{"id":20582,"date":"2022-05-31T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-31T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/?p=20582"},"modified":"2022-10-08T09:58:21","modified_gmt":"2022-10-08T13:58:21","slug":"why-our-national-security-needs-more-empathy-stephanie-carvin-reassesses-the-threats-facing-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/2022-05-31\/why-our-national-security-needs-more-empathy-stephanie-carvin-reassesses-the-threats-facing-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"Why our national security needs more empathy: Stephanie Carvin reassesses the threats facing Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This episode of Hub Dialogues features host Sean Speer in conversation with Carleton University professor Stephanie Carvin about her <a href=\"https:\/\/utorontopress.com\/9781487524517\/stand-on-guard\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">interesting new book<\/a>, <em>Stand On Guard: Reassessing Threats to Canada\u2019s National Security<\/em>, which has been shortlisted for the prestigious Donner Prize for the best public policy book by a Canadian. The prize will be awarded on Tuesday, May 31.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The two discuss new and emerging challenges to Canada&#8217;s national security, including extremism driven by online radicalization, the differences between &#8220;mal-&#8220;, &#8220;mis-&#8220;, and &#8220;disinformation&#8221;, and the importance of empathy in tackling these problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Embed Player\" width=\"100%\" height=\"188px\" src=\"https:\/\/embed.acast.com\/61d335631b91cf0012c4cb3d\/6294de56da6c6a001257ec50\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border:none;overflow:hidden;\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p>You can listen to this episode of Hub Dialogues on <a href=\"https:\/\/shows.acast.com\/hub-dialogues\/episodes\/episode-63-dialogue-with-stephanie-carvin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Acast<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/music.amazon.ca\/podcasts\/922014d9-f2b1-4cf8-a0de-09da2d5870a4\/episodes\/73e16265-202d-44d0-ab49-793ff75ef002\/hub-dialogues-episode-63-dialogue-with-stephanie-carvin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/ca\/podcast\/episode-63-dialogue-with-stephanie-carvin\/id1605647948?i=1000564555652\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.google.com\/feed\/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5hY2FzdC5jb20vcHVibGljL3Nob3dzL2h1Yi1kaWFsb2d1ZXM\/episode\/NjI5NGRlNTZkYTZjNmEwMDEyNTdlYzUw?sa=X&amp;ved=0CAQQ8qgGahcKEwjwy-3Dzof4AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Google<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/213lUVMDg8MzUmlpBWOKfe\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=TnFtt7Hl89M\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">YouTube<\/a>. A transcript of the episode is available below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Transcripts of our podcast episodes are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>SEAN SPEER: <\/strong>Welcome to Hub Dialogues. I&#8217;m your host, Sean Speer, editor-at-large at <em>The Hub<\/em>. I&#8217;m honoured to be joined today by Carleton University professor Stephanie Carvin, whose book, <em>Stand on Guard: Reassessing Threats to Canada&#8217;s National Security<\/em>, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Donner Prize for the best public policy book by a Canadian. The prize will be awarded on Tuesday, May 31. Stephanie, thank you for joining us at Hub Dialogues, and congratulations on the book and its success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>STEPHANIE CARVIN: <\/strong>Well, thanks for having me, and thanks for the congrats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>SEAN SPEER: <\/strong>The book&#8217;s title calls for a reassessment of Canada&#8217;s national security threat. What did we used to think and why does it need to be reassessed now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>STEPHANIE CARVIN: <\/strong>So, I call for a reassessment in the sense that it&#8217;s not that I think a lot of the threats have changed. We&#8217;re still dealing with violent extremism; we&#8217;re still dealing with espionage; we&#8217;re still dealing with foreign interference. But the way we need to actually think about those threats needs to be what I described as responsibly\u2014underscore, underscore, underscore\u2014widened. And that&#8217;s not to say we need to turn everything into a national security threat issue. But when we think about violent extremism, I mean, for a long time we thought it only came from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, when just based on the events of 2022 we can see that&#8217;s clearly not the case, that there are other major threats out there. And we also need to think about who&#8217;s impacted by these.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A lot of the time when we think about violent extremism, we think about bombs going off. But really, there&#8217;s so much more that we have to worry about, and this includes, for example, people who fundraise for these movements; people who facilitate these actors; what happens to communities when radicalizers go and try to target children. That&#8217;s increasingly what we&#8217;re seeing. I mean, we can just look at the Buffalo attack, which although it was not in Canada, it&#8217;s very similar. We&#8217;ve seen other attacks, the London attack of 2021, where very young people are consuming radicalizing materials and then acting out in violence. So, these are the kinds of things that we need to think about as violent extremist activity. It&#8217;s not just the attacks in and of themselves. That&#8217;s what I mean effectively by widening, and that&#8217;s really what I mean by reassessing.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The other thing I would add to this is that we need to do this not out of fear. I think when we have new and scary situations, we do so out of fear; we do so in a reactionary kind of way. And that&#8217;s something else that I&#8217;m trying to warn against, which is that we need to ground our responses, strangely enough, in empathy. This may seem counterintuitive because maybe we don&#8217;t think of CSIS as the most empathetic organization, and there are many historical reasons for that, but really, from a policy response, this is what we need. We need empathy with those communities that are experiencing these challenges. We have to think about the impact of when a company loses all of its intellectual property because it&#8217;s been hacked, the impact on workers, and things like that. So that&#8217;s kind of my reassessing approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>SEAN SPEER: <\/strong>That&#8217;s great, and we&#8217;ll come back to the issue of empathy which really does run through the book. Let me ask about the source of these new and emerging threats. You observe that most national security threats today come from homegrown sources.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What legal or operational gaps are there currently in our ability to identify, track, and even proactively intervene in these cases? Should the government be pursuing changes or reforms in order to strengthen our ability to mitigate some of these spectacular threats manifesting themselves?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>STEPHANIE CARVIN: <\/strong>That&#8217;s a really good question. I think there are both cultural and legal barriers. So, cultural is kind of what I started out with. For a long time, we assumed that terrorism could only come from the Middle East or from Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, and we&#8217;ve seen that in our prosecutions. The vast majority of terrorism prosecutions in this country are for acts that were carried out to further the end of Al Qaeda or the Islamic state. But on the other hand, when we&#8217;re talking about white nationalists or white supremacists, they&#8217;re oftentimes for hate crimes. So, that&#8217;s an issue of hypocrisy that I think has impacted the way we look at these threats for a very long time. I do think it&#8217;s starting to change. But it is, I think, a cultural barrier.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And, you know, one of the things I have to think of is\u2014I want to be careful what I say here because the Freedom Convoy is a very large and complex movement\u2014but within that movement, there were extremists at the core of it, but also, I think, some who tried to latch on to it as well. And if that group had been any other group, if these people had been doing this for pretty much any other kind of extremist cause, we would have probably had a very different response from the police. Would they have let them come into town and do these kinds of things? When you had an extremist group, Diagolon, for example, coming in and recording themselves saying, &#8220;Hey, let&#8217;s turn this into Canada&#8217;s January 6,&#8221; before the event, and the police still kind of welcoming them in, you wonder like, &#8220;Are there systemic biases inherent?&#8221; And the answer is almost certainly, yes. So, I think that there are those cultural challenges.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But legally, there are a lot of challenges too, and some of them relate to inertia. We just are really bad at updating our national security legislation. But I would say in addition to that, a lot of the questions we have to answer are complex, and I think there are some challenges here. So, for one example with violent extremism, the priority threat becomes what we call ideologically motivated violent extremism, which we usually associate with, not perfectly, the far-right, white supremacists\u2014but you know, even in some cases the far left, it depends what we&#8217;re talking about. The distinctions aren&#8217;t always clear, even to the movements themselves. These movements exist online, right? They&#8217;re really online movements.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, to what extent do we want our national security agencies going online into these spaces and looking for threat-related activity? Do we want CSIS monitoring the internet is the question that we have to ask ourselves. And if so, to what extent? Because that&#8217;s a really tough question to answer. And a lot of people, a lot of civil liberties groups, have raised serious questions about how this is done, how data is absorbed, ingested, retained, and then eventually turned into products. These are very good questions.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another good question is even in the area of critical infrastructure protection, where you have problems with different\u2014particularly given the Russia-Ukraine war\u2014we&#8217;re worried about attacks on our critical infrastructure. And most critical infrastructure in Canada, as in most Western countries, is in private sector hands. But the CSIS Act actually limits who that organization can talk to. It can only really advise the government of Canada; it doesn&#8217;t give it permission to talk outside the government of Canada. So, do we actually want our national security agencies being able to talk to the private sector?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But again, civil liberties groups raise the question, &#8220;So are you going to then talk about Indigenous protesters to logging companies and mining companies? And who would do the oversight of this and these kinds of activities?&#8221; So, yes it&#8217;s a very long answer, but the answer is we have both these kinds of cultural issues. But also, we have to make some very hard decisions about how we want our national security agencies to engage in this space. It is hard to hit that right balance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>SEAN SPEER: <\/strong>The books definitely also talk about the human resource and operational capacity of our national security organizations. You&#8217;ve worked in these organizations and even interviewed many of the current officials for your academic scholarship.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What&#8217;s your sense of how we compare to peer jurisdictions when it comes to human resources and overall capacity? What are our strengths and weaknesses?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>STEPHANIE CARVIN: <\/strong>So, one of the issues is that generally speaking, and the national security intelligence committee of parliamentarians, which is one of the review bodies we have set up in Canada, did a study on Human Resources issues in Canada, including equality, diversity, and inclusion issues, and they found that while some organizations are doing okay, by and large, national security agencies are still behind other government agencies when it comes to recruiting more diverse individuals. That impacts how these organizations run, how they look at issues.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The other thing we found is\u2014I wrote a book separate from this one, everyone should just buy all my books, that should be the theme of this podcast\u2014but another book that I think you definitely featured on <em>The Hub<\/em>, I believe last December, was the <em>Intelligence of Policymaking in Canada,<\/em> and for that, we actually asked officials in Canada how they felt about diversity. What was really interesting is that there were clearly two different ways they thought about diversity in the national security establishment. Some people were actually talking about EDI issues. Representation and how that matters. But it was also clear that people were thinking of like neurodiversity, and diversity in the way that people think, and that you need people who think differently. That&#8217;s a different kind of diversity than EDI.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, it&#8217;s funny. I&#8217;m not sure that the community itself has really thought about what it means. You can bring in people who are diverse ethnically and religiously into an organization. But if that organization still has systemic barriers in it, it&#8217;s not going to be very different. If everyone still thinks the same way, it&#8217;s not going to be very different. But then again, you can bring in people who are neurodiverse, but that doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean that you&#8217;re hitting various EDI goals. So, there&#8217;s a lot more that we need to do.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We do have trouble recruiting generally. If you want to work in national security, it&#8217;s a long process that can take up to 18 months for security clearance. It&#8217;s a black box. Often you don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s happening. You&#8217;re just kind of waiting for, every few months, an email from HR. Some organizations have identified recruitment as possibly even one of their chief threats. Like the fact that if you are trying to recruit cyber talent, well, you&#8217;re competing with Google, you&#8217;re competing with organizations that can pay a lot more money. So, it&#8217;s all these are huge challenges that we&#8217;re facing from an HR perspective. And yeah, I&#8217;m not sure we&#8217;ve squared the circle on that either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>SEAN SPEER: <\/strong>If I could just follow up with a supplementary question. Today is May 26th. We released an episode of Hub Dialogues with former Canadian ambassador to China David Mulroney earlier today in which, amongst other things, he argued that the government of Canada needs to up its China competency.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, maybe just more broadly, are we within our national security organizations developing capacities in these new areas of potential threat from new and emerging geopolitical risks? You mentioned cyber attacks and other forms of technological attacks on Canada. Like, do you have a sense, Stephanie, in addition to the big question of EDI, if we have the right set of skills and talents and experiences to carry out the kind of national security operations that we need to in the new world you described in the book?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>STEPHANIE CARVIN: <\/strong>I&#8217;ll answer this with two points. The first point is that one of the things that when it comes to\u2014I agree very much with David Mulroney and what he&#8217;s saying. We don&#8217;t actually do area studies in this country. We don&#8217;t, and I think that&#8217;s a huge problem. We don&#8217;t really teach people French. You know, in Ontario you can kind of get out of it pretty early in your education. And I think that&#8217;s something we really lacked. If you go to a lot of countries around the world people are speaking like three, four languages, and it&#8217;s so important, right? And then even at the tertiary level of education, we&#8217;re not teaching the area studies in the way that I think would be useful and promote cultural exchange and understanding. So, I think that&#8217;s another issue.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But also, I think there&#8217;s an issue that&#8217;s structural in national security agencies, which is that we have, in many of them\u2014I can speak specifically to RCMP and CSIS\u2014which is that they have a generalist model. If you work for the RCMP, you go, you do your training in Depot, Saskatchewan, and then you probably spend a couple of years doing rural policing somewhere on a contract basis. And then suddenly, you&#8217;re put on a complex national security file, and you&#8217;re not necessarily given the kind of training that you need in order to run this.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We&#8217;ve had time and time again, problems with the way evidence is collected, understood, done, because we don&#8217;t really develop specialization. And I find that in Canada we don&#8217;t do training; we don&#8217;t do a lot of language training; we don&#8217;t do area training; we don&#8217;t invest in education. There&#8217;s that aspect of the training and education element, which should be ongoing.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I mean, one of the things that\u2014there&#8217;s a lot to criticize with the U.S. military, and let&#8217;s just say that\u2014but one of the things they&#8217;re always doing is investing in their top leadership. There are a lot of generals, and their senior leadership have masters and PhDs. They go out and do that. Canada, we don&#8217;t really invest in that way. Then on top of that, this generalist model, which assumes that you can be put into any role and do any kind of investigation and be fine because you&#8217;ve been trained as an intelligence officer, I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s right. I think we actually need to have a mix of generalists and specialists within our national security organizations. But this is actually just a holdover from colonial days, back to the RCMP back in the 1870s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>SEAN SPEER: <\/strong>That&#8217;s a great answer. A lot of food for thought there, Stephanie. If I can shift the subject to another topic, the book takes on which is the somewhat controversial issue of misinformation and disinformation. If you&#8217;ll permit me, let me ask a three-part question.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>First, how do you define these terms? Second, how do you differentiate between state-sponsored efforts versus individual activities? And three, how can we ensure that efforts to challenge or even remove misinformation and disinformation from the internet don&#8217;t threaten debatable yet legitimate ideas or arguments?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>STEPHANIE CARVIN: <\/strong>Wow, those are some heavy questions. I feel like this can be a podcast in and of itself. So there&#8217;s disinformation. Disinformation is where you&#8217;re trying to actively promote something that&#8217;s false. Like you&#8217;re trying to promote a rumor. For example, we have seen from Russia a lot of effort to promote this idea that 5G causes COVID right at the beginning of the pandemic, or that vaccines are bad for you. All these kinds of things. Then you have misinformation, which is where the intention is a little bit different. Some people who are just misinformed are spreading bad information to people who are out there. It&#8217;s not really the same kind of intention as disinformation, but it can be just as harmful. So, someone who is reading some of these things and then is posting their own information about them and that information is wrong.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then I&#8217;ve actually had a third category to that, which is sometimes called malinformation. Malinformation is where you have information that&#8217;s actually hacked on the internet. So, they call it doxxing someone, D-O-X-X-I-N-G, where you get someone&#8217;s personal information then you dump it all over the internet and then you spread it for malicious purposes. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the John Podesta emails. They took the emails of a senior Democratic adviser and Hillary Clinton, and by they I mean Russia, and they spread it all over the internet. That&#8217;s a kind of malinformation.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There really are different kinds of actors in this space. You&#8217;re right, there are both state actors and individuals in this space. I actually think the state actor aspect to this can be overrated. For a number of reasons. One, the vast majority of mis-dis-malinformation that we receive in Canada is almost certainly from the United States, and from actors in the United States. Non-state actors. There was a survey, I think, that was done by the Global Rapid Reaction Mechanism, the GRRM, at Global Affairs Canada looking at potential sources of disinformation in one of the Alberta elections, and they found that the vast majority of it, like the vast, vast, vast majority, almost all of it, was from Albertans themselves. From Canadians themselves. So, there&#8217;s that aspect of it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then there&#8217;s a second part of it here, too, which is that just because a campaign exists doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean it&#8217;s going to work. A lot of times you have people who are already predisposed to believe certain ideas. They see this and they agree with it, so they put it out. But just because you see a piece of disinformation doesn&#8217;t automatically make you believe it. It&#8217;s actually hard to hack human brains that are out there. There&#8217;s a lot more that&#8217;s happening than just mis-dis-malinformation. And, you know, that gets to problems of trust and beliefs, so it&#8217;s a side unit of extremism and populism and all these other questions.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So yeah, I would actually say the individual or non-state level here is probably actually the more complex, and then that speaks to your third question: what do you then do about it? I think to a large extent, it&#8217;s gonna depend on when we can find things that are artificially amplified by states.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the things that we saw\u2014there&#8217;s this extremely tragic case that&#8217;s happening right now in the United States with the shooting in Texas at a school. Almost immediately after malicious actors were trying to blame a transgendered individual for having committed the act. And we&#8217;ve already seen some transgender violence as directly as a result of that disinformation campaign about it. I think we have to do something about it. The social media platforms themselves are aware of this, they have been pretty successful in some aspects of this.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, for example, the Buffalo shooter, when he started live-streaming his attacks they were able to take down the live video, I believe, within two minutes of that. That&#8217;s actually relatively impressive. The fact that the Christchurch shooting, after the video was uploaded, Facebook ended up\u2014there was I think 1.6 million attempts to upload the video which Facebook was able to take down 1.3 very, very quickly. But that still left 300,000 attempts that they had to then go in and find and take down as well. So we are seeing the social media companies themselves learning how to respond to this and in a much more quick fashion.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The problem is, though, it&#8217;s the more slow-moving radicalization material that these individuals are consuming over time. You can take down videos of someone shooting someone, but the fact is we know from the manifestos in both of those incidents that these people had been consuming far-right materials for a very long period of time, and that&#8217;s where we need to focus our efforts. How we do that in a democratic way is an extremely complicated question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I mean, we do have laws in Canada about hate speech and things like this, we just don&#8217;t seem to be able to enforce them online and in a way that is easy. I think the other thing here that&#8217;s a challenge is the takedown orders. This can sometimes impede police investigations o researchers who are trying to understand this phenomenon. There are a lot of hard questions here.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I do note that the government has set up a committee of experts that includes both lawyers and experts on extremism who will be reporting by the end of the summer on a procedure to follow. So I&#8217;m just going to cop out of this long answer. Although to be fair, it&#8217;s a long question. I get a cop-out of this by saying I know we are expecting a report and I eagerly await the recommendations of it that I believe will be going to the heritage Minister sometime later this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>SEAN SPEER: <\/strong>Stephanie, in effect, I think what I&#8217;m hearing from you is that this will necessarily require a process of trial and error and something of an iterative legal regime as opposed to a big bang. Do you want to just talk a bit about how this would involve policymakers rethinking the way that they do national security legislation from a tendency in the past to think you just need to pass a law that solves our problems versus this process of trial-and-error iteration that you&#8217;ve just outlined?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>STEPHANIE CARVIN: <\/strong>What my concern is when we answer these questions is really how we&#8217;re not going to answer this with platitudes. Like, the best answer to hate speech is more speech. I mean, the fact is this is going to be messy, and we&#8217;re going to get things wrong. I just think the idea that we&#8217;re going to have this perfect policy is going to be a problem. And actually, I think that&#8217;s a problem for national security policy generally, which is that in Canada, we don&#8217;t actually pass a lot of legislation very often. We have this idea that, okay, we&#8217;re gonna pass this omnibus bill, usually in the wake of a tragedy like 9\/11 or the October 2014 shootings, that we pass these large bills thinking, &#8220;Okay, we&#8217;ve solved the problem and we don&#8217;t have to think about this again for another 10 years.&#8221; Whereas other jurisdictions they&#8217;ll pass little small bills every other year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The fact is we need to get used to having policies that are much more flexible and laws that can be updated much more quickly, especially when we&#8217;re dealing with these kinds of fluid issues. Because we have to work with the assumption that our first attempts to do this are going to be flawed, whether it is trying to restrict the amount of information, or how we do these things in terms of the information space. But also things like restricting funding from China when it comes to our research labs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The government has come in and introduced all these policies now about if you want federal funding, we&#8217;re going to restrict which partners you can use. They&#8217;ve put in these policies, and there are already concerns being raised about prejudice against Asian-American or Asian-Canadian scholars, that they are being left out of applications because there&#8217;s too much fear that they&#8217;re going to be rejected by the government because they&#8217;re Chinese. That&#8217;s a real problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The fact is when you put these policies in place, we need to be much more nimble about them and not just see them as &#8220;Okay, we fixed this problem. Now let&#8217;s go to the next problem. Now let&#8217;s go to the next problem.&#8221; We need to have a much more robust policy. But this gets into problems of Parliament and how we don&#8217;t pass a lot of bills anymore, and that&#8217;s another issue entirely, but it does impact national security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>SEAN SPEER: <\/strong>Stephanie, let me ask a penultimate question about cyber attacks. It&#8217;s something you mentioned earlier, but it&#8217;s worth expanding upon because it&#8217;s a topic that the book directly addresses. How well is Canada prepared today for cyber attacks? And what should be the role of the public and private sectors to improve our capacity to defend against such attacks on our critical infrastructure?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>STEPHANIE CARVIN: <\/strong>There&#8217;s a lot we do actually don&#8217;t know about cyber attacks in Canada and for important structural reasons. The government doesn&#8217;t like to give a lot of its secret classified information to the private sector, and the private sector doesn&#8217;t like to raise up its hand and say, &#8220;Hey, look, we got hacked,&#8221; because that&#8217;s not good for its reputation or investment that&#8217;s often needed. So they often keep these things very quiet. Or if they&#8217;re subject to a ransomware attack or their data is being held hostage, they often will find a middleman to deal with it and then pay the ransom, get the information back, rather than exposing it. And the only time we ever know if that&#8217;s the case is if personal information is taken, then it has to be reported to the Privacy Commissioner.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So all that being said, we don&#8217;t actually have great insight into how badly Canada&#8217;s being hacked. I think there&#8217;s a large assumption that with the <a href=\"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/tag\/remote-working\/\">work from home<\/a> environment we now seem to be in, even as we&#8217;re getting out of the pandemic, that there has been a surge of cybercrime because people are no longer behind corporate machines and things like that, they&#8217;re working on their home computer that maybe does not have the best up to date software and things like this. And also a lot of the hackers we&#8217;ve seen recently have been very creative with how they&#8217;re doing their crime; effectively by saying, &#8220;Oh, here&#8217;s your COVID test results,&#8221; and sending a malicious link and things like this. So, there&#8217;s a lot we don&#8217;t know and that&#8217;s a problem.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At this wider scale of critical infrastructure, it&#8217;s interesting. Harvard University&#8217;s Belfer Center ranked Canada as number eight in the world, really, for its cyber defensive capabilities. Like we&#8217;re doing a not totally terrible job. One of the advantages that Canada has over its allies is that we&#8217;re much more nimble. We&#8217;ve really centralized our cyber responses in the Communications Security Establishment and the Canada Centre for Cybersecurity. And that&#8217;s good. Because in the U.S. cyber defense is across something like thirteen different agencies that all have to coordinate their responses when a major incident happens. And so we&#8217;re much more nimble in that respect, and I think that&#8217;s a good thing. But we have a long way to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Companies would rather invest or pay dividends to their shareholders. They don&#8217;t want to invest in cybersecurity. Hospitals would rather hire nurses or buy machinery rather than invest in cybersecurity. And then you have cases like in Newfoundland, last year, where where your entire hospital system goes down because it&#8217;s subject to what was almost certainly a ransomware attack. We are still exceptionally vulnerable in these ways, and we really need to encourage the private sector to be investing in these ways. So, it&#8217;s gonna be interesting to see.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The government did just announce, of course, that it is banning, or it&#8217;s coming up with\u2014sorry, I should say more correctly\u2014it&#8217;s coming up with a process by which Huawei and ZTE, two Chinese companies, will be banned from 5G and therefore important parts of our critical infrastructure. But accompanying that is going to be legislation that&#8217;s going to enhance cybersecurity. Because people think that just simply banning Huawei or ZTE is going to fix the problem. It&#8217;s not right.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The problem is that in all technology there are these gaping holes. Something we often call zero-days, where there are security flaws that we don&#8217;t know about that can be exploited by malicious actors. We need the government to do more in terms of regulation, and in terms of requirements, and possibly introducing policies that will help plug some of these holes so that if things start really going bad in the Russia-Ukraine war, that we don&#8217;t have to worry about things like our dams or electrical grids and things like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>SEAN SPEER: <\/strong>You&#8217;ve been so generous with your time, Stephanie. Let me wrap up with a final question that comes back to a point you made earlier about empathy. Just have you elaborate a bit on the book&#8217;s argument that Canada should avoid, quote, &#8220;Securitizing every threat and instead deploy empathy to deal with some of these national security issues.&#8221; What do you mean by that? And why is empathy a better approach than securitization?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>STEPHANIE CARVIN: <\/strong>Securitization is the process by which you take an issue, a political issue, and you say, &#8220;This is now a security threat,&#8221; and therefore you&#8217;re taking it out of the realm of normal politics. And you&#8217;re kind of saying we need extra-legal means or special emergency powers to actually deal with this thing. No shade on the <em>Emergencies Act<\/em>, which can be a whole different podcast as well. But the fact is that there was a lot of people saying the pandemic is a national security threat. Because of the impact that it has on our economy, on our lives, and all these things. And I would say, no, the pandemic is not a national security threat. It is a public health emergency with national security elements in it. Climate change is not a national security threat. It is a policy challenge, and it&#8217;s definitely a crisis. But it&#8217;s not one that we should be dealing with.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t think CSIS should have a climate change bureau. I mean, what it should be studying are the impacts that climate change could have on the international security environment. That makes a lot more sense. That&#8217;s what I mean. We need to right-size our understanding of what security is, and just because something&#8217;s bad doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s a national security threat. There are a lot of people who want to widen the idea of security, and I&#8217;ve argued for widening the idea of threat but not necessarily our conception of security. I try to keep it fairly minimal because I don&#8217;t want CSIS pontificating on these issues. They have enough to deal with right now. So, I actually think the better response is empathy in a lot of ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s like how do we partner with communities where we know radicalizers are going in and targeting children or that have just suffered a violent extremist attack? How do we work with companies that are under the pressure of possibly being hacked and deal with them in such a way and help them recover, while perhaps being mindful of what they need in order to continue to thrive and things like that?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the key issues here, too, is foreign interference, or what I call clandestine foreign influence in the book. For a long time, we&#8217;ve seen communities in Canada, the Tamil community, the Chinese community, and aspects of the Indian diaspora, they&#8217;ve been targeted by state actors and harassed. And the fact is, we&#8217;ve always seen this as a foreign issue. We don&#8217;t see these groups as Canadians, right? We don&#8217;t see them as a part of our country, a part of our fabric. But the fact is, they are and it&#8217;s unacceptable that they are being hacked, that they&#8217;re being tracked, that they&#8217;re being threatened by foreign states while they&#8217;re on Canadian territory.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, we need to react in such a way that&#8217;s empathetic. And perhaps most controversially, I&#8217;ll end on a controversial note, because why not be interesting, but even with the convoys in Ottawa. Not everyone there is or was a Nazi. Not everyone there was a malicious actor. This was a populist movement, and the way we need to understand the vast majority of people who participated, at least in the opening days, they were frustrated. Like, I&#8217;m frustrated with the pandemic. I&#8217;m tired of lockdowns. I&#8217;m tired of having my life restricted. Now, I&#8217;m not going to go out and protest in the streets, but I&#8217;m tired too, right? And suddenly, you have a group that offers a policy solution, which is let&#8217;s just drop everything. We&#8217;re gonna drop everything. We&#8217;re going to get rid of all the mandates and we&#8217;re gonna protest so we have it. And you know what, they offered a solution where government at all levels, municipal, provincial, and federal, didn&#8217;t offer anything. They weren&#8217;t offering hope. They were just saying, &#8220;Well, you know, we&#8217;ll wait and see.&#8221; Like, they didn&#8217;t offer any kind of hope. And I think that&#8217;s where we needed to be empathetic. I think that was the missed opportunity for this.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, I think when we look back at this, we have to do so through empathetic eyes and people who were tired of\u2014and again, I&#8217;m not excusing the behavior of the organizers or the neo-Nazi groups that were trying to take advantage of this\u2014but some of the perhaps initial supporters of this wave who saw a policy solution being offered and were supportive of that because they&#8217;re just so tired of everything. And that&#8217;s a kind of empathy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It doesn&#8217;t mean we have to agree with them, but we have to understand their perspective in doing so. I think if we did this, then it might offer us some ways out. Again, we have to be super careful here. I don&#8217;t want to do legitimate disinformation and things like that, but understanding perhaps the policy failures that led to this movement, I think it&#8217;s gonna be really important in terms of countering it as we go forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>SEAN SPEER: <\/strong>That&#8217;s just one of the many key insights of Stephanie Carvin&#8217;s book <em>Stand on Guard: Reassessing Threats to Canada&#8217;s National Security.<\/em> It&#8217;s up for the Donner Prize. This episode will be released on May 31, which happens to be the day the Donner Prize will be awarded. Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us at Hub Dialogues, and good luck on the awarding of the prize on May 31st.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>STEPHANIE CARVIN: <\/strong>You know honestly, they say it&#8217;s an honour to be nominated, and I really mean that. I&#8217;m up against some crazy, amazing competition, some just brilliant authors, and just to even see my name out there is like winning the prize itself. So, I&#8217;m happy as we are, this is good, this is good, this is great. And to have this come out that day, that&#8217;s even better. So, thank you for having me on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sean Speer sits down with Carleton University professor Stephanie Carvin to discuss challenges to Canada&#8217;s national security, including extremism driven by online radicalization, and the increasing importance of empathy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":20622,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2022-10-08T13:58:15Z","apple_news_api_id":"811fa0b9-d639-40e7-af6a-cc71810abbae","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2022-10-08T13:58:15Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AgR-gudY5QOevasxxgQq7rg","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":"","_custom_css":"","_custom_scss":""},"categories":[124,55,56,64,69],"tags":[],"hub_format":[85],"thefutureofnews":[],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20582"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20582"},{"taxonomy":"format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hub_format?post=20582"},{"taxonomy":"thefutureofnews","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thefutureofnews?post=20582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}