It remains to be seen whether Stéphane Dion is all that different. Is the new Liberal leader up to the task of withstanding the inexorable pressures of continentalism while providing meaningful leadership at the global level? Certainly, when it comes to Dion’s signature issue of climate change (the focus of Chapter 6 of this book), his record as former federal environment minister is not encouraging.
At this point in Canadian history, we need vision and action, not just a “safe pair of hands.” As Grant pointed out: “But a nation does not remain a nation only because it has roots in the past. Memory is never enough to guarantee that a nation can articulate itself in the present. There must be a thrust of intention into the future.”
Canadians are confronted with great challenges, ranging from our deep economic, cultural and military exposure to the United States to climate change and nuclear proliferation. We need a vision to light the way, something more inspiring than keeping the U.S. border open to trade. This country is not a shadow of someone else’s destiny; we have a greater purpose. Let’s find that thrust of intention. Let’s decide—by ourselves—what Canada is for.
– 1 –
“I HOPE THEY CATCH the sods who did it,” said the workman who was installing a new floor in my mother-in-law’s kitchen near London, England. “ It was July 7, 2005, just five short minutes after the first radio report of explosions on Underground railway trains, and he was already back to work. Fifty-two people were killed and around seven hundred injured in the attacks. But the response of the British public was calm and measured. Later that day, my sister-in-law received a phone call from friends who, unable to find a train home after work, had repaired to a pub instead. The next day, I received an e-mail confirming a lunch meeting a few days later near Tavis-tock Square, where one of the suicide bombers had destroyed a double-decker bus.
The reaction of the British government was also measured. The army was not called in. The police described their work as a criminal investigation. A G8 summit meeting continued at Gleneagles, Scotland, with Prime Minister Tony Blair back at the negotiating table after a quick trip home to London.
The British had been bombed before. At the height of the Blitz in September 1940, German aircraft dropped more than five thousand tons of explosives on London in just one month. Later that year, Coventry was hit by nearly nine hundred incendiary bombs during a single night. For three decades, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) maintained a terrorist campaign against London, claiming more than one hundred lives. In 1973 alone, thirty-six bombs were detonated in the British capital. I remember taking the Underground on February 9, 1996, the day that a truck bomb exploded at Canary Wharf, killing two people and destroying a six-storey building. Yet the foundations of British democracy remained unshaken. Catholics or people of Irish ancestry were not collectively blamed. The IRA taught the British an all-important lesson: if you are fighting to defend your way of life, you must not give up your way of life.
In contrast, our American neighbours had little experience with terrorism prior to September 11, 2001. Many aspects of their response were excessive. They detained U.S. citizens without charge or access to lawyers, conducted a widespread and illegal electronic surveillance program, produced spurious legal opinions justifying torture, then invaded an uninvolved sovereign country on the basis of trumped-up evidence. Much of the response was counterproductive, as George W. Bush finally admitted in May 2006. At the same time, the president expressed regret at his own choice of language—including the memorable “wanted dead or alive”—in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
In June 2006, almost five years after 9/11, the Canadian police and intelligence services arrested seventeen men and youths in Toronto who they alleged were conspiring to commit terrorist acts. In the public sphere, the response was a strange mix of American hysteria and British coolness. Right-wing commentators immediately began chortling “we told you so.” For them, the arrests were proof positive that radical Islamic terrorists were targeting all Western democracies, a situation that demanded unwavering support for U.S. foreign policy, stronger anti-terrorism laws and tighter security, including much closer scrutiny of Canadian Muslims. The following excerpt from a National Post column by Andrew Coyne is typical of what many said and wrote that week:
The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service currently has on its watchlist at least 50 other terrorist cells in Canada, similar to the one alleged in the present case: young Muslim men who subscribe to an extreme interpretation of Islam, coupled with an even more extreme agenda of apocalyptic mayhem. For every cell the security forces know about, they estimate there are another 10 they do not know about.
Everyone is talking about how this case is a “wake-up call.” But if we are led to believe that, because this particular (alleged) attack was thwarted, the danger is past—or that it is possible to prevent all future attacks—we are little further ahead. The chances that the authorities can detect every last one of these plots in time to defuse them are remote. We can “harden the targets,” we can lengthen the odds, but the likelihood approaches certainty that some time, somewhere, one of them will break through.
What then? Rather ask: What now? We are about to undergo one of the greatest tests our society has yet had to endure— that is, whether we can remain a coherent society, different social groups sheltering under the same broad set of beliefs, in the face of an existential threat originating from within one particular group.
For a week or so, it seemed as if I were living in the United States again, with Canadian media outlets having morphed into imitations of Fox News, the Washington Times and freerepublic.com. Fortunately, the Canadian people exhibited considerably more restraint. In one poll conducted by Ipsos-Reid for CanWest Global just ten days after the arrests, 66 per cent of Canadians said they lacked sufficient information to tell whether the suspects were guilty or not. It seemed as if, having watched Americans overreact to 9/11, most Canadians were not about to jump to conclusions. The foiled plot was disturbing, but there was as much reason to feel secure as there was to worry; after all, the police and intelligence services had done their jobs. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who undoubtedly reads the polls, wisely chose not to exploit the arrests as the basis for a major speech or policy change.
There is no disputing that terrorism—commonly defined as any action intended to cause death or serious injury to civilians in order to intimidate a population or compel its government to act—is a bad thing. The police and intelligence services deserve our thanks for having identified and arrested the alleged plotters before they posed a danger to anyone. Moreover, Coyne is correct to assert that Canada will likely suffer a terrorist attack at some point. Eighty-eight Australians died in October 2002 when a car bomb blew up outside a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia. Nearly two hundred Spaniards died in March 2004 when bombs exploded on four commuter trains in Madrid. The attacks on the London Underground followed one year later. It would be surprising if Australian, Spanish and British involvement in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was not a factor contributing to the attacks. Today, with more than two thousand troops engaged in a war in Afghanistan, Canada is almost certainly on a target list somewhere.
Yet terrorism is not new to Canadians. In 1970, Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act to counter what he called “an armed, revolutionary movement that is bent on destroying the very basis of our freedom.” Fortunately, the threat was not as serious as the prime minister thought: only one person died during the October Crisis and most of the nearly 500 people detained were soon released without charge.
In June 1985, Air
