The Canadian way of counterterrorism: introducing the GATE-Canada data set

Abstract

How does Canada fight terrorism, and to what effect? In this article, we introduce an original data set of all reported actions taken by the Canadian government in relation to both domestic and international terror groups between 1985 and 2013. Data include conciliatory and repressive, verbal and physical, and discriminate and indiscriminate actions relating to a wide variety of constituencies. We demonstrate the value of these data by applying them to a key scholarly and policy question: whether actions by Canada relevant to terrorism abroad affect its terrorism relevant actions at home. Our results suggest that international actions related to terrorism did lead to a subsequent increase in domestic actions. Interestingly, the effects of international actions on domestic actions after 9/11 extend not only to Muslims in Canada, but also to other Canadian political constituencies. This finding lends support to the hypothesis that an increased mandate and resources to counter a particular threat may lead to more generalized counter-terrorism initiatives domestically.

Résumé

Comment le Canada combat-il le terrorisme, et quelles en sont les répercussionsDans cet article, nous présentons un ensemble original de données sur toutes les mesures prises – et rapportées – par le gouvernement canadien contre les groupes terroristes aussi bien nationaux qu’internationaux entre 1985 et 2013. Ces données sont celles qui correspondent à des actions conciliantes et répressives, verbales et physiques, et discrétionnaires ou non discrétionnaires, conduites vis-à-vis une grande diversité de groupes. Nous démontrons l’importance de ces données en les appliquant à une question académique et politique clé : les actions du Canada contre le terrorisme à l’étranger affectent-elles celles qu’il mène contre le terrorisme sur son territoireNos résultats suggèrent que les actions antiterroristes internationales ont réellement eu pour effet d’entraîner une augmentation des actions au plan national. Singulièrement, l’effet des actions internationales sur les actions nationales après le 11/9 se ressent non seulement parmi les musulmans au Canada, mais aussi au sein d’autres groupes politiques. Ce résultat soutient aussi l’hypothèse selon laquelle un mandat élargi et des ressources accrues dans le but de contrer une menace particulière peuvent conduire à des initiatives antiterroristes plus généralisées au plan domestique.

Keywords:

• terrorism
• counterterrorism
• extremism
• repression
• dissent

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Public Safety Canada in funding this research. They also thank Daren Fisher, Quinn Fisher, Michelle D'Ippolito, Zachary Rowan, Mark Tallman, Maureen Handrahan, Heather Randall, Brian Greenlaw, Melody Vinje, Michael Clement, Michael Youmans, Katie Aldridge, Daniel Davis and Allyson Hodges for excellent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data and research materials

The underlying research materials for this article (including the data, replication file, and Appendices A and B) can be accessed at http://www.du.edu/korbel/sie/research/chenow_gate_data.html.

Notes

1. We define “repression” as any punitive, coercive or intransigent act. We categorize actions as repressive if they would arouse anger in the targeted or affected constituency, regardless of the act's legality or legitimacy. Thus, repressive actions include legal acts, such as making an arrest or mobilizing troops; illegal acts, such as killing a noncombatant; and policy decisions, such as passing stricter counterterrorism legislation.

2. On the allegations that the Canadian government paid a ransom to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, see Wingrove and Clark (2013).

3. Throughout this article, we refer to the “constituencies” of terrorism. When we use the word “constituency,” we are referring to the combined population of terrorist groups and the populations from which they emerge (e.g. the Front de libération du Québec would be the terror group, and Québec separatists would be the population from which this group emerged). As such, constituencies of terrorism often include many innocent civilians who share an ideology or identity with terror groups but are nonetheless uninvolved in terror activity.

4. We used the Conflict and Mediation Event observations Coding scheme.

5. The sources include Agence France-Presse (AFP), Associated Press (AP), Calgary Herald, Canada Newswire, Canadian Government News, Edmonton Journal, the Halifax Daily News, The Hamilton Spectator, National Post, Financial Post, Ottawa Citizen, the Montreal Gazette, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Vancouver's The Province, and the Vancouver Sun. It is possible that the results might be different if French-language sources were added to this list; however, linguistic constraints in TABARI's programming prevented us from including such sources.

6. The search string entered into Lexis-Nexis was: [canad! or ottawa or toronto or vancouver or montreal or edmonton or calgary or quebec or winnipeg or hamilton or ontario or yukon or alberta or nunavut or manitoba or saskatchewan or “british columbia” or “northwest territories” or “new brunswick” or “nova scotia” or “prince edward island” or “newfoundland and labrador” or inuit or cree or inuktitut or ojibway or “first nations” or metis].

7. Events are discrete actions (e.g., arriving for a meeting is an event, but every word exchanged across the table is not; arresting a suspected terrorist is an event, but we did not count each day he or she was held in jail as a daily event).

8. Appendix B contains the removal instructions.

9. As stated in the introduction, we believe that disaggregation is extremely useful in allowing researchers to answer various types of questions. For our purposes, we aggregate some of our data for illustrative purposes; however, the fully disaggregated data are available at the project's website.

10. The expansion hypothesis is similar but not identical to a strand of literature known as the securitization literature. Here, we use the term “expansion” to indicate a diffusion of targets that the government regards as relevant to its counterterrorism efforts. Securitization refers more broadly to the tendency of certain public issues, such as immigration, health care or aviation, to become recast as “threats” and reframed as security issues. See, for instance, Salter and Piche (2011), Lennox (2007) and Williams (2003).

11. We added 0.5 to each variable to preserve the few months that had no actions when calculating the natural logarithm. The data were skewed prior to logging and are more symmetrical after this transformation, improving the accuracy of the hypothesis tests. We chose this method over other generalized linear models because the outcomes were not rare enough for Poisson or negative binomial models, and censored normal models require additional assumptions that the data might not meet. Further, the Cochran-Orcutt procedure corrects for the correlated error terms.

12. Note that we present the four dependent variables in their unlogged form.

13. Space limitations prevent us from introducing more control variables to the model; however, future research might fruitfully assess the sensitivity of our findings to various controls.

14. Prime Ministers include Brian Mulroney from 17 September 1984 to 25 June 1993 (Progressive Conservative), Jean Chretien from 4 November 1993 to 12 December 2003 (Liberal), Paul Martin from 12 December 2003 to 6 February 2006 (Liberal) and Stephen Harper from 6 February 2006 to 4 November 2015 (Conservative).

15. When we combine Conservatives and Progressive Conservatives, the estimated coefficient for lagged international actions is 0.038 (p = 0.000).

16. The significant coefficient for Conservative Prime Minister suggests a difference between the Conservative and Progressive Conservative Prime Ministers. However, if we combine them and use all Conservatives as the reference group, the estimate for Liberal Prime Minister drops to 0.437 (p = 0.004).

17. Data on extremist events were compiled through three sources: the Global Terrorism Database (GTD; LaFree et al. 2015) compiled by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (START); the Canadian Incident Database (CIDB) compiled by the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society (TSAS; Ellis et al. 2015); and qualitative accounts of extremist events, compiled by Leman-Langlois and Brodeur (2005).