Defending Canada While Holding Canada to Account

"[The National Defence counter-intelligence unit can not] arbitrarily conduct surveillance on Canadian citizens; [investigations may take place when a clear link is present to defence security interests]."
"[In] an increasingly complex global information environment, and with Canadians constantly travelling all over the world [military-intelligence personnel may incidentally gather some information about Canadian citizens]."
Capt.Nicola LaMarre, National Defence spokeswoman

"We're worried about what it means when they collect inadvertent information."
"We don't know the scope or the degree to which Canadians' information is being captured."
Tim McSorley, national coordinator, International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, Ottawa

Military spies will be allowed to gather the information of Canadians in certain circumstances. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)

"We have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms … when governments, regardless of which stripe, do not defend those rights, Canadians have to pay."
"I hope people take notice of this. I hope people are angered that governments violated people’s fundamental rights."
"And I hope people remember to demand of governments, this one and all future governments, that nobody ever has their fundamental rights violated."
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, October 2017

Under Canadian law military intelligence is able to collect and share information about Canadian citizens -- and that includes material gathered by chance -- when it supports a legitimate investigation. This is a federal directive newly disclosed on a public request for information by the Canadian Press. The incidental or 'chance' information-gathering includes anything dredged from the Internet. And this concerns civil-liberties advocates who think in terms of the vast amount of data and sources available in cyberspace.

The directive, encompassing eight pages dated August 2018, is titled Guidance on the Collection of Canadian Citizen Information, made available through the Access to Information Act. It represents an instruction manual meant for National Defence employees and members of the Canadian Forces, that any information collected on Canadian citizens must have a "direct and immediate relationship" to a military operation or activity, warning as well that "emerging technologies and capabilities" increase the potential for such data to be scooped inadvertently from open sources such as social-media feeds.

Whether inadvertently collected or intentionally, data on Canadians may lawfully be kept and used in support of authorized defence-intelligence operations, points out the directive. Parliamentarians attached to the national-security and intelligence committee are in the process of examining the directive through a study on the manner in which Canadian Forces gather, use, keep and share information about Canadians, forming part of their intelligence work.

This study follows on an earlier report the committee produced that concluded the military has one of the largest intelligence programs in Canada, with little outside oversight. Thousands of pages of data were examined by the committee along with a number of closed-door briefings, to find that defence agencies carry out an entire range of intelligence activities. Information is collected through sensitive methods by means of human sources, technical means and investigations; activities that encompass considerable risks, among them the potential for Canadians' rights infringements.

Stricter controls on the military's intelligence-gathering including the possibility of legislation setting out when and how defence intelligence operations can take place, is being called for by the committee. The Canadian Forces national counter-intelligence unit carries out Canadian citizens' information which includes identifying, investigating and countering threats to the security of Canada's military from foreign intelligence services, or from individuals or groups engaged on espionage, sabotage, subversion, terrorist activities and other criminal activity relating to security concerns.

The activities of intelligence gathering, ensuring that specialized agents acquire and maintain critical information pertaining to the actions and activities of Canadians whose sympathies may lie with an outside body engaged in terrorism, potentially threatening the safety and security of other Canadians and/or Canadian institutions logically would seem to justify the requirement for such data collection. Without which it would not be possible to be alert to danger, and to the capacity to react, in apprehending dangerously sinister plans to wreak havoc on Canadian interests.

There have on occasion been just such incidents which have been identified and apprehended, those involved placed on trial, convicted, sentenced and imprisoned. There have also been instances where Canadian intelligence units have shared information with foreign-partner counterparts as within the Five Eyes compact in a bid to allow for cooperation between Western democracies threatened by common enemies. Aside from which it is no secret that malign actors on the international scene have infiltrated Western societies, requiring that their activities be monitored.

All this by way of setting the stage for events that brought the Charter of Rights and Freedoms into direct confrontation with the imperative for Canadian Defence and intelligence to apprise their global defence and intelligence partners in discussions and prevention of terrorist attacks. Particularly at a time when Islamists have demonstrated their facility in carrying out horrendously murderous attacks on Western democracies. Not to mention the issues involved in Canadian Muslims enrolling themselves as members of Islamist terrorist groups.

Omar Khadr appears at the courthouse in Edmonton with his lawyer in hopes of getting a Canadian Passport to travel to Saudi Arabia and permission to speak with his sister in Edmonton, December 13, 2018. Greg Southam/Postmedia

As, for example the prime minister asserting that Ottawa’s apology and reported $10.5 million compensation to Omar Khadr is about the former Guantanamo Bay inmate’s Charter rights, not about the details of the case. Details, what details? That the Khadr family, Egyptian immigrants to Canada, the father a confidant of Osama bin Laden, who raised funds within Canada for the support of al-Qaeda activities and who took his sons to Afghanistan's jihadi training camps where 15-year-old Omar was taught how to make explosives and threw one at a U.S. Army medic, killing him, blinding another.

Details, details. American surgeons saved Khadr's life from life-threatening injuries he sustained during that attack in which he took part against an American military group in conflict with the Taliban. As a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay prison for Islamists Khadr claimed to have been mistreated. As a Canadian he was visited by a Canadian diplomat and by the CSIS group who questioned him there. That, according to the prime minister, abridged his Charter rights, therefore Canadian taxpayers were on the hook for $10.5 in 'compensation'.

And there were others. Just after the horrific 9/11 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, the international community was placed on high alert, and Muslim men were under great scrutiny, a web that caught another Canadian, Maher Arar who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time, was apprehended by U.S. agents and sent to his home country of Syria where he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured. His Charter rights too were judged to have been abridged and a similar pay-out of 'compensation' awarded him for his pain and troubles; Canadian investigators charged with giving questionable data to their U.S. counterparts.

Wait, why stop there!? There's also the 'settlement' reached by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with three other Muslim-Canadians, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin who sued the government for $100,000 million. Trudeau saved Canadian taxpayers quite a bit of tax funding, he claimed, with the final payout to the three men of $31 million, who wee 'falsely accused of terrorist links' but not by Canada. 

El Maati had been detained in Syria after travelling to the region from Canada for his wedding, which he was never able to attend. Nureddin, a geologist and educator in Toronto, was imprisoned while visiting family. Almalki, an Ottawa electronics engineer, was held for 22 months. And they alleged that Canada was instrumental in aiding in their ordeals. And our government agreed with them, yet even so in language couched to imply perhaps yes, perhaps not.

That uncertainty can be read in the joint statement issued by Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland who formally apologized to the three men "for any role Canadian officials may have played in relation to their detention and mistreatment abroad and any resulting harm."

Is this the price of being Canadian?