Canadians are more obsessed about imaginary flu epidemics than real threats.
In March we had the conviction of Momin Khawaja, a Canadian born and raised jihadi who lived in an east end Ottawa suburb, one I know well, frequented by my friends and their children. Khawaja was given a 10 and a half-year sentence for his part in a British plot to target nightclubs, shopping districts and other high traffic locations in the U.K. In October, Said Namouh, a Morrocan native who had settled in Trois-Rivieres was convicted under the Anti-Terrorism Act for disseminating material to promote the global Islamic jihad. (…)
There were also five convictions in the Toronto 18 case, that was the 2006 plot distrupted by the RCMP.
When the plot was made public there were scoffs that these young men had planned to storm Parliament, many saying they could not have accomplished the task, a gaggle of Greenpeace activists proved in December that the Toronto men could have breached security as 20 green activists made it past security to take over the rooftop of West Block on Parliament Hill.
(…)
In 2009 we also saw the disintegration of the security certificate system. A part of Canada’s immigration process, security certificates date back to the 1970s and are meant to remove people, non-citizens, who are deemed not to have committed a crime but based on intelligence are seen as a security threat to this country and therefore inadmissible to Canada. For the last 7 years many media reports have stated that the government is holding several men on these certificates but will not charge them or bring them to trial.
Well, frankly, that’s the point, the certificates are meant to be used to deport someone just as when the government used them to remove Ernst Zundel from Canada or Russian spy Paul William Hampel.
