By Matthew Behrens
Every
other day in 2018, a woman in Canada was murdered,
almost exclusively by men. Sexual
assault crisis centres reported a
record numbers of calls last year. And according to a new report, male violence
against women has claimed the lives
of at least 10,495 women and girls in Canada since 1961, an average of 184 femicides
per year.
“Femicide
is recognized internationally by the United Nations as the most extreme form of
violence and discrimination against women and girls,” according to the Canadian Femicide
Observatory for Justice and Accountability. “Its definition varies across disciplines and world regions, but
broadly captures the killing of females, primarily by men, because they are female.”
Despite such
massacre-scale figures, successive federal and provincial governments have
refused to recognize and act upon the scale and severity of a national security
threat that daily targets more than half the population. It’s certainly not
news to those who courageously – and almost always without the necessary
funding and resources they need to do their jobs – staff the shelters and
sexual violence hotlines counseling the targets of hundreds of thousands of
daily acts of male violence.
While
the Trudeau government has thumbed its nose at a United Nations commitment to
enact and properly fund a National Action Plan to End Violence Against Women and Girls, its Public Safety Minister also refuses to
recognize the national security implications of male violence. Indeed, when a
man inspired by extremist misogynist ideology (the so-called incel movement)
went on a murderous Yonge Street rampage in 2018, Ralph Goodale had the
audacity to declare the
terrorist act did “not appear to be connected in any way to
national security.”
Instead of naming
and addressing this major national security threat, the Canadian government
continues to rely on racist tropes generated by white supremacist state
security agencies to imagine threats that are minimal at worst but which, when parroted
by a compliant media, actually make life even more dangerous for anyone who
does not enjoy the protective shield of white privilege.
A Flimsy Terror Plot
Nowhere was that
more clear than in the arrests last week of two people in Kingston on an
alleged terror plot. While one of those arrested was released without charge,
the media continue to spout inflammatory lines about the non-charged individual
being part of a refugee family fleeing Syrian violence. Needless to say, that irresponsible
reportage was immediately picked up by Donald Trump’s Canadian Tweet Deputy,
Andrew Scheer, who reinforced
the utterly nonexistent notion that falsely equates refugees with terrorism.
(Indeed, research
concludes that new immigrant communities have lower crimes rates than those who
came before them).
While
we have yet to learn the details about this alleged plot, its timing is, as
with all so-called terror arrests, curious, coming as it does as the Senate is
set to renew hearings on the dangerous new state security powers being debated
in Bill C-59.
Its substance is also open to some very reasonable questioning. A tip from the
FBI – an organization with a remarkable record of initiating and planning terror plots that
are then pinned on vulnerable individuals – led some 300 Canadian agents into
high-octane motion, even though there was “no specific target identified”; the superintendent in charge confirmed
there was “no specific time, date or location affixed to” the alleged plot of
the 16-year-old; there were only “elements
and trace elements” of a “potentially” explosive substance allegedly found in one
of the houses raided by police; and the superintendent in charge declared:
“At no time was the city of Kingston or any Canadian area under direct threat.”
It appears there was some vague talk of “facilitating” someone setting off a
non-existent explosive device at a place and time that had not been determined,
which sounds a lot like the kind of plots that are cooked up by eager FBI and
RCMP informants who fish the internet to find vulnerable individuals who might
take the bait.
The
arrests also play into what will likely be a significant racist narrative
during the 2019 federal election: Canada’s allegedly “porous” borders and
equating refugees with security threats. Evidence of this trend was a lazy and
fear-mongering CBC piece that
read more like a press release from CSIS than the work of a responsible news
organization. In reporting on a heavily redacted government document entitled “Subject of national security concern granted permanent residency,” CBC took
great pains to point out, adding fuel to the fire, that the granting of landed
status here “means the person is entitled to most social benefits —including
health care — can live, work and study anywhere in Canada, and is
protected by Canadian law and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but
isn't considered a Canadian citizen.”
While the
document allegedly could not detail why the individual was considered a threat
because to detail CSIS’s “derogatory information” would allegedly harm “the
conduct of international affairs, the defence of Canada or any state allied or
associated with Canada,” the CBC failed to properly contextualize the
consistent pattern of state security agencies claiming “national security
confidentiality” as a means of covering
up anything that could prove embarrassing to the government. Such
rationalizations are also employed to cover up the fact that “derogatory
information” in the hands of CSIS is often the product of torture or other
forms of mistreatment that Canada’s spy agency
eagerly receives from some of the world’s worst dictatorships.
The CBC also failed to question what it meant
to declare that CSIS had “derogatory information” against this individual,
especially given the spy agency’s lengthy historical record of falsely naming individuals security threats (often leading to torture,
as we have seen in the cases of Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad ElMaati,
Muayyed Nureddin, and Abousfian Abdelrazik, among others).
In
addition, CBC failed to place this allegedly bombshell document within a long
history of Canada using overly broad definitions of security threats to declare individuals inadmissible to Canada. That includes, for example, thoe who were
involved in struggles against South African apartheid or death squad
dictatorships in Central America. The overly broad interpretation of what it
means to be a member of an organization – membership being a ground to make one
inadmissible to Canada on security grounds – is so broad that it can encompass
someone who wrote for a party newspaper or provided catering services to a
political meeting. Ottawa fails to consider, for example, whether someone
joined a group before it took up arms or after it eschewed violence. It also
fails to distinguish between membership in groups with a single brutal purpose
-- the employment of violence without regard to civilian casualties -- and
multi-faceted organizations that, while possessing a military wing, also act as
de facto governments that provide social services (such as the Palestine
Liberation Organization).
The Tunnel Vision of State
Security
That
Canada’s state security agencies would not focus on real threats to security
and instead pin blame on individual targeted communities is understandable.
They have always demonized Indigenous people, immigrant communities, and anyone
who threatens an unequal status quo. It's in their DNA, reflected recently in a
2017 lawsuit by a group of CSIS employees who declared they had been “harassed
and discriminated against by CSIS management and colleagues, on the basis of
religion, race, ethnic and/or national origin, and/or sexual orientation."
That lawsuit was quietly settled with the usual promise to “do better.”
Meanwhile,
the 2018 “Terrorist Threat to Canada”
report, issued just before the December holiday season, proved a significant
dose of cognitive dissonance on steroids. While Ralph Goodale inaccurately
described it as “a balanced and frank assessment of the current threat
environment,” it is in reality a recycled hash of racist nonsense produced by a
nation that Goodale describes as “being a collaborative force for good in the
world”. While the 2017 public report declared, without substantiation, that “the principal terrorist threat to Canada continues to be that
posed by violent extremists who are inspired by violent Islamist ideology, and
terrorist groups such as Daesh and al-Qaida,” the 2018 report returns to the
tired evil Muslims nostrum of “violent Sunni Islamist ideology.”
The basis for such conclusions is a timeline dating back to 2006
that features a series of incidents that almost exclusively relied on the role
of highly-paid RCMP and CSIS agents in creating and organizing various plots,
leading vulnerable individuals right into lengthy prison terms via elaborate
entrapment schemes. Others – single individual incidents – were carried out by
people with serious mental health challenges but, given their ancestry, were
translated into so-called terrorist acts.
In the check-box virtue-signalling and faux political correctness
that defines the Trudeau regime, some space is devoted to Right-Wing Extremism.
But it is seriously downplayed, noting in a major affront to the lived reality of
millions that “while racism, bigotry,
and misogyny may undermine the fabric of Canadian society, ultimately they do
not usually result in criminal behavior or threats to national security.” It’s
a remarkable statement – not only because racism, bigotry, and misogyny
actually make up the fabric of Canadian society – but also because it flies in
the face of readily available public figures.
Indeed, whether it’s the epidemic of male violence against women –
perhaps most dramatically illustrated in 2018 by the Yonge Street misogynist massacre
– or racism (January 29 marks the second anniversary of the terrorist attack
that murdered six and injured 19 Muslim worshippers in Quebec City), there is
clearly a growing threat from white supremacists that’s been well documented by
researchers Barbara Perry and Ryan Scrivens.
Downplaying White Supremacist Violence
Indeed, as the Toronto Star reports:
“Between 2015 and 2018, researcher Barbara Perry said she’s observed a 20 to 25
per cent jump in the number of right-wing extremist groups active in Canada.
Based on Perry’s previous estimates, that would mean anywhere between 100 to
125 active right-wing extremist groups operating from coast to coast. Between
1980 and 2014, there have been more than 120 incidents involving right-wing
extremist groups in Canada, according to Perry and co-author Ryan Scrivens’s
2015 research. The ‘incidents’ range from drug offences to attempted
assassinations, firebombings and attacks.” The researchers noted, by
comparison, only seven incidents during the same time period that could
possibly be described under the government’s definition of “Islamist” ideology.
(Notably, a recently released report from the
Anti-Defamation League also confirms that every single extremist killing in the
USA in 2018 was committed by right-wing extremists.)
Despite such readily available figures, it remains controversial
within the Canadian government to mention this reality. Indeed, an initial
muted reference to right-wing extremism in the 2017 Canadian terrorism report
almost didn't make it given the objections of CSIS.
According to
documents obtained by Global News, CSIS originally proposed that the 2017 report
would include the claim that “Within the
broader context of extremism in Canada, the number of right-wing extremists who
promote or are willing to engage in politically-motivated violence is extremely
small.” (This false claim would be
consistent with CSIS behaviour: the spy
agency’s review committee found that
CSIS dropped an investigation into Canada’s far-right in 2016 because Canada’s
spies felt these groups did not represent a national security threat.) Global News
continues that while Public Safety Canada initially included the CSIS statement
on the far fight, it was later changed from “extremely small” to “quite small,”
and then cut altogether. CSIS also disputed
that right-wing extremism was “a growing concern in Canada,” saying that was a
“subjective statement” and demanding, “What is your facting for this?”
CSIS could have easily
found that “facting” via a search engine that most 2nd graders know
about called Google. They would have discovered a rigorous academic study by
the Canadian Network for Research on
Terrorism, Security & Society (whose partners include CSIS and Public
Safety Canada) that concluded the right-wing extremist movement in Canada “is more extensive and
more active than public rhetoric would suggest.” They noted there were over 100
groups, some of which “were actively engaged in brutal acts of violence
directed at an array of targets” including Muslims, Jews, Indigenous people,
LGBTQ communities, and “people of color, such as
Afro-Canadians, Asians, and South Asians.”
Significantly,
their research confirmed that “a key factor enabling the emergence and sustainability of right-wing groups
was a weak law enforcement response. Typically, activities of the far right
have not been monitored or taken seriously…there was a tendency for officials
to deny or trivialize the presence and threat.”
Still, Canadian officials
tried to soft pedal right wing extremism, questioning why it was listed as a
Principal Threat to Canada. “Is
far-right a ‘principal threat’ to Canada?” asked an official in the released
documents obtained by Global News. “Good
that it is outlined in this document, but may want to revisit how this is
framed.”
Naming New
Unsubstantiated Threats
The unwillingness of Canadian state
security agencies to develop threat profiles based on readily available public
information is another reason why CBC’s abovementioned reportage of alleged
security threats receiving permanent landing in Canada is so irresponsible.
Indeed, the CBC’s preferential option for the powerful assumes that CSIS and
the CBSA actually know what they are doing. Notably, these terrorism threat reports
are produced by the same agencies that treat as security risks land and water
defenders from Wet'suwet'en to Muskrat Falls (a chilling but consistent
historical practice well documented in the excellent book, Policing Indigenous Movements).
The 2018 public report on terror
threats also suddenly raised out of the blue alleged “Sikh (Khalistani)
Extremism,” pointing to events that happened over 30 years ago as part of its
rationale. It also backs up this claim by declaring that two Sikh
organizations were listed as terrorist entities in Canada, but that is old news
that dates back to 2003. This understandably
upset Sikh groups, prompting Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale to say he would
look into tweaking the language of the report because “words matter and being
precise matters,” but six weeks later, the libelous reference remains on the
website.
And
because Canada’s state security agencies are equal opportunity Islamophobes,
they also bring in alleged “Shia Extremism” with the very lazy, vague claims
that some people in Canada “may sympathize with [Hizballah] for political
reasons” and that individuals in Canada send material and financial support to
the group, without providing any evidence. Hizballah was listed as a terrorist
entity in 2002 by Canada.
The
largest amount of space in the report is dedicated to “Canadian Extremist
Travellers,” even though the report notes
that “Canada has not experienced, and does not expect to experience, a
significant influx of returning Daesh-affiliated extremist travellers.” While
the report claims that these travellers pose a threat because they return with
the “capability to conduct unsophisticated attacks, such as with knives and
vehicles,” it completely ignores the fact that white Canadian men are perfectly
capable of conducting such attacks against women with no need for overseas
training, as reports from hospital emergency rooms and women’s shelters will
bear out. Indeed, a December, 2018 report from the Canadian Domestic Homicide
Prevention Initiative found that the most common means of men
murdering women in Canada was by knifing, all carried out without the support
and inspiration of Daesh or Al-Qaeda.
The
report offers an extensive explanation of initiatives being undertaken to
counter what it already admits is not much of a threat – those who have travelled
overseas – while completely failing to list any efforts being undertaken to
counter right-wing extremism and misogynistic attacks.
Will Canada Acknowledge an Epidemic?
As billions of dollars continue to
be poured into state agencies chasing almost non-existent threats (including
the commityment to purchase warships at a staggering cost of anywhere from $62
to $100 billion) , those whose lives are on the line from racism and misogyny
are left out in the cold. But with a federal election on the horizon, there is
an opportunity to push all political parties on the epidemic of misogyny in
Canada.
Former NDP Women’s Critic Sheila
Malcolmson pointed out
that “direct federal funding to women’s organizations represents less than 0.01%
of total federal program spending; only about $1 for every woman in Canada,”
and that proper core funding for said groups should be a cornerstone commitment
that would allow Canada to live up to international and domestic constitutional
obligations ensuring women’s equality.
When she testified before a
Parliamentary Committee last fall, Megan Walker of the London Abused Women's
Centre reminded MPS that any program going
forward must consider that “male violence against women is an
epidemic. If we were talking about violence in any other format except against
women and we knew that 106 women were murdered this year, largely by men, with
33 murdered by their intimate partners, all bells and whistles would be going
off. If it were an epidemic with respect to a flu or SARS or anything like
that, we would be taking immediate action, yet for some reason we still
continue to minimize the lived experiences of women and pretend it doesn't
happen.
It's
time to get our heads out of the sand and realize that we all have a role to
play, especially government, in preventing women across this country from being
murdered, particularly when they're being murdered by a man who is supposed to
love them, and in their homes, which for most of us is the safest place we can
be. That's our first recommendation: we want the
Government of Canada to recognize this as the epidemic it is.
Further, we want the government to respond
to this epidemic by including full core funding for all services that are
helping women live their lives free from violence and abuse. We want to see major public awareness and education
programs so that future generations of girls and boys grow up knowing that this
is wrong, that the value women and girls have is not from the attention paid to
them by boys and men, but in fact from who they are as people.
We also want to see a heavy investment in
prevention. As I say, I think if we can see the results of one woman being
alive today because of preventive action, we've done our job. We need to do
that with much more frequency and with a much greater investment.”
(originally published at http://rabble.ca/columnists/2019/01/canada-ignores-national-security-threat-posed-femicide)