Manitoba Law Journal
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Chapter 2 – A Social Network Analysis of the Toronto 18
No full textThis chapter employs social network analysis in order to empirically explore the communication network established by the Toronto 18 in the three years before their arrest. It provides a basic conceptual overview of the extent, breadth, and nature of ideological and operational communiques between the disparate members within the Toronto 18 to further stimulate scholarly inquiry into similar relational dynamics within analogous terrorist groups. This chapter also provides readers with an understanding of certain group, social, and structural characteristics across three distinct periods: (1) the radicalization phase (January 2003 to October 2005); (2) the winter training camp (November 2005 to December 2005); and (3) the three-month period surrounding the Opasatika property buying trip (January 2006 to March 2006). Research results are then presented and discussed, along with a brief overview of areas for future research
Chapter 10 – Trial by Jury and the Toronto 18
No full textThis chapter examines the trial of Fahim Ahmad, Steven Chand, and Asad Ansari, which was the only jury trial in the Toronto 18 prosecutions and the first held under post 9/11 terrorism offences. Part II examines the role of juries in past national security trials. These include those that occurred after the 1837 rebellions; after the assassination of D’Arcy McGhee; after the 1885 Métis resistance; after the Winnipeg General Strike; and after the October Crisis of 1970. The third part examines the public record of the Toronto 18 jury trial, including decisions about what questions could and could not be asked by the accused about potential jurors and the decision to require the three accused to stand in the prisoner’s dock. Part IV examines the future of jury trials in terrorism cases in light of the exploration of this topic by the Air India commission and 2019 reforms to jury selection. Although the jury is often conceived as a shield for the individual from the state, it can also be a sword that the state can wield against unpopular accused. Sometimes unpopular accused may be better off selecting, if they can, trial by judge alone
Feeling Inadequate: Reframing the Mindsets of Legal Education to Promote Mental Health
No full textLaw students suffer from staggeringly high rates of anxiety and depression. Although several causes have long been surmised, scholars have recently focused on the role that mindset plays in shaping mental health outcomes. In particular, some suggest that certain features of the “law school experience” steer students towards a sense of inadequacy and even hopelessness.
This article identifies two trends that can lead students towards these harmful internal narratives. First, law faculties are saturated with accounts of how difficult legal education is and just how much raw talent it takes to succeed. Second, members of the learning community often fail to contextualize the difficulties that law students face. As a result, many students come to believe that their encounters with difficulty and complexity reveal a lack of innate ability. This undermines their wellness, motivation, and perseverance.
Bridging the gap between psychology and legal education, this article argues that members of our learning communities can proactively steer students towards healthier interpretations of their experience, drawing them away from feelings of inadequacy. Drawing on the concepts of “attributional retraining” and “story editing,” law teachers can shift students’ internal narratives about learning in ways that can improve wellness and foster resilience. More fundamentally, this paper invites mental-health interventions that recognize the relationship between law students’ high rates of distress and the workings of law faculties’ learning environments
Chapter 5 – The Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Toronto 18 Case
No full textWhile it is well known that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) played a key role in the investigation of the Toronto 18 cases, these activities have been left out of the public record. To provide some context for the other contributions in this study, this chapter proceeds by describing the process by which CSIS conducts counter-terrorism investigations – from initial notification of the threat through to cooperating with the RCMP. Although there have been some changes since the mid-2000s, these processes largely remain in place today.
Importantly, while the case of the Toronto 18 was seen as a huge success for Canada’s counter-terrorism capabilities at the time, it also shaped expectations regarding how future threats would be treated. Canadian national security would spend much of the five to seven years after the Toronto 18 arrests looking for the next such group, a threat that never really manifested. In this way, the Toronto 18 may have contributed to bias in understanding an evolving national security threat that was manifesting in the form of lone actors and extremist travel
Chapter 8 – Improving the Intelligence to Evidence (I2E) Model in Canada
No full textThis chapter examines some of the key issues and challenges of the intelligence to evidence (I2E) process, mainly regarding the exchange of information between the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). For historical perspective, the authors cite findings from the 1981 McDonald Commission Report, concluding that subsequent events proved McDonald over-optimistic in terms of the expected level of cooperation and sharing of information between the new CSIS and the RCMP. The intervening years between the creation of CSIS in 1984 and the Toronto 18 case saw marginal progress towards improving inter-agency cooperation. Landmark judicial rulings, such as R v. Stinchcombe, only served to dampen any incentive to freely share information between the agencies and build an effective I2E operational model. The authors argue that the current I2E model, known as One Vision 2.0, developed in the years following the Toronto 18 case, while representing a notable improvement in the process, nevertheless falls short of achieving a robust framework. More recent improvements stemming from the joint CSIS/RCMP initiative “Midnight Horizon” are helpful but unlikely to move the needle substantially closer to the ideal. Pre-empting terrorist/hate-related attacks requires a more aggressive response than at present, one focused more on eliminating the threat through arrest and prosecution rather than lesser measures aimed at “threat reduction” or “threat containment.” To that end, this chapter offers some recommendations. The authors conclude that while CSIS and the RCMP have accomplished much towards improving the I2E process, there are clear limits to what they can achieve on their own in the absence of broader government action. Parliament can and must do more to champion needed legislative and policy changes to provide intelligence and law enforcement officials with the additional tools and resources they need to achieve a maximum level of security against terrorist and hate-inspired attacks
Chapter 12 – Policing Entrapment
No full textEntrapment has been a prominent, if rarely successful, defence in terrorism prosecutions. In this chapter, I sketch an egalitarian case for entrapment. On this account, the primary moral significance of entrapment is to prevent the police from generating crimes that would not otherwise have been perpetrated. In a context in which most people are, as Richard McAdams puts it, “probabilistic offenders,” the power of the authorities to control the nature, frequency, and timing of an inducement to crime is the power to make criminals out of ordinary, but fallible, people. Entrapment is a means of constraining this power. In this regard, entrapment stands to undercover policing roughly as abuse of process stands to prosecutorial discretion: as a constraint on how officials choose which individuals to investigate, prosecute and punish. However, since judgments as to when this line is crossed are likely to be contestable, and since what is at issue is typically extraordinary state power used to ensnare particular individuals, I argue that courts should do more to encourage Parliament to regulate undercover policing ex ante rather than rely solely on an entrapment defence applied ex post, for instance by strictly applying an “authorized by law” condition in prosecutions based on undercover investigations
