ethnic and tribal values, suddenly finds itself faced with disparate enclaves of antagonistic cultural-religious-social groups that find Canadian mores and customs unsuitably degrading to their personal tastes.

If there is any one single reason for Canada, like the examples of the U.K. and the U.S., to put into place a national threat plan, a security strategy, it is self-evidently on the basis of our own experiences in radical nationalism that have entered our shores. With Sikh Khalistan, and Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers.

But above all, with the very real and everpresent threat mounted against this country as with all free democracies by radical Islamism which aspires to create, through violence or steadily quiet, covert 'diplomacy', a new universal Caliphate. Occasional threats come Canada's way through the importation of violence from Sikhs and Tamils, but they have been subdued.

It is largely from the immense geographical presence of Islam and specifically fundamentalist, violence-prone Islamists that threats and atrocities are seen all over the world. Largely in the numbers of incidence, targeting the Islamic world itself, as tribal and clannish and sectarian viciousness plays itself out in an unending spiral of blood-letting.

But directed too at the jihadi-hating vestiges of a Western presence on Muslim soil. Where Christian communities in majority-Muslim atmospheres are increasingly at risk. And more vehemently at the democracies of the world whose values and systems of governance represent as anathema to a people schooled from birth in the rigidly authoritarian ideology of Islam.

The recommendation in the newly-issued report on security in Canada, and its lapses, points the need for a bilateral strategy with our neighbour. It stresses the need for the establishment of a foreign-intelligence service, which would "investigate the intentions of other countries": (e.g. spy network). Canada's lack of security and intelligence gathering, the report and its author claim, makes the country attractive for terrorists and criminal organizations.

We certainly see his claims in reality, with the installation and comfort of the Italian Mafia in Quebec and Ontario. And Asian drug-running gangs in British Columbia. And the ease with which the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated various parts of the country, installing more innocent-sounding groups as fronts to forward the elements of their mission.

Above all, the finger of lax attention to the needs of the country points at the dysfunctional refugee-determination system. It should also point unerringly to the immigration system which fails to accurately determine which people from which countries represent as most likely to adjust to the norms, the values, priorities and political-civic concerns of Canada.

"Once people are here we have to do something to promote citizenship and an appreciation for the Canadian way of life to protect them from people in their community or outside who seek to exploit them for one reason or another", explains Mr. Chapin. And he is quite correct. Which translates as a need to divest ourselves of that unworkable multiculturalism tradition.

To that add a need to exclude those clearly not representative of good citizenship material.

Canadians, as Mr. Chapin points out, are "comfortably convinced" that what happens elsewhere has no impact on Canada. Events occurring regularly within the country prove otherwise. Particularly when ethnic nationalism is concerned, and when regional conflicts are in play, and migrants from countries where both are a concern, bring their cultural and social and traditional conflicts to Canada.

"We're needlessly running a risk when we don't have a plan that would be a pretty good insurance policy", he says, and he's right.