Early in the morning on May 21, a Twitter user with the handle @mjafleur issued a threat to the students and staff of Carleton University.
“Tomorrow morning, I will be taking many lives at Carleton University. Take this as a warning, if you go to campus you will be among the casualties,” the tweet said at 1:51 a.m. on the Monday.
The post added that there were pressure switches for bombs to be set off all around campus.
The threat was determined not to be credible fairly quickly, according to Brian Billings, the director of the Department of University Safety at Carleton.
“Looking back to the Twitter threat, it said he’d set up those pressure switches on the major pathways in campus,” he said. “It was pretty easy for us to discount that fairly quickly because it would be something that sticks out.”
Despite this, the threat brought home in a startling way that even here in Canada, even on university campuses, potential threats of terrorism exist.
According to the Global Terrorism Index released in 2017, worldwide deaths from terrorism decreased by 13 per cent from 2015 to 2016. Attacks against civilians increased by 17 per cent and since 2014, there has been a shift towards simpler attacks against non-traditional targets.
In a report looking at terrorism attacks in 36 countries including Canada, written by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), half of these countries have experienced a Daesh inspired or directed attack. These account for three quarters of terrorism deaths.
Mass attacks around the world have become a far more frequent occurrence, and Canada has faced its share of losses.
“Looking back to the Twitter threat, it said he’d set up those pressure switches on the major pathways in campus,” he said. “It was pretty easy for us to discount that fairly quickly because it would be something that sticks out.” – Brian Billings, Director of Department of University Safety and Security at Carleton.
According to a report from the Government of Canada, Canada’s terrorism threat level is rated as medium, meaning an attack could happen and additional measures are in place to keep Canadians safe.
However, the Global Peace Index for 2018 reported that Canada is the eighth most peaceful country in the world, and the sixth safest country to live in. But, despite Canada’s reputation of safety, recent attacks in the country and around the world beg the question: where do these attacks come from?
What is terrorism?
According to Jeremy Littlewood, a professor of international affairs at Carleton, the defining factor in whether something is a terrorist attack or not is the presence of the ideological purpose.
In one sense, we must be able to detect and describe or at least identify what that ideological purpose was. Otherwise, it could be a normal crime, he said.
In the Quebec mosque shooting, Alexandre Bissonnette was not charged with a terrorism offence by the prosecution. Instead, he was charged with six counts of murder.
In his statement he said, “I am not a terrorist, nor an Islamophobe, rather a person who was carried away by fear, negative thoughts and a horrible form of despair.”
However, according to Littlewood even if the court did not make a terrorism claim, it doesn’t mean that the attack is automatically not terrorism.
Littlewood cited an example of a school shooting, which can involve violence, but the attacker may not have had an ideology behind his actions; this would therefore not be classified as terrorism.
But a similar incident could be considered terrorism if there was an ideology found to have motivated the attack.
With the van attack that occurred in Toronto in April, it may or may not be considered a terror attack. The perpetrator of the attack is suspected to have had an ideological motive, under the incel movement. Incel, which is short for involuntary celibate, groups believe they have been withheld sexual intercourse by women, something they believe is owed to them. A Facebook account under his name had posted in some incel online forums and chat groups.
Before it can be determined that the attack was a terror attack, there has to be a legal trial.
Mass attacks in Canada
Toronto was the site of the latest mass attack in Canada. A 29-year-old man armed with a handgun, walked down Danforth Avenue and shot two people dead while injuring 13 more. This follows the bombing of a Mississauga restaurant in May, and the van attack in Toronto in April.
In Canada, the main terror threat comes from ìviolent extremists inspired by terrorists groups, according to the 2017 Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada issued by Public Safety Canada.
The report said extremist groups such as Daesh and Al Qaeda, encourage followers to carry out simple attacks using knives or cars.
With the emergence of online communication methods, such as social media, recruiting and communicating with potential followers has become a lot easier for terrorist groups. But it is just part of a process, according to Michael Kempa, director of the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.
“A small number of people who may have mental health problems can be influenced into action by online behaviour. But typically with online recruitment itís just the opening of the door,” he said. “They typically want to meet with these young people as quickly as possible, before someone can have time to think and change their mind, so it’s the gateway into the organization.”
Safety measures and funding
Ottawa Police recently received nearly a million dollars in government funding, to be used over four years, to combat radicalization of vulnerable people. According to the Ottawa Police website, the money will go primarily to the Multiagency Early Risk Intervention Tables (MERIT), an Ottawa police program that works with the local community to improve access to social services for at-risk individuals including those at risk of radicalization to violence and broaden prevention work in Ottawa.
This money will be help to expand the program out of the east portion of the city, to eventually aiming to be citywide, according to Sgt. Anthony Skinner.
“It’s first and foremost allowed us to hire a full-time dedicated staff person to work the program, because MERIT is a collaboration with multiple agencies,” he said. “Each agency has representatives at the table but all of those representatives have regular full-time jobs, so to be able to logistically expand the project city wide, it requires a full-time dedicated person.”
“We’ve had several hundred cases presented since the start of three and a half years ago, we have an over 90 per cent success rate of connecting people to services.” – Sgt. Anthony Skinner on the MERIT program.
Programs such as these are important for law enforcement to prevent people becoming radicalized, according to Kempa.
“Police tend to do much better on the technical side of law enforcement and by that, I mean they are very good at collecting information, and compiling and analyzing information,” he said. “But to do that, you need collaboration with community agencies who are on the ground interacting with communities on a daily basis.”
According to Billings, campaigns that engage the public not only work as education and rehabilitation tools, but also help prevent attacks from happening.
“The airports have been way ahead of this with their “See Something, Say Something campaign, he said. It’s extra eyes and ears for us. We can’t do this alone, it’s a partnership with the community.”
Policies such as the “See Something, Say Something” campaign may seem appealing to law enforcement but may actually be more burdensome than helpful. When the Metropolitan Transport Authority in New York ran a similar campaign, reports of suspicious packages in New York grew from 814 in 2002 to 37,614 in 2006.
“It’s extra eyes and ears for us. We can’t do this alone, it’s a partnership with the community.” – Brian Billings
Similar spikes in calls were seen by the New York police Department, who received 100 suspicious-package calls a day, but according to a New York Times analysis, there is not a single instance where these calls prevented an attack.
“Certainly there has been a lot of suspected instances where people have been walking on campus with a long bag, which was surmised to be a gun case,” said Billings. “So, they report those suspected incidents, and what we determined was they were these fighting sticks [kendo] that they carry in long bags.”
While Billings said in his memory there has never been an instance of an attack against Carleton, security services are updating their technology so they can be prepared if one occurs.
“We’re transitioning over to the Carleton mobile app, which would send push notifications over, or anyone who is logged into a computer on campus would get an alert [in the event of an attack],” he said. “We also have cameras on campus, and we’re moving toward video analytics, which can determine if there is anything in this image that has changed in the past 24, 48 to 72 hours.”
Determining what makes a successful counter-terrorism program can be tricky. But Skinner said he is seeing tangible results with the MERIT program.
“We’ve had several hundred cases presented since the start of three and a half years ago, we have an over 90 per cent success rate of connecting people to services.”
Graphics by Paloma Callo
