Canada – and Manitoba – is no stranger to terrorism, new database shows
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/07/2015 (3190 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Canada is no stranger to terrorism, according to a new effort to compile extremism-related incidents during the past 75 years.
The Canadian Incident Database, which is run by researchers at five universities and funded by a government grant, lists more than 1,800 incidents of extremism or terrorism in Canada or involving Canadians since 1960, including 11 in Manitoba.
The data is especially relevant as concerns grow about foreign terrorism hitting home, with last fall’s attack on Parliament Hill. In Winnipeg, Aaron Driver was jailed after allegedly posting militant Islamist propaganda from his Charleswood home.
The database chronicles how terrorism has been a part of Canadian life for decades. While current governments scramble to pass laws to prosecute terrorists, it is something security services have had to confront for years.
"Terrorism is not a new issue in Canada. It’s been used by most major national political philosophies, religions and social ideologies," said James Ellis, the project lead for the database. "No one has a monopoly on the use of terrorism and violent extremism, and by looking at this problem over time it’s much easier for us to show that we aren’t focusing on one group of people or one ideology."
Manitoba has seen everything from a shooting attack on a doctor who performed abortions, to a bomb threat against the Israeli pavilion at Folklorama, to vandalism at McNally-Robinson Books for stocking Salman Rushdie’s controversial book, The Satanic Verses.
The database also shows how Manitoba dealt with those events. In 1989, after the McNally Robinson window was smashed and gasoline-soaked rags thrown into the store, Paul McNally, the store’s co-owner, said he had no intention of taking Rushdie’s book off the shelves — even though the country’s largest bookseller at the time, Coles, had decided not to stock it.
"If intimidation was the intent, it’s not going to work," he told the Free Press at the time.
There were even two plane hijackings in Manitoba, one involving a Canadian Pacific Airlines flight carrying about 100 people in 1974. The plane, flying on a Montreal-Winnipeg-Edmonton-Vancouver route, was hijacked by Nairn Djemal who boarded it in Winnipeg. He was upset about the political situation in Cyprus, and attacked a flight attendant with a knife before demanding the plane be flown to Cyprus.
Robert Pitcairn, the captain of the flight, convinced the hijacker the plane had to stop in Saskatoon to refuel. Once on the ground, he persuaded Djemal to give up.
"In those days we didn’t have shakedowns at security at the airport… Back then, in the early ’70s, there were hijackings all over the country. Most of the guys were political, there wasn’t terrorism, like some guys went to Cuba, and (my hijacker) wanted to go to Cyprus," Pitcairn said from his Chilliwack, B.C., home.
The more serious airplane captures and bombings came later.
Still, Pitcairn had attended a training session on how to deal with hijackers just a few days earlier, and was able to end the situation peacefully.
The database is filled with incidents such as these, along with threats, targeted killings, minor bombings and other such attacks. The database uses the Criminal Code definition of terrorism, which includes acts intended to intimidate the public for a political, religious or ideological cause. Taken together, they offer a clear statistical overview of the terrorist threat in Canada.
Researchers draw upon publicly available sources such as legal documents, books, journals and news reports to find extremism or terrorism incidents. They verify an event by citing multiple sources, which are included in the database.
The database is currently the most comprehensive listing of such incidents in Canada, but Ellis says it is a work in progress. More funding for the next phases of the project means more incidents may be added by researchers who will expand the sources they can draw upon and fill in gaps in the data for certain time periods.
"We are raising the bar on the quality of national security research on this issue, which means that government will see better policy papers, it’ll see better educated students and junior analysts who will eventually go on to positions of power," Ellis said. He added the database would help researchers and the public ask better questions, and get away from "generalities" about terrorism and rely instead on statistics.
Those better questions could include, "Does that mean we are doing the right thing, or is there a way we can improve? Or sometimes save money? Maybe we’ve been preparing for a threat that just isn’t borne out in the data yet," Ellis said.
Organizers are trying to get more funding to include detailed information on terrorist groups and leaders and allow richer mapping abilities.
Pitcairn, the pilot who handled a hijacking before the days of post-9/11 airline security, said the hijacker called him after being released, apparently to apologize, but Pitcairn didn’t want to hear from him. He flew right after the incident, turning down an offer from the airline to take a holiday.
"I took out another guy just three years later. He had just got out of Stony Mountain (penitentiary) and wasn’t supposed to leave Winnipeg… He got onto my airplane and I took him to Saskatoon and had him arrested. He was fighting on the airplane," Pitcairn said.
"Winnipeg is quite the town for me."
To see the full database, go to extremism.ca
inayat.singh@freepress.mb.ca