Missing IDs won’t alter military’s policy

DND dismisses disappearance as ‘isolated incident’

An incident involving hundreds of blank Canadian Forces identification cards that went missing just days after the 2014 attack on Parliament Hill has been meet with a shrug from the military.

The case involving the identity cards, which disappeared while being shipped from Ottawa to Toronto through Canada Post, resulted in a brief police investigation and no changes to the military’s security policy.

Missing for 73 days, the cards were eventually discovered in a batch of mail that had been returned as undeliverable, according to the 2015 military police report obtained by the Ottawa Citizen using the Access to Information law.

They had been sent by mail during a tense period when the Canadian government and military were on edge and worried about domestic terrorist attacks.

On Oct. 20 an Islamic extremist in Quebec deliberately struck Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent with his car, killing him. Two days later, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau gunned down Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial in Ottawa before running into the Parliament Buildings, where he was shot dead. He had also espoused Islamist extremist views and was planning to leave for the Middle East.

The first inkling something had gone wrong with the shipment was after a military officer in Scarborough, a Toronto borough, received a package of 100 ID cards marked as “undeliverable mail.” The cards were supposed to have been delivered to a Toronto armoury but instead appeared to have been misdirected to another address.

Military police wondered if they had been found by “an unknown person” who then dropped them into a Canada Post mailbox. Another 100 were successfully delivered, leaving the remaining 300 cards unaccounted for, the police report noted.

Initial attempts to find out the location of the cards were met with “negative results,” the report added.

One sailor who tried to alert Canadian Forces officials couldn’t get through and instead had to leave phone messages at a number of locations.

On Jan. 9, 2015, the cards were discovered back in a military police unit in Ottawa, having been returned by Canada Post as undeliverable mail. Military police closed their investigation on March 26, 2015.

The incident has not prompted any changes, the Department of National Defence confirmed.

Military identification cards are still shipped using Canada Post, DND noted in an email to the Ottawa Citizen. “The Department of National Defence (DND) is confident this was an isolated incident,” its statement said. “The security implications were limited, as all of the identification cards were recovered and were not tampered with during shipping and recovery.”

DND acknowledged in its email, “there is always a risk associated with lost ID (military and civilian) cards, and building access cards.”

But it noted that since such temporary access cards had an expiry date, if such a card is misplaced or stolen, the risk it poses “is minimal.”

DND statement also pointed out that the shipment was appropriately handled by all military and civilian staff.