CANADA’S COUNTER-RADICALIZATION EFFORTS HAVE ‘LITTLE NATIONAL COHERENCE,’ PUBLIC SAFETY MINISTER RALPH GOODALE SAID SUNDAY, ADDING THE COUNTRY NEEDS TO DO BETTER TO COUNTER EXTREMISM.
Liberals to announce program to combat radicalization
TO R O N T O • Canada’s counter-radicalization efforts have “little national coherence,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said Sunday in a statement reflecting on the killing last week of an ISIL supporter allegedly about to conduct an attack.
The governing Liberals are to announce Monday they’re moving ahead with a program designed to reach out to those who are vulnerable to radicalization.
Goodale will announce details of the program when he visits a centre in Montreal devoted to preventing radicalization that leads to violence, The Canadian Press has learned.
Goodale on Sunday called for an improved response to the threat of extremism. While some work is underway in cities such as Montreal and Calgary, Canada has had no national strategy.
“Our goal is to begin fixing that this year,” he said. “We need to get really good at this — to preserve our diversity and pluralism as unique national strengths. … We need to access the best global research. We need to develop more of our own.
“We need to generate and co-ordinate talent and expertise. We need to mobilize and support communitybased outreach agencies. We need to know how to identify those who could be vulnerable to insidious influences that draw certain people — especially young people — toward extremism leading to violence.
“We need to understand what positive messages can counteract that poison. We need to know how to intervene with the right tools at the right time in the right way.”
An RCMP investigation into a video recorded by a masked man who vowed to attack Canada led police Wednesday to the Strathroy, Ont., home of Aaron Driver, a radicalized Muslim convert and ardent supporter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
The RCMP Emergency Response Team confronted him after he got into a waiting taxi and he detonated an explosive device. Police then opened fire and he was killed. RCMP believed he was on his way to bomb an urban area.
The incident has sparked debate over whether government counterterrorism is adequate, but Goodale said Canadian police and security agencies, working with the FBI, had “foiled the would-be terrorist’s plot in a remarkably short span of time.”
He acknowledged, however, that the close call last week, as well as the October 2014 attacks that killed two Canadian Forces members in Saint-Jeansur-Richelieu and Ottawa, had “led to a genuine appetite among Canadians for a serious examination of Canada’s current national security framework.”
Driver was well known to counterterrorism police, who had been investigating him since December 2014, when he was living in Winnipeg.
After police arrested him in June 2015 on a terrorism peace bond, he moved to Ontario to live with his sister. Despite court-imposed conditions on his conduct, he was able to get to an advanced stage of preparing an attack.