Paradiplomatic policing and relocating Canadian foreign policy

Paradiplomacy and transgovernmental policing in Canadian foreign policy

The literature on the role of provinces (and to a lesser degree, cities) in Canadian foreign policy is fairly comprehensive. However, as Christopher Kukucha's contribution to this special issue makes clear, it focuses largely on trade and, in the case of Quebec, cultural diplomacy. In two recent surveys on the role of provinces in Canadian foreign relations security is omitted entirely ² or mentioned only briefly. ³ We argue that this is a significant omission. Scholars of Canadian national security have clearly recognized the erosion of the barriers between the domestic and the international and its effects on security governance, ⁴ but few explicitly pitch their contributions in terms of foreign policy. ⁵

Similarly, scholars of transnational and transgovernmental policing ⁶ usually ignore the foreign policy implications of policing activity abroad. Like scholars of national security, scholars of transnational policing recognize the dissolution of the barriers between the domestic and the international, and ascribe it to changes in the nature of the threats police are required to counter that originate from this dissolution. Threats are perceived to originate from anywhere, not just from other states. The discourses of security of the past decade have been dominated by terrorism, a threat that emerges not just at borders and ports of entry, but potentially anywhere, and that can be nearly impossible to predict. In response to the (perceived) transnationalization of the threat to security, policing has simultaneously become securitized ⁷ and transnationalized. That is, not only are police departments taking on more and more functions that relate to national security; they are engaging in more and more functions that lead them to work across borders. Scholars of transnational policing and the securitization of policing recognize the role of police departments in constructing new spaces of security and insecurity, and new structures of security governance. Peter K. Manning further argues that “transnational policing is partly about the regulation of a new, growing and resonant kind of social space” ⁸ and that police are in the process of growing a capacity to deal with it. There is a popular conception that “it takes a network to fight a network”—that the only way to address modern terrorism is through transnationalism. ⁹

The transnationalization of security threats, however, is not simply an objective process to which police are responding. Through the boundary-creating processes of security and foreign policy, relevant state actors also shape their environments and what is considered to be a threat. This, in turn, shapes the relationship between the state and its citizens. As security policing leads police into cooperative arrangements with colleagues across borders, patterns of accountability necessarily change. The politics of security are often the politics of exceptionalism. Many things can be done in the name of security that would not otherwise be permissible. As the boundaries between crime and policing, and inside and outside, blur, so too do the boundaries between those who are considered citizens and those who are considered outsiders.

In this article, we discuss transgovernmental policing activities undertaken by Canadian governmental actors at the federal (RCMP), provincial (SQ), and municipal (VPD) levels. All transgovernmental policing activity of necessity involves information sharing. Without information sharing, no other policing cooperation is possible. ¹⁰ The most prevalent form of this information sharing is liaison policing, where police officers are posted in police agencies abroad. Each of our three paradiplomatic actors also engages in mission-specific or standing operational policing cooperation. We argue that standing police cooperation is most likely to reshape the relationship between citizens and the state.

Transgovernmental liaison policing

Because it is a federal agency, the RCMP's transnational activities are not paradiplomatic in the conventional sense. However, these activities are still significant, particularly since the RCMP's national security operations have grown in number and security threats to Canada have come to be seen as emerging from anywhere, at home or abroad. In Canada, 37 RCMP police liaisons of the International Policing branch now operate in 26 locations abroad. They have a mandate to “maintain a link between law enforcement agencies in Canada and in their countries of accreditation in order to facilitate bilateral cooperation to advance criminal matters that have a Canadian connection.” ¹¹ RCMP liaison officers most commonly facilitate information sharing, assist foreign police departments with investigations with a Canadian connection, and facilitate mission-specific cooperation. A recent case where liaison officers are likely to have been involved is that of Jeffrey Delisle, the Canadian naval sub-lieutenant allegedly working as a Russian spy: it has come to light that even though the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) had evidence showing Delisle passing information to Moscow, it was Washington's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that alerted the RCMP to Delisle's activities. ¹²

Transnational liaison policing at the provincial or municipal level is comparatively rare. The only province to engage in it is Quebec, and there are no Canadian cities with formal, standing liaison programs. ¹³ The SQ engages in technical and operational cooperation in public safety and security with different partners. Its program seems to focus primarily on improving police practice and learning from other police forces. Liaison personnel from the SQ are sent to foreign countries with long-term cooperation agreements. Cooperation in these liaison exchanges includes police education, criminal investigation, emergency measures, community policing principles, road safety, counter terrorism, intelligence, management, and crime prevention. Liaisons have been established in France, Belgium, and Switzerland and are in the process of being developed in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK. ¹⁴ The SQ also has the capacity to share counter-terrorism information with the US. Nine cooperation agreements have been signed with international partners since 2001. By sharing practices and expertise and gathering information overseas, the SQ aims to improve its ability to fight crime and bring innovative solutions to public safety and security challenges. It also aims to build and enhance cooperation networks to be able to share expertise and consult with other countries as well as to improve evaluation, ethics, training, and management through these networks. ¹⁵

As appropriate, the RCMP helps SQ liaison agents connect overseas, assists with prevention and detection services for international crimes that break Canadian or Quebec law, and collaborates with the SQ in major Canadian investigations that have foreign ramifications. Further, SQ officers are posted to the Interpol offices in Ottawa and to the Montreal Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET). ¹⁶ Much of the SQ's collaboration on security issues has been with France, and together they have created an international network of francophone police, Francopol. Francopol's role is to share best practices, research, training, and education. There are a few other limited examples of standing provincial liaison policing. For instance, the Ontario Provincial Police has an officer seconded to the Michigan Regional Operational Integration Center, which is “intended to be a mechanism for leveraging the capabilities of the law enforcement community in an effort to detect, deter and prevent any security risks or threats along the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair area.” ¹⁷

The most noteworthy example in Canada of transnational policing at the municipal level is the VPD. It is the only municipal police force in Canada to have developed a sustained relationship with other actors outside of Canada, through its Military Liaison Unit (MLU). ¹⁸ The MLU was established in the run-up to the Vancouver Olympic Games to improve the communications and training relationships between the VPD and the military. As the unit has grown, however, it has begun to engage in joint exercises several times a year with the US National Guard in Yakima, Washington. While this is not an operational partnership, it clearly goes beyond the liaison policing described above. The goal is for the police to learn how military technologies and tactics might assist with urban policing, and for the military to learn how police tactics might assist with an urban warfare mandate. Adam Molnar argues that the Vancouver Olympics served as a “multiplier” for the VPD, providing it with an opportunity to acquire specialized training and equipment. The “Olympic boost” meant that the VPD was better equipped than some military brigades. ¹⁹ This put the organization in an excellent position to export its knowledge and skills beyond Canadian borders. Under an agreement with the US Army, the MLU trains US National Guard soldiers in urban tactical operations, while the VPD's experts learn explosive ordinance disposal and train with unmanned aerial vehicles in American airspace. ²⁰ The agreement allows the US National Guard to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act, which states that the federal military cannot be involved in law enforcement on domestic soil. Receiving training from a foreign police department rather than the US Army nicely avoids any legal dilemmas. ²¹ The National Guard's use of VPD training, therefore, can be seen as a type of process laundering, using transnational relationships to get around domestic restrictions. The MLU also trains personnel in traditional policing who go on to serve in military police roles in Afghanistan and Sudan ²² —clearly showing that the phenomenon of transnational policing is shaped by and shapes the erosion of the divide between the domestic and the international.

These policing activities are significant because they provide further evidence that the national security function of the state has been adopted by actors not just across the federal government, but also beyond it. The state can no longer speak with one voice in security diplomacy, especially as concerns terrorism, perceived by Canadians to be a significant threat. Even more significant for the study of foreign policy, however, are cases where Canadian actors work directly with foreign actors in integrated units.

Integrated transgovernmental policing

Ever since 9/11, it has become conventional wisdom that a lack of cooperation among domestic security and intelligence agencies as well as between security agencies across borders has inhibited national and international security. In Canada, integrated policing units have brought together professionals from different parts of the security bureaucracy with the goal of improving information sharing and, in some cases, operational capacity. In rarer cases, these teams have integrated personnel from Canada and the US.

While the integrated model has been used for some time in Canada for border enforcement and prosecuting organized crime, more recently more ambitious teams have developed which focus on national security. In 2002, the RCMP established integrated units called Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams (INSETs). These bring together experts from federal, provincial, and municipal police forces, Canadian Border Services, and CSIS. While they do not include foreign nationals, the INSETs work closely with police forces abroad, and most intensively with the US. At a minimum, this cooperation includes information sharing, but in some cases the information sharing is so intensive and coordinated that it might more properly be called mission-specific cooperation. This seems to have been the case with the recent “Operation Smooth,” where the Toronto and Montreal INSETs cooperated with the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force—another domestically integrated team—to coordinate the timing of three arrests of individuals suspected of planning to bomb a VIA rail train. ²³ There has been some suggestion in the media that the Americans would have preferred to wait longer to make an arrest, but the Canadian decision to go ahead forced their hand. ²⁴ This suggests that operational cooperation is imperfect at best.

Canada and the US also police together in standing, integrated teams. The oldest of these, Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (IBETs), were designed to control the border for the protection of both countries. Since their establishment, standing integrated policing teams have become more ambitious. The Shiprider program, for example, was created in 2005 to police the boundary waters of Canada and the US. Shiprider extended the IBET model to remove “the international maritime boundary as a barrier to law enforcement by enabling seamless continuity of enforcement and security operations across the border, facilitating cross-border surveillance and interdiction, and serving as both a force multiplier and, potentially, as a model for other US/Canadian cross-border (integrated) enforcement and security initiatives.” After a number of pilot projects, it was finalized and given a set of standard operating procedures in the summer of 2013. ²⁵ Under the program, Canadian RCMP officers and American Coast Guard officials ride together on the same boats and are deputized to enforce the laws in both countries, with the host state always retaining final jurisdiction.

There has also been talk of extending the IBET/Shiprider model beyond the immediate region of the border. This “NxtGen” policing model was first proposed in the Beyond the Border Agreement of 2011. Progress seems to be hindered by American concerns about having American officers subject to the jurisdiction of Canadian courts when operating in Canada. ²⁶ Were such an agreement to be implemented, however, several other jurisdictional challenges could arise that might shape Canadian foreign policy from the transnational level. For instance, it is not yet clear how far from ports of entry these integrated teams would be allowed to operate, and under what circumstances. Under the Shiprider agreement, one of the perceived advantages is that of “hot pursuits”; no longer will port-runners be able to flee across the border, leaving their police pursuers on the other side of a jurisdictional boundary. On land, such pursuits have a questionable legal status, and one could again imagine a kind of process laundering where an integrated team waits until a suspect is physically in a jurisdiction with preferable laws or sentences. ²⁷ Would integrated teams be able to investigate and prosecute crimes that occur wholly on Canadian soil and subject to Canadian laws, or would they be limited to inter-jurisdictional crimes, as the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has suggested? ²⁸ Integrated teams also add an extra wrinkle to secondary information sharing. How far could information collected in Canada by an integrated team be shared with American law enforcement officials beyond those on the team? The creation of IBETs and Shiprider and the proposal for NxtGen clearly reflect Canadian strategic priorities, which have long been shaped by the need to maintain a strong security relationship with the US. However, as these new cooperative initiatives evolve, it becomes clear that Canadian foreign policy is shaped from the margins, through regulations and laws that may not be affected by democratic processes.

What explains police paradiplomacy in Canada?

Police departments at all levels have for some time shared information with departments across borders in the service of apprehending criminals. However, more recently, they have also engaged in mission-specific and standing operational cooperation across borders. Provinces and municipalities that engage in operational transnational policing must have both the means and the incentives to do so: in Vancouver, transnational policing seems to be a way to exchange techniques with new partners and gain prestige; in Quebec there is a political motivation. Neither example seems to be related to a perceived threat, decentralization of policing and security services, or to a sense that the RCMP cannot protect Vancouver or Quebec. Both examples, though, lend credence to the hypothesis that transgovernmental policing is only tangentially related to a particular threat, and has more to do with entrepreneurship (Vancouver) or the desire to sustain a particular social order (Quebec). The RCMP example more clearly reflects evolving strategic priorities at the national level, but still demonstrates how the changing nature of security policing shapes foreign policy at the margins.

Vancouver's efforts seem to come from the autonomy of police and represent an opportunistic desire for innovation, experimentation, and entrepreneurship within the context of the changing nature of security. Robertson argues that because of the many different forms of Canadian policing (local, provincial, federal), there are many opportunities for innovation that come from varied and independent types of services. ²⁹ With significant autonomy and the opportunity to begin such innovation during the Olympics, Vancouver was able to easily engage in paradiplomacy.

The existence of the SQ's international presence is more complex and is closely related to Quebec's ownership of its international relations, since it sees questions of security as integral to the global priorities of the province. Quebec has traditionally claimed authority over foreign policy in matters constitutionally assigned to the provinces. The federal–provincial distinction has been harder to uphold over the years, as almost any facet of government activity has an international dimension. Quebec has a strong history of paradiplomacy and engagement in international affairs beyond its provincial police force. Primarily, Quebec's paradiplomacy has been driven by nationalism and its desire to assert the unique cultural and linguistic attributes that set it apart from the rest of Canada. ³⁰

André Lecours argues that in addition to a desire to assert and project its identity, Quebec's paradiplomacy is fuelled by both its considerable power within the federal system and also its sense of competition and conflict with the federal government. ³¹ This competition is reflected in the SQ's choice of liaison policing, a program that mirrors the RCMP's activities, as its mechanism for policing paradiplomacy. In short, the SQ's foray into transgovernmental policing is part of a larger paradiplomatic movement and structural context that is motivated by the province's long-standing desire to represent its own affairs (and identity) abroad rather than by a sense that it faces undue threats.

As Canadian police agencies at all levels become more involved in paradiplomatic transnational relationships for a variety of reasons, we can also expect the relocation of foreign policy to agencies and governments beyond the federal to shape and reshape the federal government's relationship to its citizens.

Implications for foreign policy

Transnational policing in Canada shapes foreign policy by affecting the way the state interacts with its citizens. Security, like foreign policy, is a boundary-making process that defines insiders and outsiders to the state. ³² This definition of outsiders may be literal—preventing certain groups of people from being admitted to the state in the first place—but also metaphorical—mandating that certain laws apply to those who have the markers of potential terrorists, and others to the rest of us. Transnational policing complicates the boundary-making function of foreign policy in two ways: first, by pluralizing the actors engaged in the governance of security (forcing us to question who does foreign policy) and second, by blurring the boundaries between crime and security, and domestic and international (forcing us to question where foreign policy happens).

Each of the cases reviewed here reshapes boundaries in different ways. The RCMP's liaison policing erodes the boundaries between crime and security, as the RCMP takes on a larger role in national security investigations. Shiprider and NxtGen reshape the way we conceive of the border; the maritime border has become shared jurisdictional space, and if American police officers begin to work on Canadian soil (and vice versa), notions of domestic and international security will become nearly meaningless. The very fact that the province of Quebec and the city of Vancouver engage in police paradiplomacy subverts normal expectations about both policing and foreign policy, but the content of their transnational policing does so even more: the VPD's relationship with the National Guard demonstrates the porous nature of the line between urban policing and urban war; the SQ's liaison program operates just like similar programs undertaken by states. Below, we discuss some specific ways in which paradiplomatic policing in Canada shapes foreign policy.

Conclusion

While security has always been recognized as central to foreign policy, its absence from the analysis of paradiplomacy has been noticeable. This omission is significant; scholars of foreign policy recognize that threats cannot be defined as strictly coming from outside, and that non-central governments often engage in paradiplomacy when global issues intersect with local ones. Nonetheless, scholars have rarely examined policing, one of the more prominent cases where these phenomena intersect. Non-central government transnational policing emphasizes the ways in which actors who are both outside the federal government and outside the normally identified security agencies increasingly shape Canadian security policy. The advantages and drawbacks of the practices of security and diplomacy in which they engage deserve the attention of policy makers and scholars engaged with the governance of Canada's national security, and the foreign policies associated with it.