How the Tragedy of 9/11 Made Canada a Better, More Sensible Country

How much has Canada changed in the last eleven years? Consider this: As the World Trade Center rubble was still smoldering, the then-leader of Canada’s left-wing NDP party, Alexa McDonough, declared: “As responsible international citizens, it is important to reaffirm our commitment to pursuing peaceful solutions to the tensions and hostilities that breed such mindless violence.” A year later, in a CBC interview broadcast on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, then-prime minister Jean Chrétien suggested the 9/11 attacks might have been a reaction to Western greed and arrogance: “You cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others.”

Such remarks would be unthinkable now. Canada is a place where even most mainstream leftists recognize the need for military intervention as a means of disrupting terrorism and protecting local populations.

Before 9/11, for instance, Canada’s involvement in the bombing of Muammar Gaddafi’s loyalists in Libya in the spring of 2011 would have been a major political issue: Ms. McDonough and other well-known Canadian activists such as Naomi Klein and Judy Rebick would have locked arms and marched on Parliament Hill, demanding a “peaceful solution.” Yet in the 2011 federal election campaign, the word “Libya” was scarcely mentioned by any politician of note, even as the bombs were falling. Nor did anyone make much of Afghanistan, where 158 Canadian soldiers have died.

In short, the last 11 years have fundamentally transformed Canada’s attitude toward foreign policy, and the use of force more generally. After a quarter-century pacifist interregnum, we once again became comfortable with our proper historical role as an active military ally to the United States and Britain. Canadians now stand up and salute their soldiers at NHL hockey games. A major part of Ontario’s Highway 401 — the road travelled by fallen soldiers from CFB Trenton to the coroner’s office in Toronto — has been renamed the Highway of Heroes. These are small, symbolic gestures that any American would see as entirely normal. But they would have been unthinkable in the pre-9/11 era, when our Liberal leaders still entertained gauzy visions of a world without war.

For students of the Canadian response to 9/11, it is important to remember what the country’s response to previous major terrorist attacks had been. The worst of these was the June 23, 1985, mid-air bombing of Air India Flight 182. The destruction of that aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean killed all 329 people on board. The main suspects were militant Canadian Sikhs seeking to punish India in the wake of the Indian army’s 1984 attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab.

Until 9/11, the downing of Air India flight 182 was the deadliest attack in the history of modern terrorism. In per capita terms, it was roughly equivalent to 9/11. Yet the effect on Canadian attitudes was miniscule. While 270 of the 329 victims were Canadian, most had some tie to India. Bizarrely, the Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney, phoned his Indian counterpart in India to express his condolences — as if this were primarily an Indian disaster. There was a feeling that Canada and the West weren’t being targeted, but rather a country far away.

Most white Canadians didn’t feel that they were under any risk from the Sikh threat; and they hadn’t the slightest interest in the foreign-policy issues underlying the attack on flight 182. At the time militant elements within Canada’s Sikh community were campaigning openly to create an independent Sikh state called Khalistan in the Indian Punjab — a region that 99 out of 100 Canadians couldn’t find on a map. While many Americans became interested in the Muslim faith after 9/11, there was no comparable intellectual movement in Canada following the downing of flight 182. Canadian laws remained largely unchanged, and the criminal investigation of the flight 182 attacks stumbled along in amateurish fashion for two decades.

Prevailing Canadian attitudes remained similar in the 1990s, when Canada was used as a base of operations and a source of financing for the Tamil Tigers, a Sri Lankan terrorist group and insurgent army. Many of these extremists had come into the country as refugees following Sri Lanka’s descent into civil war in the 1980s. The fact that the Tigers got much of their funds by extorting Tamil-owned businesses in the suburbs of Toronto was well known in Canadian security circles. But there was little incentive to act on the matter, because the problem was seen as a Tamil one, not a Canadian one.

Canada’s status as a self-consciously multicultural state also was a hindrance to any sort of muscular response to the presence of terrorist bagmen and operatives in the country. The Liberal party in particular enjoyed a lengthy run in power between 1993 and 2006, building much of its support on being known as “the party of immigrants.” Many of the most powerful and cohesive voting blocs at Liberal leadership conventions were Sikhs, Tamils and Muslims — groups that all had their own reasons for opposing an aggressive anti-terrorism campaign. Sikh gurdwaras were seen as especially rich targets, since the trove of cash donations they collected every week could easily be channeled into political donations or get-out-the-vote drives.

Most scandalously, Liberal members of parliament in the Toronto suburbs would appear at events where the Tamil Tiger insignia was on open display. Politicians from all parties would attend Sikh parades where floats bore the image of “martyrs” who had blown up flight 182 or performed assassinations in India. “Ethno-politics” exercised a huge disincentive on any Canadian politician who sought to rein in extremists within immigrant communities.

One particularly telling episode occurred in 2000, when it emerged that Liberal cabinet ministers had attended a May 6 fundraising dinner organized by the Federation of Associations of Canadian Tamils, a group that had been identified in a report by the U.S. State Department as a front for the Tamil Tigers. When pressed about the issue in parliament, the Liberals deflected questions, suggesting that they were simply engaging in multicultural outreach.

Even with respect to Arab terrorism against Israel, the goal among elite Canadian politicians and academics was largely one of staying neutral and promoting “dialogue.” Canada prided itself on being an “honest broker” in the world. At the United Nations, Canada regularly lined up with developing nations to support ritualized denunciations of Israel. Even as late as 2002, at the Francophone Conference in Beirut, prime minister Chrétien sat just a few seats away from Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and gave a speech with Nasrallah in the crowd. When questioned about this, he didn’t seem to see anything wrong with it. Terrorism was simply not a subject that Canadian political leaders thought about.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001 changed this attitude massively. It was not just the 24 Canadians who perished in the 9/11 attacks, or the searing media images. It was also naked self-interest: Canada’s export economy is almost entirely based on the U.S. market. And in the days after 9/11, there was a very real threat that the border would become impassable to the thousands of goods-laden trucks that cross every hour. Unfounded rumours began circulating that some of the 9/11 terrorists had come through Canada on their way to the United States. Given the political climate, Canadian politicians knew that they would have to update Canada’s anti-terrorism policies in a hurry, or risk watching Canada’s export economy become another casualty of 9/11.

Within a few months, Canada had passed the Anti-Terrorism Act, which provided police and justice officials with the right to convene secret trials and pre-emptively detain suspects, among other powers. The Canadian government also worked to create a large array of co-operative security protocols with the United States. At the time, these provisions were controversial: Many Canadians seized on them to give voice to the usual Canadian anxieties about being bullied and subsumed by the United States. But as episodes of terrorism multiplied around the globe, from Bali to Madrid to London, Canadians came to realize that their country was under threat as well. Over a decade later, the Anti-Terrorism Act, and the increased vigilance toward terrorism that it represents, generally has become uncontroversial.

In the years following 9/11, there were other changes as well. Canadian Jews, seeing the cause of fighting terrorism in Israel and North America as one and the same, became more assertive in challenging Canada’s policy of voting with the Palestinians at the UN. In time, the Liberals began changing their UN policies. They also sent a sizeable delegation to Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan operation marked a historic change in Canada’s military identity. While Canada had played an outsized role in both World Wars, its military had largely been left to rust in the years since the end of the Cold War. Protected by the United States, and ideologically intoxicated on the pacifistic cant of Pierre Trudeau, many Canadian intellectuals developed a fetish for peacekeeping, as opposed to offensive military operations.

Canada’s initial large-scale deployment to Afghanistan had many elements of traditional peacekeeping and nation-building: We were out of the fight, for the most part, and headquartered in Kabul. But Paul Martin made the courageous decision to transfer the main Canadian contingent to the Taliban heartland of Kandahar province. This proved to be momentous for Canada. Though Canadian troops had faced live fire in the Balkans and other hot spots for decades, this was different: For the first time since Korea, our military was on the front line of a real, full-time war against a declared enemy of Western civilization. In 2006, for instance, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry led the fighting in both Battles of Panjwaii, brutal encounters featuring close-range combat amid mud huts and trenches.

Americans might not see this as such a big deal: American GIs have seen Panjwaii-type combat in Vietnam, both Iraq wars, the brief and bloody intervention in Somalia and Afghanistan. But in Canada, two whole generations of Canadians had never seen our soldiers fight this way before. And the sight of it filled us with a pride that has manifested itself in a renaissance in Canadian patriotism. Even in Quebec, a province historically known for anti-war agitation, the response to the Afghan campaign was more muted than expected. Indeed, many Quebecers were justly proud that the largely francophone Royal 22e Régiment distinguished itself in a variety of operations in Kandahar.

Canada seemed to find a sense of mission off the battlefield as well. Our status as an amoral “honest broker” no longer made sense in the Afghan War era: When your troops are shooting and killing an enemy, you have chosen sides. We became the loudest critics of the Durban “anti-racism” sham, and an unabashed friend to Israel when it fought wars against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008.

Even in the purely domestic context, the after-effects of 9/11 have been remarkable. Aside from our anti-terror policies, we no longer let multicultural pieties get in the way of denouncing the barbaric misogyny of some unassimilated immigrants. “Honour killings” once were the stuff of back-page crime stories. Now they are on the front page, for we recognize them as vestiges of the ideology that produced 9/11 and the Taliban. It became clear that Canadians had become tired of the political correctness they had been fed during the long period of Liberal rule, and the years after 9/11 witnessed a vigorous right-wing political backlash. As a result, Canada now is a far more conservative country than it was in the 1990s. Tory leader Stephen Harper is now ensconced in his third term as prime minister, and his opposition is fractured and leaderless.

The 9/11 attacks must be remembered first and foremost as an epic terrorist crime, and as a great tragedy for the victims and their families. Yet they also have had profound political and cultural ramifications that have transformed Canada into a more serious country, and one that plays a bolder and more helpful role on the world stage.

This piece originally appeared in the collection Terror in the Peaceable Kingdom, edited by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Senator Linda Frum and published by FDD Press, a division of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The article is adapted from an editorial published in the National Post on Sept. 10, 2011.