Canada should start thinking about getting law enforcement capable of monitoring what’s happening on social media, say public safety experts. Gaps in the intelligence system would even partly explain the astonishing longevity of the Freedom Convoy’s occupation this winter in Ottawa.
On January 28, the media were already reporting that Quebec truckers were planning to join a movement whose objective, publicly planned on social networks, was to disrupt the federal capital for several weeks. The occupation, however, took the Ottawa police high command completely by surprise.
“The original intelligence we had only predicted a much smaller hold of people […] motivated to stay for a long time,” the new interim leader, Steve Bell, told federal elected officials at a parliamentary committee meeting in March.
The siege of the federal capital by a few hundred angry truckers finally lasted three weeks. He revealed in passing major organizational problems of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, underlines a damning report for the federal government published earlier this week.
First, the surveillance of extremist comments by Canadians on social networks seems to fall into the cracks of the intelligence system. A problem that the Minister of Public Security, Marco Mendicino, promises to tackle in his current mandate, even if it means modifying the law.
Away from social networks
“When the primary terrorist threat was al-Qaeda and [le groupe armé] Islamic State, they were non-Canadians, and the intelligence agencies could monitor them, ”illustrates Thomas Juneau, one of the authors of the study. A national security strategy for the 2020s and associate professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. “When they are Canadians [derrière le clavier], their mandate and the law do not allow this. »
However, during the occupation of Ottawa, “organizers, including radicalized and violent people, openly announced what they were going to do on social networks,” he recalls. Convoys of freedom, there will be others in the future. »
“The authorities do not have the capacity to analyze the aggregate of data”, also deplores Jean-Christophe Boucher, assistant professor of political science at the University of Calgary.
For example, the police would be unable to interpret trends emerging from a large amount of tweet or posts on Facebook. According to the researcher, national security agencies would be “very careful” not to collect intelligence on Canadian citizens, causing a certain paralysis.
Thomas Juneau qualifies: there are “good reasons in democracy” to prevent government surveillance of the actions and words of Canadians without restrictions. However, “we have to start thinking” about a way to allow law enforcement to be informed of internal threats, without compromising privacy. A difficult balance to achieve, and on which the experts do not take a position.
Lack of coordination
Even when police forces and offices such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) collect information on these groups, it is too little shared from one level of government to another, notes the report led by Mr. Juneau and co-signed by a dozen other national security experts. This would have caused a lot of trouble to prevent or dislodge the occupation of Ottawa.
“The lack of coordination between the different orders has caused the prolongation of the demonstrations and the erosion of confidence in the authorities”, can we read.
This poses a risk to the country’s democratic institutions, in a context of the rise of extremist ideologies in Canada. The researchers also note that far-right Canadian movements receive support from conservative American media, “including the Fox News channel”, which does not correspond to the classic pattern of foreign interference.
In interview at To have to, Minister Marco Mendicino has promised that his government will learn from this winter’s “illegal blockade” and that it will act without delay. “We must review our legislative, administrative and tactical tools to respond to this new threat,” he said.
The Minister agrees that there is “perhaps a gap” in social media monitoring and commits to exploring the issue keeping in mind the legal limits and the principles of the Canadian Charter of Rights.