In Canada, a Sea Change Follows Wave of Terrorism

Canada’s quiet Victorian-era capital may seem serenely unchanged, but officials and citizens agree that the political landscape here has been dramatically and perhaps permanently transformed.

There are the minor but symbolically important inconveniences: No longer, for example, can Canadians drive up to the doors of their ornate Parliament building or wander freely in its corridors.

Less visible, but far more significant in a culture that puts a premium on privacy, are the wide-ranging powers the government has been granted since Sept. 11. It can now intercept e-mail, ban inflammatory speechmaking and interrogate anyone suspected of having knowledge about terrorist activities.

And from bars to bus stops to federal office buildings, the usual talk of hockey and political intrigue is overshadowed by discussion of the infantry battalion about to be airlifted from Edmonton to Kandahar--the first Canadian combat troops, as opposed to peacekeepers, to be deployed abroad since the Korean War.

“This is not a peacekeeping mission,” Defense Minister Art Eggleton stressed in Parliament this month. “The military campaign in Afghanistan is not over yet.”

The decision to dispatch the renowned Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry to Afghanistan--and to place the nation’s combat forces under U.S. command for the first time since the Korean conflict--is a striking example of what analysts say is the most notable change here since Sept. 11. There is a strong new pro-American tilt of the political center, led by the once nationalist-minded Liberal Party.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien is using his solid majority in Parliament to align his government with the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism campaign in Central Asia and North America alike, with new joint border patrols and the importation into Canada of U.S. Customs agents, among other controversial initiatives.

“There has been a profound change in the way the U.S. and Canada do business,” said a Canadian Foreign Ministry official here as he headed out the door for a recent meeting in Washington with Thomas J. Ridge, the U.S. homeland security director.

The new security measures are not designed primarily to protect Canadians, officials here contend, but to ensure that their nation does not become a staging ground for attacks against the United States.

“Canada has never been a target for international terrorism, but there is a concern that Canada not be used as a giant aircraft carrier for terrorists targeting Americans,” said a Justice Ministry official who helped draft Canada’s month-old anti-terrorist legislation. Like most senior civil servants here who agreed to be interviewed, the official asked not to be identified.

Chretien has drawn the expected rebukes from the New Democratic Party, the leading bloc to his party’s left, which charged that he is “turning Canada into the 51st state.” The criticism has been joined by mainstream opinion makers, including Chretien’s former foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy, who said sending troops to fight under U.S. command was tantamount to a surrender of sovereignty.

Chretien’s foreign policy team bats away the criticism.

“When Mr. Axworthy was foreign minister, we were involved in Bosnia and Kosovo and other places with Americans, in fact frequently under American command structures,” said John Manley, the newly designated deputy prime minister, who is charged with coordinating national security policies with allies.

To the surprise of many analysts here, the pro-American stance appears to have strengthened rather than jeopardized the government’s standing. The largest opposition party, the rightist Canadian Alliance, advocates even closer ties with the U.S., and polls show two-thirds of respondents supporting the American-led military coalition abroad and strict anti-terrorism laws at home.

“In the wake of September 11th, security has jumped to the top of the agenda here,” said Mike Thielman, who heads the Canadian solicitor general’s Counter-Terrorism Division.

Security cooperation with Washington began almost immediately: When the U.S. closed its airspace to incoming aircraft Sept. 11, the Chretien government volunteered within the hour to have scores of jets diverted to Canada.

“This government took a big risk that day,” said the Foreign Ministry official. “Nobody knew if there would be more attacks.”

Canada quickly complied with a U.S. request to put plainclothes air marshals on every flight from Canada to Washington’s Reagan National Airport--even though Canada had never had such a program. About 2,000 of the 16,000 officers in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were reassigned in September to terrorism-related jobs, most along the U.S. border, officials said.

Stung by critics here who said its visa rules were too lax, Canada’s immigration service intensified screening at overseas airports of inbound passengers. “It is as though we took a system that was not on alert and put it on permanent alert,” said a top immigration official.

In the Justice Ministry, meanwhile, government lawyers immediately began drafting counter-terrorism laws. “We had our first meeting on the afternoon of the 11th,” recalled a leader of one team of 30 lawyers, “and within a month we had a bill written and submitted.”

Civil libertarians here concentrated their fire on two provisions of the legislation. One called for court-ordered “investigative hearings” that could compel testimony from uncooperative witnesses or unindicted co-conspirators in terrorist-related offenses. The other gave new authority for the preventive detention of suspects for up to 72 hours in terrorism cases.

Despite the objections, the legislation was adopted in Parliament by an overwhelming majority in November and became law in late December.

The terror attacks also forced the government to revamp its 2002 budget, adding $7 billion in security expenditures, most of the money for the military. The appropriations will deepen an already severe deficit.

Some Canadian nationalists worry that security fears will lead to a common external border patrolled primarily by Americans. Those concerns intensified when U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft signed an agreement here in December for border policing and intelligence-sharing that he said represents “a sea change” in U.S.-Canadian relations. The agreement will put U.S. Customs Service agents in Canadian seaports handling southbound container cargo. The Bush administration announced Friday that it was requesting an additional $2.1 billion for further security measures at both the northern and southern U.S. borders.

The Mounties, meanwhile, have formed joint “border enforcement teams” with U.S. law enforcement agencies. Just one of these teams, working along a 100-mile stretch of the St. Lawrence Seaway, has 70 representatives from a dozen agencies from both sides of the border.

“Since September 11th, there has been a speeding up of the ‘continentalization’ that started with the free trade agreements,” said Maude Barlow, head of the Council of Canadians, a leading force in anti-globalization protests here.

“And now for the first time since Korea, we have Canadian soldiers serving under Americans, as if we were Americans,” she said. “Our culture, and our country, are all being merged into one North America.”

But Barlow concedes that most Canadians appear less than concerned about a blurring of their national identity.

Many observers here have been surprised by the depth of the pro-American response--and the seeming lack of American awareness of that backing.

On Sept. 14, a hastily organized demonstration of support for the U.S. drew about 100,000 people in Ottawa. A few weeks later, 20,000 Canadians trooped to New York for a solidarity visit--a gesture largely ignored south of the border.

Nor have many Americans understood the extent to which Canadian political and military priorities have been altered, officials say.

“What we do doesn’t resonate down here,” Paul Heinbecker, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, said in a recent interview in his New York office.

Instead, Canadian officials contend that there is an unjustified but widespread U.S. perception that Canada harbors terrorists from North Africa and the Middle East. “There is no evidence whatsoever of any Canadian link to the events of 9/11,” said Sgt. Paul Marsh, spokesman for the Mounties.

Still, there is acute retrospective interest on both sides of the border in the case of Ahmed Ressam, who was caught crossing from Canada to Washington state in 1999 with a trunkful of explosives he admitted were intended for an attack on Los Angeles International Airport. He was convicted on terrorism charges last April.

Ressam, a confessed Al Qaeda operative who lived in Montreal and traveled with a forged Canadian passport, was “an isolated case,” Marsh contends. However, another former Montreal resident, Mokhtar Haouari, who provided Ressam with funds and a forged Canadian driver’s license, was sentenced this month to 24 years in prison by a U.S. federal judge.

Ashcroft announced Friday that one of five suspected Al Qaeda terrorists who appear in videotapes discovered in Afghanistan has been identified as a Tunisian-born Canadian citizen. The man’s whereabouts is unknown, Ashcroft said, thanking Canada for its “significant assistance” in the case.

Although Canada may not have been a past target of terrorists, the military alliance with Washington in Afghanistan could change that, officials here fear. “As we become more engaged in this action, there is an elevated risk,” said Thielman, the counter-terrorism expert.

Some critics here assert that the deployment represents an unsettling departure from the Canadian military’s recent role in international peacekeeping missions. By early February, Canada will have nearly 3,000 soldiers and sailors in and around Afghanistan, a commitment surpassed only by the U.S., Britain and France.

The government was assailed in Parliament for the announcement that it would turn over prisoners captured by its forces to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan. Yet there has been little criticism over the combat commitment itself.

Many Canadians are gratified that the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry has been asked to serve alongside the U.S. 101st Airborne Division in combat.

“They welcome and support it,” said army Col. Tim Grant, the chief spokesman for Canada’s armed forces, “as this shows that we are not a gendarmerie; in fact, we are an army.”