Tories to speed up revocation for would-be foreign fighters.

As it struggles to stop Canadians from joining terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq, the government is introducing measures allowing officials to more quickly revoke passports from suspected extremists, the

National Post has learned. A senior government source said the policy expediting passport revocations on national security grounds would be announced Thursday by Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney and Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander.

The change comes two weeks after Canadian Security Intelligence Service director Michel Coulombe told the Senate national security committee the number of Canadians who had left for Syria and Iraq had jumped 50 per cent in the past few months.

To prevent them from leaving, police have been alerting officials to cancel the passports of so-called extremist travellers, but the government source said the current procedure was too time-consuming and that authorities needed to be able to act more speedily.

“With the growing number of radicalized Canadians travelling abroad to fight with ISIL, this government will take action to ensure our national security agencies can swiftly and urgently revoke the passport of any threat to Canadians and our allies,” the source said.

The policy is the latest of a number of changes being brought in by the Conservatives amid alarms from counter-terrorism agencies. Bill C-51, which expands police and intelligence powers, passed third reading in the House on Wednesday.

Before the vote, Blaney tabled the CSIS annual report, which warned that the call of violent jihadist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant was “resonating with some individuals in Canada,” causing security troubles.

“In its previous public reports and elsewhere, CSIS has raised concern about the growing number of Canadian citizens who have left the country to participate in foreign terrorist activities. In light of the growing menace posed by ISIL and its ability to attract foreign fighters, CSIS again draws attention to this problem,” it said.

The killings last October of two Canadian Forces members by suspects espousing Islamist extremist beliefs exposed the country’s “vulnerability” and the potential to wage terrorism without conducting mass-casualty attacks, the report said.

“In truth, a single assailant with low-tech weaponry — a rifle or even a car — can bring tragedy and insecurity to our communities, as we saw in Canada,” Coulombe wrote in the introduction to the 71-page annual report.

In a similar-style attack, two gunmen apparently sympathetic to ISIL opened fire outside an event in Garland, Texas, featuring cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad on Sunday, wounding a guard before being shot dead.

Like Martin Couture-Rouleau, who attacked a soldier in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Que., one of the Texas suspects had allegedly attempted to travel overseas to join an extremist group but police had arrested him and seized his passport.

The CSIS report mentioned the “threat posed here by frustrated extremists who have been unable to join the fight abroad.” But despite the dangers of grounding would-be foreign fighters, the report said allowing them to leave was not a solution.

Once abroad, they may become even more radical and acquire status allowing them to recruit others, it said. They could use their foreign contacts to set up networks in Canada.

“Even if a Canadian extremist does not immediately return, he or she is still a Canadian problem,” Coulombe wrote. “Just as Canada expects other nations to prevent their citizens from harming Canadians and Canadian interests, we too are obliged to deny Canadian extremists the ability to kill and terrorize people of other countries.”

Although ISIL has dominated the counter-terrorism debate since it seized parts of Syria and Iraq last year, its rival al-Qaida “remains a dangerous terrorist group” and continues to have supporters in Canada, the report said. The Iranian-backed Hezbollah is also a threat, it added.

By contrast, Canada does not appear to be experiencing the far-right violence emerging in Europe. “Right-wing extremist circles appear to be fragmented and primarily pose a threat to public order and not to national security,” the report said.