Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Distinguished committee members, thank you for having me. I will be pleased to answer questions in both official languages, but if I may, I will speak in English.

My presentation will have three parts.

The first is laying out why I think this particular issue we're dealing with today will continue to persist for years to come; why I sympathize with the measure; and why I think there are good ways of rationalizing this particular measure, both within the Canadian context and the comparative context.

Here's why this is going to be a persistent problem. I think there have been two fundamental changes that have brought this whole phenomenon much closer to home. Those are two revolutions.

One is the communications revolution, which has made it so much easier for people to get their twisted messages out. Everybody has a mobile phone. Aside from the ability to spread one's message in a way that would have been much more difficult a couple of decades ago, we also have what sociologists call the “filter bubble”. This phenomenon says that even though we have a very pluralistic social media universe, individuals are increasingly reading only the types of information that reinforces the biases and stereotypes they already hold. As people start to buy into this type of extremist narrative type of messaging—which that might cause them to engage in violence and travel abroad for either the purpose of committing violence, or joining an organization that the Government of Canada has decided is an organization we'd rather not have them join—I think that media communication is a major part of it.

The other is transportation. It's so much easier and cheaper today to get anywhere. For a couple of thousand bucks, you get on a plane in Edmonton and you fly to Istanbul and find your way to the border. If you think about a hundred years ago, if somebody immigrated to Canada they left everything behind. They maybe sent a letter or so back, but they wouldn't be thinking about going back. Staying in touch would be very difficult. I think these two fundamental revolutions have very much changed the game.

There's another element that I think is going to be a challenge for years to come with this phenomenon of extremist travellers, or “foreign terrorist fighters” as the UN calls them. It is the immense structural imbalances that afflict the countries that span from North Africa through to Pakistan, this arc of countries. It is the very high fertility rates that lead to severe demographic imbalances and very large youth bulges. If you look at a country such as Pakistan, you're going to have a 50% increase in their population over the next 40 years. These are recurring or replicable phenomena in most of the countries throughout the region, and yet we have social structures, economic structures, and political structures that are ill-adapted to this demographic growth.

In part, for instance, if you're smart and an ambitious young person, even if you try, it's very difficult for you to get a job because many of the economic structures and the state structures are so ossified you can't get a job unless you have all sorts of connections with senior elites, and whatnot. It's no wonder we have a large bulk of individuals in the region who are frustrated and who buy into extreme solutions and narratives not necessarily because they might be entirely convinced by the ideology being peddled, but because they're the one organization that gives them some hope of changing the circumstances in which they live.

What we've seen over the last 30 or so years, as a result, is what you might call the phenomenon of the globalization of terrorism. Previously we had domestic terrorism and we had international terrorism, both state terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism. What we've seen is this proliferation of this phenomenon of transnational terrorism and the narratives that go along with it, and now also the opportunity of ISIS, which has essentially turned the al Qaeda strategy on its head and deliberately tries to hold and control urban centres and lines of communication among these urban centres. If you wanted to join al Qaeda it was really hard. You had to get to Pakistan, and you had to find your way over to Waziristan. That was a dangerous trip and many people didn't make it. Now it's so easy to join these organizations.

While I think we can manage the ISIS phenomenon, it becomes a bit of a whack-a-mole game. As a result of these imbalances that I've laid out for you, I think instability and extremist-type narratives in these types of organizations are going to be a persistent problem for years and decades to come.

The challenge we have with people travelling abroad is going to be a persistent challenge. Sure, it dates back to the Spanish revolution and, as some of you might know, we still have the Foreign Enlistment Act on the books that was implemented at the time to dissuade individuals from going. We had this problem with German Canadians and Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. We had this challenge with some members of the Sikh community joining Babbar Khalsa, and with some members of the Tamil community joining the LTTE. As a result of these revolutions that I've laid out, this is a whole new world. It's no longer limited to particular ethnic or religious communities, because these narratives can speak to just about anybody.

As a result, what do we need? We need a much more nuanced tool kit for our security services. We've done a good job of focusing on what you might call “criminal pre-emption”, but we need to have a more nuanced tool kit in what my colleague Craig Forcese calls “administrative pre-emption”. Passport revocation is a very important component with regard to precision kinetic counterterrorist intervention, not for some mass community radicalization, whatever, talk, but rather targeting that small portion of individuals looking to travel abroad to engage with these organizations.

I might remind the committee that, of course, it's not just about adults travelling abroad. It's also about youth travelling abroad. I think the state has an obligation toward minors, toward people under 18, to intervene in ways that it might not with adults.

We also need to remember that these people will return. We know that about one-third of foreign fighters have returned. We know nine out of ten of them return deeply disillusioned and with serious mental health issues. And we know that about one out of ten—from is Thomas Hegghammer's study out of Norway, based on a sample of over 1,000—returns as a hardened ideologue.

One way or another, there are significant implications for Canadian society and for the Canadian taxpayer, if we don't engage in more effective administrative pre-emption.

Why do we need to do this? In itself, this will have a deterrent effect, if people understand that their passport may end up being revoked or they may not have one issued.

I think we also need to protect the integrity of the Canadian passport. As a result of incidents in central Asia and in north Africa, the Canadian passport in these regions is not treated now with the recognition and respect it had previously. So I think we need to be at the forefront of making sure we protect the Canadian passport as one of the most respected travel documents in the world.

I would like to finish on the premise that a passport is not an entitlement but more like a driver's licence. If you engage in conduct that clearly contravenes the collective interest, as Canadian society has outlined it, then you simply don't have the right to that particular document.

However, I might perhaps have one suggestion in closing that the committee might want to entertain. When we take people's drivers' licences, we don't take them forever, in most cases. We take them for a limited period of time. I wonder if the committee might want to consider some sort of a sunset clause built into the provisions here, whereby there is some obligation on the government to renew the provision of either not issuing a passport or renewing the revocation of that particular passport. Moreover, if we do have a permanent revocation of somebody's document, we need to make sure that we have an administrative procedure that independently confirms the assessment by the minister and by our law enforcement and security agencies that this individual's actions are so severe that they need to have that document essentially revoked for a lifetime. That would be the caveat that I might introduce.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you for your attention.

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