The COVID-19 pandemic brought into sharp relief the multiple shortfalls of only “following the science,” as some policy-makers suggested, in response to a global outbreak of a lethal disease. Canada’s lack of any advanced diagnostic and predictive bio-risk capacity beyond our borders contributed to great suffering, grief and loss, not to mention economic harm, to Canada and Canadians.
A reimagined security policy must reconcile itself to this new reality: The range, depth and challenge of national security threats now facing Canada has transformed the context in which Canada must protect its security interests at home and abroad. This is a challenge that requires reaching beyond our existing national security agencies, however well prepared, competently staffed and determined to serve they are, to a much more collaborative national security posture. The real threats facing us engage the key pillars of our way of life and the mixed market democratic and pluralist nature of Canada itself. What is now required is a federal government-led societywide engagement.
This is not to suggest the “securitization” of society. On the contrary, it’s a call for a country often perceived by its own residents to be quite immune to many global threats, to collectively address the multiplying range of threats that have reached our soil and permeated our society’s fabric. Disease, bio-threats, ransomwear, intimidation agents of authoritarian states, our proximity to threats to the United States, social media contamination with disinformation, are some the threats that effect the well-being, sovereignty and security of Canadians.
In the beginning and in the end, the purpose of any security infrastructure is to protect the freedoms, democratic choices and societal values of our fellow citizens.
We need interdisciplinary approaches to strategic intelligence, and an “all talents” effort to maximize our ability to predict, assess, analyze, warn, and engage deter and respond to the full range of threats. Building better for the future of this country requires honesty about the strengths and weaknesses of the present approach.
Security threats unaddressed are like an infectious virus ignored. We know how destructive that can be.
An ongoing, multi-faceted and interdisciplinary analytical capacity for Canada will help society better understand how threats that permeate regularly into the country are felt at the local level. For we know that cyberattacks by foreign hostile actors or criminal cyberforces that take out hospitals and other non-profit community services will bring the national security threat down to the grassroots of our society. The susceptibility of Canadian residents to intimidation from authoritarian regimes abroad or unlawful electoral intervention, also manifests locally. Our response must also, then, be local as well as national and international.
Bridging this critical link between federal government security agencies and local communities requires that links be strengthened between government, civil society stakeholders and local communities. Our vital free press, and myriad of cultural and community organizations that strengthen our national diversity and resilience, are important in this battle. Establishing a broad network of experts from academe, corporate and not-for-profit sectors would strengthen our ability as a national community to assess, analyze and get ahead of security and cyber threats that, left unchecked, can cause immense harm. Broadening the linguistic range of analysts within our national security agencies would be a start toward deepening our competent early warning framework.
In an age where intelligence agencies claim that 90 to 95 per cent of the intelligence they draw on is from open sources, the excuse that civil society and corporate interlocutors might require security clearances to interact more meaningfully and frequently with government no longer washes.
But to even make the expression “national security” people-friendly and amenable to Canadians’ sense of freedom, democracy and privacy — rights, the term must be cast in the context of our unique Canadian national interests.
Previous “global” expressions of Canada’s national interests — the much-used slogan, for example, that “Canada is back” — are too generic to be meaningful any longer. Identifying national interests that are uniquely Canadian, and that therefore have an impact at every level of society, about how we should collectively defend, protect, pursue and preserve our common interests — is where the process must start. Continuous critical analysis, across disciplines, and with input from all levels of government, should follow. The goal would be, quite simply, to illuminate the ways in which we are threatened, and identify remedies.
An ‘all talents’ approach to national security implies specific measures of investment and collaboration on the part of the federal government. Informed multi-sector co-operation leading to more regular reports to Parliament, and regular coordination and collaboration between national security officials and their provincial and municipal counterparts, would all help build better and more fruitful engagement.
Formalizing the role of the office of the National Security and Intelligence Adviser to the prime minister and defining it as such by statute, would also strengthen our national security capacity, across the country.
Canadians’ security now and in the future can only benefit from greater collaboration, and a more frank and open discussion of looming and urgent threats, than occurred in the lead-up to the COVID-19 crisis. And this conversation must extend beyond government, the policy bubble and the academy. National security agencies talking to themselves and up a narrow chain of command is simply not good enough anymore.
This article was originally published by the Toronto Star.
