Canadians have “a general problem across the board in taking national security seriously,” says Alexander Dalziel, guest on this ‘Hannaford’ episode.Dalziel, a senior fellow and National Security Project Lead at the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute comments on the outrageous admission to Canada of a man believed to be an ISIS member and his subsequent acquisition of Canadian citizenship. The scandal came to light when Moustafa Eldidi and his son were arrested in Toronto by the RCMP, and charged with terrorism offences under the Canadian Criminal Code.It’s not more people that are required however says Dalziel, but more people with the right skills.“I don't think it's an indictment of the entire system, but we somehow think, ‘Oh well the Americans will deal with that, or this is something in the Middle East or this is something in Europe, or we've always had issues with terrorism over decades.’ ”.Canada is unfortunately no stranger to terrorist activity. In 1985, Sikh terrorists blew up an Air India flight with a loss of 329 lives. And earlier this century, the so-called ‘Toronto 18’ plot involved the potential bombing of the CN Tower and the storming of Parliament.“You know we have a fundamental tension in the system. This system is designed to bring people into the country, not keep people out... But, the Canadian government has not been strong in hiring people with the language skills that are going to make screening effective, people that speak foreign languages whether that Spanish, whether that's Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, Chinese, Persian all the different languages you know, that that you know some of our threat actors are coming from.”Dalziel is not alone in his belief that all that could be done, has not been done. Conservative spokesman Andrew Scheer, while demanding the emergency recall of the House of Commons public safety committee, commented, "For Canadians to have confidence in our immigration system, we need to know that in every case, in every application, the due diligence and proper screening is done. Clearly that was not done in this situation and lives were almost lost.”Dalziel agrees and calls for better use of what he calls “open-source intelligence.”“Using materials that are publicly available, like the video that showed an ISIS execution that came to light during the arrest last week, you can connect it to the individual, there's a lot of tools that are out there now. It's important that Canadians push governments to make sure the analysts who work on this have access to those tools, so you know quantity is now quality.”Part of the problem is what Dalziel calls “Canadian exceptionalism.”“We tend to imagine that somehow we're excluded from a lot of the trends that are shaping the rest of the world. Partly that's a function of being in North America protected by three seas, having a generally very productive partner to the south, but you know whether you're talking about terrorism or whether you're talking about organized crime, drug-trafficking money laundering, whether you're talking about people seeking to flee here from oppressive regimes or hide war criminals, all these things exist, and that doesn't need to be accepted here.”
