How will Canada confront the problem of Daesh ‘returnees’?
Case of Quebec woman in Syria illustrates twin challenges of public safety, reintegration
The fate of a Montreal woman who has lived for the past three years under Daesh rule will be a critical test case for how Canada deals with the issue of “returnees” from Syria and Iraq.
Don’t expect the discussion about Canadians who return home after joining a terrorist group to be measured or nonpartisan — as was evident in a testy exchange in the House of Commons on Tuesday.
In question period, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada is taking a multifaceted approach, including enforcement, surveillance and “methods of deemphasizing or deprogramming people who want to harm our society.”
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer re- plied with a quip: “The prime minister is using a broad spectrum that includes poetry and podcasts, and all kinds of counselling and group hug sessions.”
Trudeau: “(The Conservative party) ran an election on snitch lines against Muslims, they ran an election on Islamophobia and division and still they play the same games, trying to scare Canadians.” And so on. Debate about how to combat terrorism has been one of the world’s most politically fraught issues since Al Qaeda crashed four planes into American targets on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000.
Politics aside, the case of the 22-year-old woman from Quebec, and her 2-year-old daughter and newborn girl, is about Canadian law and the best way to ensure security while also reintegrating a radicalized Canadian citizen.
As the Star reported Tuesday, the woman and her daughters are in the custody of Kurdish forces in Syria, after having fled Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and surrendering to coalition troops last month.
She left Canada in November 2014 as a 19-year-old, travelling to Syria with another teenage girl from Montreal. The woman’s mother, whom the Star has agreed not to name, said she received an anguished call from her daughter after the teenager arrived, saying she had made a terrible mistake.
In Syria, she married a German convert to Islam and in November 2015 had a daughter. She gave birth to a second daughter last month in Kurdish custody, where she has not been allowed contact with her family.
Foreign affairs officials have offered consular services and are preparing travel documents for the woman and her children — so it’s clear that Ottawa intends to bring the woman home.
Will she face charges? The RCMP has not said if it is preparing to charge the Montreal woman.
“My default position is that anyone who elected to belong to a listed terrorist entity . . . must be seen as a continuing menace to society until proven otherwise,” Phil Gurski, a former analyst for Canada’s spy service, wrote on his blog in response to the Star story. “Simply put, they broke the law.”
But that last point is not entirely correct.
Everyone agrees that security concerns are paramount — but membership in a terrorist group alone is not a crime in Canada.
“It’s not just joining,” says law professor and author Craig Forcese. “What the heck does it mean to join a shadowy, covert terrorist group? It’s not that they hand out membership cards. So you’re left with this dilemma of how do you prove membership?”
What prosecutors would have to prove, if they do charge the Montreal woman, is that she joined Daesh “for the purpose of enhancing the ability of any terrorist group to facilitate or carry out a terrorist activity.”
That has been the law in the Criminal Code of Canada since 2001.
The Supreme Court of Canada upheld this law in 2012, but questioned the definition of “enhance the capacity.” What does that mean, practically? What is the threshold for guilt?
Forcese explains a hypothetical: “What if I’m a lawyer and I’m representing someone charged with a terrorist offence? Does that not enhance their capacity to engage in terrorist activity if I’m successful in court?”
In 2013, the Conservative government passed legislation that is known colloquially as the “terrorist travel” law, which made it a criminal offence to leave Canada to participate in the activity of a terrorist group — but the travel alone, or intending to travel, is not enough.
Other Canadian cases in various stages of prosecution include people who were stopped and detained before they could leave, but the legal question is not yet decided. The Montreal woman could be charged under this law, but again, prosecutors would need to prove that she travelled with the intent to further the abilities of the terror group. Legally speaking — did she?
Toronto lawyer Nader Hasan, who has been working with the woman’s mother to help her daughter surrender to Canadian authorities, says he considers the woman a victim.
If she regretted her decision to leave Canada, and her only role for Daesh was to be a wife and mother, could that satisfy the criminal threshold of “enhancing the capacity” of a terrorist group? Maybe, Forcese says. “But you can see the dilemma,” he adds.
“This is not the test case that I think the Crown and police are really going to want to take to court.” How can Canada make sure she’s not a danger? If the Montreal woman isn’t charged, the authorities have a few other options to mitigate the threat — of course, nothing is without risks.
Police may consider a peace bond, which would restrict her freedom, but not put her behind bars.
Peace bonds have been used in a variety of terrorism cases successfully. But the high-profile case of Aaron Driver shows they’re not foolproof. Driver, subject of a peace bond, was shot and killed in a taxi in August 2016 after he detonated an improvised explosive. Unlike the Montreal woman, whose state of mind or belief in Daesh ideology is unknown, Driver’s violent extremist views were well documented.
He was part of what was known as the “baqiyah family,” an online international network of Daesh supporters.
Evidence needed to obtain a peace bond is quite low — proof that there is a “reasonable fear” a person may engage in a terrorism offence. Still, prosecutors would have to convince a judge this woman poses a risk.
Other options include revoking her passport and putting her on a no-fly list while monitoring her activities. Security services undoubtedly watch anyone who has lived abroad with a terrorist group.
But 24/7 surveillance is incredibly costly and both the RCMP and Canada’s spy service have to triage, allocating resources to only the most urgent cases. The role of community support There is little consensus in the field known as CVE, which stands for “countering violent extremism,” except this: security services cannot deal with this issue alone.
That message has been delivered worldwide, as I learned travelling during my year as an Atkinson Fellow, researching government policies on CVE here and abroad, for the “Generation 9/11” series.
Critics may mock these efforts as “group hug sessions,” but community programs that provide counselling and social services for the young people who joined violent extremist groups, and their families, seem to have the best success.
Luckily, Montreal is one of the Canadian leaders in this field, offering the well-funded Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence and research co-ordinated through the Université de Montréal.
The centre’s director, Herman Deparice-Okomba, said he is dealing with the families of at least three other Quebec women who left for Syria and Iraq and want to return home.
Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale wrote in a statement Wednesday that early intervention is key to safety, but “Canada is getting started late on this work.”
He notes the previous Conservative government’s law and order agenda did not focus on community engagement, but the Liberals have been slow to act, too.
It wasn’t until June — after the Driver case and the Quebec City mosque shooting that in January killed six — that the government announced the creation of the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence, which supports community programs run at the provincial or city level.
“Everyone’s struggling to find the best and appropriate way to manage interventions. It’s very complicated, it’s content-specific, it depends on the kind of radicalized behaviour . . . we look at all kinds of threats whether its right wing, Daesh, Al Qaeda,” said Ritu Banerjee, a senior director at the centre, in an interview Wednesday.
“What we’re trying to do is look at a made-in-Canada approach.” Michelle Shephard is the Star’s National Security correspondent and the 2015-16 Atkinson Fellow, writing a series on “Generation 9/11.” Follow her @shephardm.