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Citizenship revocation has returned to the political agenda. In recent years, many Western democracies have either legislated or considered legislating citizenship revocation for terrorism offences. This paper analyses how Canada's short-lived experiment with citizenship revocation was represented in political, media and online discourses. Specifically, it identifies who has been interpreted a presumed candidate(s) of citizenship revocation, and analyses the discursive strategies employed to associate these targets with specific ethnic, national, or religious groups. We find that references to Muslims dominated public discourses on citizenship revocation. The articulation of these references reveals that Muslims were targeted not as individuals but as a category, indirectly branding them as less Canadian, and thereby symbolically un-belonging them from Canadian citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece provides a detailed case study of the evolution of counter-terrorism within a specific domestic security agency of a liberal-democratic state in the context of the Cold War. It does so by examining the creation of a counter-terrorism unit within Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and how it responded to international terrorism. This occurred in between major terrorist attacks in Canada in 1970 and 1985 and included a growing focus on counter-terrorism even as counter-subversion remained a top priority within a still dominant Cold War domestic security framework. Ultimately, the article, based on thousands of pages of previously secret documents, argues that the Security Service could conceive of in a broader strategic sense the threat of terrorism but found it more challenging, for a variety of reasons, including the dominance of the Cold War and the difficulties around infiltrating ethnic communities, to collect intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the effects of counterterrorism policy in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom between 1997 and 2016. We use time series analysis and series hazard models to examine the influence of policy on (a) incidents of terrorist violence and (b) citizen perceptions of the threat of terrorism. Results indicate that counterterrorism policy is, for the most part, not related to significant changes in Canada but does report significant results for public opinion and terrorist incidents in the United States and the United Kingdom, although these effects are temporally defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expansive domains of counter-terrorism policing remain buffered from popular visibility, and police organizations remain primary definers of security threats and the police work involved in controlling these threats. Examining the interface between police image work and the continued intensification of the "war on terror," this article details how police agencies stage police raids, arrests, and press conferences in efforts to frame terrorism narratives in Canada; a police dramaturgy that shapes how the public consumes news about the threat of Islamic terrorism and the pre-crime interventionism of policing and security agencies. To examine these police newsmaking practices, two approaches are utilized: first by detailing experiences of defence lawyers who have worked on high-profile cases, then through an analysis of declassified documents related to the preparation and roll-out of a high profile national press conference to narrate the interdiction and killing of prospective terrorist Aaron Driver. Contributing to debates on police image work and contemporary debates around police power, this article demonstrates how policing agencies curate the image of counter-terrorism through newsmaking practices that exaggerate the threat of terrorism, shape the public imaginary around the threat of Islam, refurbish the role of police as symbolic guardians against evil, and aim to reproduce securitarian politics that advocate for more pre-emptive and surveillance powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates the subject of the academic–practitioner (AP) exchange within an International Relations-orientated critique of the imperial dynamics of counterterrorism practices and racial subjugation. It uses an analytical framework that upholds the significance of racial hierarchy to knowledge production. A key contribution of this article is to situate the AP nexus within the circumstances of liberal democratic counterterrorism regimes, to demonstrate how race becomes meaningful to the knowledge that is produced about Islamophobia. The main argument of this article is that in present policy debates concerning the existence of systemic racism, one of the mechanisms enabling counterterrorism practitioners to regulate the AP exchange is that of institutionalized whiteness. Exploring two scenarios of AP exchanges in the United Kingdom and Canada, where counterterrorism practitioners were challenged to reconcile with academic explanations of Islamophobia as a systemic issue, this article uses colour-line inspired critiques of white logic to identify instances where anti-racist knowledge was subjugated in the name of imperialism. The article finds that in each scenario discussed, practitioners demonstrate trajectories of white logic by contesting the suitability of anti-racist knowledge put forward by academics, on the basis of racial hierarchy and self-aggrandizement. It concludes by discussing how a lack of practitioner–academic consensus continues to affect the dissemination of knowledge concerning systemic racism, thus prompting considerations of what this means for an anti-racist future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada and the US The United States and Canada have a long tradition of bilateral and binational security coordination, cooperation and collaboration. This is evident in a vast and growing number of transgovernmental networks that facilitate and enable policy alignment and parallelism in defence, border security, intelligence and counter-terrorism. The security community has mastered coordination and cooperation. The US–Canada relationship is based on reciprocity. Despite its common cultural bedrock though, the US–Canada security community's hallmark is policy parallelism. Forms of mature collaboration remain limited and are only found on occasion. Partnerships have proven more successful in functional areas than in principled ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrapment has been a prominent, if rarely successful, defence in terrorism prosecutions. In this chapter, I sketch an egalitarian case for entrapment. On this account, the primary moral significance of entrapment is to prevent the police from generating crimes that would not otherwise have been perpetrated. In a context in which most people are, as Richard McAdams puts it, "probabilistic offenders," the power of the authorities to control the nature, frequency, and timing of an inducement to crime is the power to make criminals out of ordinary, but fallible, people. Entrapment is a means of constraining this power. In this regard, entrapment stands to undercover policing roughly as abuse of process stands to prosecutorial discretion: as a constraint on how officials choose which individuals to investigate, prosecute and punish. However, since judgments as to when this line is crossed are likely to be contestable, and since what is at issue is typically extraordinary state power used to ensnare particular individuals, I argue that courts should do more to encourage Parliament to regulate undercover policing ex ante rather than rely solely on an entrapment defence applied ex post, for instance by strictly applying an "authorized by law" condition in prosecutions based on undercover investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thwarted Toronto 18 terrorist plot was an early indication of things to come for terrorist financing in Canada and internationally. The self-financed plot demonstrated how terrorist cells, even those not directed by a terrorist group, could obtain enough money to fully fund a sophisticated and complex attack. In total, the main elements of the Toronto 18 plot likely cost thousands of dollars, but the organizers of the plot had accumulated far more than they needed for the components of the attack and had enough money to rent a safe house, pay for plane tickets to escape prosecution after the attack, and develop a plausible cover story for their activities. Despite the financial elements of the plot, no terrorist financing charges were laid in the case. This may have been due to the lack of international funding of the plot and a conceptualization within Canada's law enforcement and security services at the time that terrorist financing came from "abroad." The lack of financing charges, in this case, may have had longstanding implications in Canada, where, to date, very few charges of this nature have been laid, even 15 years after the plot was disrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Legal systems should not always assume the legitimacy of state demands for secrecy and accommodate them with procedural innovations. This is especially so in Canada, which has made problematic policy choices to stress secrecy even in counterterrorism investigations where secret intelligence often has evidential value. A fairer and more efficient transition from secret intelligence to public evidence could be achieved if Canadian criminal trial judges, like those in other democracies, could make and revise non-disclosure or public interest immunity orders to protect secrets. The government of Canada has not justified adopting the procedural innovation of closed material procedures that would allow it to defend itself in national security civil litigation on the basis of secret evidence not seen by plaintiffs claiming to have been abused, but only by special advocates. There is a danger that even justified procedural innovation such as the use of special advocates will create new baselines that can be used to support additional innovations that may undermine the legitimacy of the legal system and discount the value of procedural regularity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Captain Javed Latif, a Muslim Canadian pilot from Pakistan, was denied pilot refresher training by Bombardier Aerospace Training Center in Canada based on information received from US national security officials. Almost 12 years after Captain Javed Latif 's ordeal began, the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed a decision by the Quebec Court of Appeal overturning a finding by a Quebec Human Rights Tribunal that Latif had been racially profiled. The Supreme Court of Canada's decision ultimately exposes and perpetuates a deep unwillingness to challenge the stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists in Canada. In response, this commentary seeks to excavate Captain Latif 's fuller story largely through a reading of silences. It critically analyzes the Court's claim that the Tribunal had little or no evidence before it to ground its finding of discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada’s approach to proscription differs from that of other Westminster democracies. After the negative example of listing in the October Crisis, 1970 and with the subsequent advent of a constitutional bill of rights, Canada does not ban organizations; instead it penalizes certain forms of conduct, above mere membership, with terrorist groups. “Terrorist groups” include entities listed proactively by the executive, but also entities that meet a functional definition in Canadian criminal law. In practice, the latter, functionally-defined terrorist groups have figured in most terrorism prosecutions—only a few cases have involved listed groups. With the new focus on Daesh (a listed group), that may begin to change. However, executive listing raises unresolved constitutional doubts in Canada, prompting concerns that reliance on proscription may be more trouble than it is worth. Listing has also been used with respect to individuals, but such listings in Canada have already produced false positives, perhaps because of the due process deficits of listing by the executive. In many respects, therefore, terrorist group listing is yesterday’s law, problematic and of marginal utility. There may be reasons of administrative expediency to preserve listing, but the tool is more doubtful when used as a precursor to criminal prosecutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how theories of radicalisation have placed an emphasis on the development of an indicators-based approach to identify individuals who might engage in politically motivated violence. We trace how policing agencies have juxtaposed the search for indicators as a defence against criticisms of racial profiling. However, through an analysis of Canadian counter-terrorism training programmes, we demonstrate that the search for radicalisation indicators reaffirms pre-emptive and discriminatory security practices. We insist that despite efforts to theorise radicalisation outside of the practices of the “war on terror”, current trends risk rationalising prejudicial policing that affirms social exclusion and injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE COLLAPSE OF the notable twin towers of New York's World Trade Center in 2001 influenced Canada in a larger number of courses than the loss of two dozen Canadians among the unfortunate passings on that day. Instantly, American fingers indicated as far as anyone knows remiss northern outskirt security that had encouraged terrorist activity in the United States. In spite of the fact that this creation was in the long run recognized all things considered, the harm was finished. The characterized circumstance was genuine in its outcomes. In a bitingly humorous move, Canadian authorities exceeded themselves in showing security cautiousness with the outcome that few pure Canadian natives were whisked away by American constrains in remarkable version, to endure torment in Syria and Egypt and to have their lives shredded by the encounters. The best known of these is Syrian-conceived Maher Arar, an Ottawa architect (see O'Connor 2006). In every circumstance, the misusing of individual data relating to the casualties was vital to their wrongful detainment. In spite of the fact that security and observation are verifiably fundamental to this circumstance, with some striking special cases (Calhoun 2002) sociological examination did not figure unequivocally in endeavors to comprehend it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]