The pros and cons of Harper's proposal to ban 'terror tourism'
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper has proposed a ban on what he refers to as 'terror tourism'. His election promise targets Canadians who visit terrorist-controlled areas, particularly those who do so to join 'jihadist causes'.
"A re-elected Conservative government will designate travel to places that are ground zero for terrorist activity a criminal offence," Harper said last week, during a campaign stop in the Ottawa riding of West-Nepean.
Christianne Boudreau, the mother of a Canadian who died last year fighting for ISIS in Syria, told CBC News that if travel to Syria had been illegal, it would not have made a difference to her son.
"If somebody is really determined and committed to go overseas to a certain area, they can fly into any other country, sit there for a couple of weeks and then book their next ticket on. So fooling everybody with a false sense of security that that's something that's going to stop it, people really need to have a hard look at that."
But Craig Forcese, who teaches law at the University of Ottawa, sees some merit in the proposed travel ban. He writes a blog about national security law — and recently authored a post called "(Almost) a Good Idea: Banning Travel to Designated Conflict Zones."
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What do you like about the idea of banning travel to designated terrorist hotspots?
This idea is not something the prime minister necessarily manufactured on the campaign trail. In fact, Australia has introduced such a travel ban ... which tries to regulate circumstances in which Australian nationals fight in overseas civil conflicts ... And so the Prime Minister, it seems, is piggybacking his idea on that particular Australian law. The Australian law has one central virtue, in my view. It has the effect of saying to Australian citizens, "We don't care who you're fighting for, we don't care why you're in this region. This region is so dangerous that we think you should not be there." Now, there are the exceptions: for journalists, for aid workers and for people visiting family members. That has a certain elegance, that ban. Why? because in contemporary Canadian law, in order to actually prosecute someone for fighting for ISIS, you have to prove that they were fighting for ISIS, which can be an enormously difficult undertaking, in terms of proving what it is that someone did, while they were in a war zone.
"The problem with the Harper plan is that they want to pick between the good guys and bad guys."- Craig Forcese, University of Ottawa
You've written extensively about 'foreign fighters' - or Canadians who travel abroad to participate in foreign insurgencies. What is the "almost" in your "(Almost) a good idea" piece about banning this kind of travel? Where do you see the Harper government's proposal for banning travel falling flat?
I think that there are problems with how they've articulated this would work. The virtue of the Australian system is that if you go to this region - and it's a relatively small region: it's confined to parts of Syria and parts of Iraq, essentially parts of Syria and parts of Iraq that are controlled by ISIS — the Australian law says 'If you go there, and you're not a journalist and you're not an aid worker and you're not visiting a family member, you're guilty'. In other words, the Australians don't care whether you're fighting for ISIS or for some other faction. They don't try to distinguish between bad guys and good guys ... And so the prime minister's proposal is both complicated on the ground, because now the government of Canada has to decide who's a good guy and who's a bad guy (and that designation may change over time) but also it raises complicated constitutional questions because the government wants to make it an obligation on the defendant to prove that they were fighting for good guys.