Ottawa- According to CTV News, an estimated 130 people who have connections to Canada are suspected to be fighting alongside the Islamic State in Syria. Canada’s fight against terrorism may soon include tools such as revoking passports and citizenship of identified extremists and utilizing “exit controls” that track people who leave the country.
“We are committed at increasing the level of tools we are providing our law enforcement so that they are able to track those individuals not only here, but abroad,” Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney told CTV. “It is important to make sure that we keep track of those, to just to know who, when they leave, where they are going.”
The United States and Canada have been sharing information through the “Beyond The Border” Initiative since 2012 regarding the movement of third party nationals and permanent residents who cross the US/Canada border, with the exception of American and Canadian citizens.
Blaney implied that exit controls may extend to documenting travel of Americans and Canadians that cross the border; an additional phase of the Beyond The Border plan was supposed to expand to include information exchange of all travelers crossing the border by the end of June 2014.
Anil Kapoor, a barrister from Toronto, said that exit controls were popular in authoritarian regimes seeking to restrict citizens’ travel and “foreign influence on domestic populations.” Kapoor said that exit controls would require all Canadian citizens to obtain exit visas.
Kapoor suggested that exit controls are currently too broad to effectively track known terrorism suspects.”It seems to me though, that isn’t really what the government should be doing,” said Kapoor. “It seems that the government should be targeting those individuals against whom they have intelligence to control or determine where they’re moving,” rather than enforce exit visas on all Canadians.
