On Parliament Hill

Justin Trudeau’s mask has been slipping lately. Canadians have heard our Prime Minister, time and again, speak of tolerance and diversity. Yet as we’ve seen with his Liberal government’s radical change to the Canada Summer Jobs program, his words and actions don’t line up. If you hold different values than him and his Liberal Party, you don’t fit his definition of a true ‘Canadian’.

Yet oddly enough, this standard disappears if you happen to be a returning ISIS terrorist. Justin Trudeau is going to great lengths to accommodate terrorists returning to Canada after fighting abroad with ISIS. In fact, he has opened the public purse wide in his effort to reintegrate ISIS fighters. If you are an ISIS terrorist, the Government of Canada won’t even ask you to renounce the beliefs that led you to participate in terrorist activities abroad. But for average Canadians – the ones who don’t leave Canada to commit acts of terror – Justin Trudeau requires your conformity to Liberal Party values in order to obtain federal grant money.

Justin Trudeau has said that returning ISIS fighters “can be an extraordinarily powerful voice for preventing radicalization in future generations.” However, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) does not seem to share the prime minister’s rosy view of the situation. Rather, according to documents obtained by the Toronto Sun, they say “the Service has never before faced a terrorist threat of the scope, scale and complexity of Sunni Islamist-inspired terrorism”.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale has stated that the number of returning fighters has remained stable, at around 60. Here again, CSIS has a different perspective. The documents reveal that CSIS has been issuing weekly reports on the numbers and location of the suspects, indicating that there may be more than the figure Liberal ministers have been parroting. Certainly it means that some of these returning ISIS fighters may be moving around.

CSIS is preparing for homegrown attacks. According to the disclosed documents, “domestic extremists are likely to continue to target Canadian uniformed personnel and related installations in neighbourhoods that are familiar to them (such as police stations and military recruitment centres)”. That means more future attacks are possible like the one in Ottawa which saw Corporal Nathan Cirillo killed in front of the National War Memorial. These are the sort of people that Justin Trudeau wants to ‘reintegrate’ into Canadian society.

A serious leader needs to put the safety of his country first. Justin Trudeau may not be worried about these returning fighters but the experts at our security agencies are. They will be first in the line of fire when reintegration efforts fail, but not the only targets. ISIS fighters overseas have shown that they have no qualms with targeting civilians either.

If you agree that the Liberals need to take this threat more seriously, please take a moment to write the Minister of Public Safety, Ralph Goodale, at ralph.goodale@parl.gc.ca and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at pm@pm.gc.ca.