Canada’s Enhanced Measures to Protect National Security and Counter Terrorism

October 12, 2001

The Government of Canada announced today $54 million in new measures to strengthen Canada's ability to prevent, detect and respond to existing and emerging national security threats.

These measures are an important part of the Government’s $280 million Anti-Terrorism Plan – a plan that brings to $1.8 billion the amount the Government of Canada has invested in policing, security and intelligence since Budget 2000.

These initiatives will provide approximately $45 million to enhance integrated policing activities, improve technology, increase protection services and enhance information sharing with other government departments as well as international and domestic law enforcement agencies. This amount is allocated as follows:

• $35 million to enhance analytical, intelligence sharing, and operational technical support such as high tech crime forensics.
• $5 million to the protection of designated persons and sites in Canada. This is in addition to the recent redeployment of 2,000 RCMP officers to national security duties.
• $4.9 million to the Department of the Solicitor General for enhancements to the Canada Public Safety Information Network (CPSIN) which will link criminal justice agencies and other agencies across Canada, and the Counter-Terrorism Operational Readiness Program, to help increase local, regional and national organizations’ state of readiness against attacks.

Another $9 million will go to immediate staffing requirements in priority areas to provide a greater capacity for coordinated law enforcement responses and targetting of cross-border criminal activity, including staffing for:

• Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams (INSETs) to collect, share and analyze information and to create enhanced enforcement capacity; and,
• Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (IBETS) to enhance border integrity.

These initiatives are on top of the roughly $10.25 million announced earlier this week by the Government of Canada to enhance security activities at airports. This includes funding for:

• new equipment to be used by the RCMP at airports, major centres, ports and border crossings;
• the purchase of fingerprint card conversion technology to upgrade the Canadian Criminal Records System; and,
• RCMP Emergency Response Team to undertake tactical response capabilities.

All these initiatives are components of the Government of Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Plan, which has four objectives:

• stop terrorists from getting into Canada and protect Canadians from terrorist acts;
• bring forward tools to identify, prosecute, convict and punish terrorists;
• prevent the Canada-US border from being held hostage by terrorists and impacting on the Canadian economy; and
• work with the international community to bring terrorists to justice and address the root causes of such hatred.