Opening Canada’s Doors to Immigration Without Proper Screening Could Pose Security Threats

Most notably, a Pakistani national and Canadian resident was arrested for allegedly planning an attack on Jewish individuals in New York in the name of ISIS. Prior to this, a father and son duo, Ahmed and Mostafa Eldidi, who were supposedly on the brink of carrying out a mass casualty attack, were apprehended by the RCMP.

In line with Canadian practices, a House of Commons committee was promptly convened, with appearances from the public safety minister, officials from the Canada Border Services Agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the RCMP. Despite the failure to prevent this ISIS terrorist from entering Canada, no one has taken responsibility for the oversight.

So, what went wrong? Without access to internal data, several possibilities can still be considered:

• The pressure to allow so many more into Canada led some departments to advise those responsible for security screening to “skip” certain stages. How this was seen as acceptable is anyone’s guess;
• If CSIS, the main body that does security screening, did indeed miss something it is most likely tied to a huge caseload and limited resources (again linked to the artificial 500,000 number the Liberals have aimed for);
• Screeners simply do not have the time to trawl all databases to make an informed decision, including the so-called dark web. (It is worth noting that given ISIS’s penchant for propaganda videos—I saw them regularly when I worked on counterterrorism at CSIS—I reject the claim that this particular film would not have been more widely available to anyone who needed to know what ISIS was doing).

In terms of the implications of the Eldidi case, there are several. The intelligence on the father-son team came from an allied service, most likely the French. Our counterparts in the intelligence community are already raising serious questions about our commitment to national security: Can you imagine if the newly naturalized citizen Ahmed Eldidi crossed the border into the United States to carry out his plans? We cannot afford to overly rely on the goodwill of our international allies.

Most alarmingly, the prospect of an immigrant potentially causing harm to Canadians in the name of ISIS has an impact on the perceptions we hold about immigration in general. Incidents such as the riots in the UK following false information that attributed the death of three girls to an “illegal Syrian refugee,” as well as the recent murder of three individuals by an ISIS sympathizer prompting the German government to reconsider its immigration policies, underscore the gravity of the situation.

Must we wait for a tragedy before taking action?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.