David Pugliese is reporting in the Ottawa Citizen that the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command (CFINTCOM) is “trying to avoid posting junior staff to Ottawa because it has become too expensive to live in the region.” The risk is that financial hardship associated with living in Ottawa could make junior members susceptible to subversion. Housing costs in Ottawa have risen much faster than either wage increases or inflation. Moreover, the special allowance provided to staff that is meant to assauge the high costs of living in Canadian cities has been frozen for 13 years.
At this point energy, telecommunications, healthcare, and housing all raise their own national security concerns. To some extent, such concerns have tracked with these industry categories: governments have always worried about the security of telecommunications networks as well as the availability of sufficient energy supplies. But in other cases, such as housing affordability, the national security concerns we are seeing are the result of long-term governance failures. These failures have created new national security threats that would not exist in the face of good (or even just better) governance.1
There is a profound danger in trying to address all the new national security challenges and issues using national security tools or governance processes. National security incidents are often regarded as creating moments of exception and, in such moments, actions can be undertaken that otherwise could not. The danger is that states of exception become the norm and, in the process, the regular modes of governance and law are significantly set aside to resolve the crises of the day. What is needed is a regeneration and deployment of traditional governance capacity instead of a routine reliance on national security-type responses to these issues.
Of course, governments don’t just need to respond to these metastasized governance problems in order to alleviate national security issues and threats. They need to do so, in equable and inclusive ways, so as to preserve or (re)generate the trust between the residents of Canada and their government.
The public may justifiably doubt that their system of government is working where successive governments under the major political parties are seen as having failed to provide for basic needs. The threat, then, is that ongoing governance failures run the risk of placing Canada’s democracy under pressure. While this might seem overstated I don’t think that’s the case: we are seeing a rise of politicians who are capitalizing on the frustrations and challenges faced by Canadians across the country, but who do not have their own solutions. Capitalizing on rage and frustration, and then failing to deliver on fixes, will only further alienate Canadians from their government.
Governments across Canada flexed their muscles during the earlier phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having used them, then, it’s imperative they keep flexing these muscles to address the serious issues that Canadians are experiencing. Doing so will assuage existent national security issues. It will also, simultaneously, serve to prevent other normal governance challenges from metastasizing into national security threats.
- As an aside, these housing challenges are not necessarily new. Naval staff posted to Esquimalt have long complained about the high costs of off-base housing in Victoria and the surrounding towns and cities. ↩︎
Excited Pixels 