Welcome to Fortress Canada

The millions being spent securing the Vancouver Games could be better used elsewhere in Canada

Stuart A. Reid, National Post, Monday, December 29, 2008

Without question, a terrorist attack during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver would be a national tragedy. Nobody wants Vancouver to join the ranks of Munich 1972 or Atlanta 1996 -- Games remembered more for acts of terrorism than for a spirit of internationalism. So it's understandable that officials are so worried about a terrorist attack.

A report by the RCMP's Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit called Canada a "priority target" because of its co-operation with the United States in Afghanistan and in the war on terrorism. Olympic officials are preparing for a chemical, biological or nuclear attack, and the security budget for the Games could reach $1-billion. That's around twice the amount spent for securing the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City -- which took place less than five months after 9/11 and in the country terrorists call the Great Satan.

Yet the greater risk now is not that terrorists might strike Vancouver, but that officials will over-react to an improbable event. Such a reaction incites irrational fear and wastes taxpayer money -- all while doing little to actually make Olympic attendees safer. Welcome to Fortress Canada.

Vancouver is preparing for the worst. The city will employ a sophisticated detection system -- the same type used around the White House -- that can identify chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological threats.
Never mind that no nuclear terrorist attack has ever occurred, or that only a handful of people have been the victims of chemical or biological terrorist attacks, Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) officials are busily prepping the city for a WMD attack. They would do well to consider the statistics: You are much more likely to die in a car accident, by drowning or by crossing the street than you are to die by any type of terrorism.

In fact, Vancouver is an especially improbable terrorist target. Although Canada has its share of Islamic fundamentalists, its foreign policy is considerably less provocative to would-be terrorists than other countries'. As the political scientist Robert A. Pape has shown, terrorists are primarily motivated not by religious fundamentalism, but by foreign occupation of "territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland." A calculated strategy to encourage military withdrawal, not ideology, best explains terrorism. Employed by al-Qaeda, this very strategy worked against Spain, which withdrew its troops from Iraq after the 2004 Madrid train bombings.
Because it opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Canada is considerably more insulated from terrorism than, say, Australia, which supported the war in Iraq and still has troops there. And as the Toronto 18 trial has revealed, in Canada, homegrown terrorist threats are aspirational rather than operational: wannabe jihadists thinking about their next trip to Tim Hortons, not al-Qaeda professionals planning a sophisticated attack.
In any case, there is little evidence these types of security measures actually protect anyone. Despite the nearly $7-billion the U. S. Transportation Security Administration has spent on airport security, Jeffrey Goldberg detailed in a recent issue of The Atlantic how he was able to enter an airport with a forged boarding pass and smuggle pocketknives, nail clippers and liquids onto airplanes. Even an Osama bin Laden T-shirt failed to arouse suspicion.

Canadian officials seem to be engaging in "security theatre" -- measures that provide the appearance of security without actually reducing the risk of a terrorist attack. For example, organizers announced the purchase of 1,650 metal detectors for the 2010 Olympics, even though the head of the 2006 Turin Olympics advised Canadian officials to throw them away.

Such elaborate security measures are sold to the government by what the political scientist John Mueller has called the "terrorism industry," which has a habit of hyping terrorist threats to drum up business. In October, Acklands-Grainger, the official safety equipment supplier to VANOC, organized a seminar at an RCMP training centre, where it stressed the threat of terrorism and touted its own counterterrorist products as a response.

The reaction to terrorism can sometimes be more harmful than terrorism itself, and responding with fear is exactly what terrorists seek. From a dollar-per-life-saved perspective, the millions spent "securing" the Vancouver Games could surely have a greater impact elsewhere in Canada.

And with Prime Minister Stephen Harper ordering fiscal belt-tightening throughout the federal government, the amount of taxpayer money wasted on security becomes even more egregious. After the global economic crisis swept through Canada, VANOC board chairman Jack Poole promised to slash every "unnecessary frill and non-essential component" from the Games' budget. He could start by re-examining the security budget.
The Vancouver Olympics are too important to Canada to be blighted by an over-the-top response to an unlikely threat. With 15 months to go, let's hope sobriety prevails. - Stuart A. Reid is an assistant editor at Foreign Affairs.