'A 180-degree turn': Aaron Driver's lawyer on the effectiveness of peace bonds
On Wednesday, August 10, Aaron Driver was killed during a confrontation with police in Strathroy, Ontario.
Driver was known to police — he was arrested in Winnipeg in June 2015, after posting statements in support of ISIS on social media. A peace bond was agreed to in February 2016, but according to the RCMP, Driver had not been under surveillance.
Leonard Tailleur, a senior attorney for Legal Aid Manitoba, represented Driver and says he's shocked by Wednesday's events, calling Driver's behaviour "a 180-degree turn."
'It sounds to me that in a period of five months, or where he's under this peace bond — for which I was assuming the police were actually surveilling him quite extensively — that he appears to have been radicalized to a much higher degree.'- Leonard Tailleur, Aaron Driver's former lawyer
Tailleur says the conditions set in the peace bond were not properly implemented, noting that the RCMP knew where Driver was and had the ability to check his phone, which they supplied him with.
Michel Juneau Katsuya, a former senior intelligence officer with CSIS, says peace bonds like the one Driver was under are inadequate. While cases with "common criminals" can be handled with peace bonds, Katsuya says issues of terrorism must be dealt with more seriously.
"A common criminal will not be ready to kill himself for his bag of weed, or the break and entry that he's done, or anything like this — a terrorist, he's committed," Katsuya says.
Katsuya — referring to comments made by Judge John Major, who presided over the commission that investigated the bombing of Air India Flight 182 — says Canada still lacks experience when it comes to cases of terrorism and should look to countries like France for how to proceed in the future. However, Katsuya says there are political and financial challenges when it comes to implementing a new counterterrorism strategy, but that it's necessary.
'We have a lot of data about what we should do and how we should go about doing it, but, unfortunately, the lack of political will to do so has been omnipresent ... Mr. Driver is not unique. Matter of fact, the RCMP and CSIS have warned the government that there's over 350 kids that are currently on the list of people of high interest.'- Michel Juneau Katsuya, former senior intelligence officer with CSIS
Lorne Dawson, co-director of the University of Waterloo's Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, understands the peace bond is a "dull instrument" used when officials aren't sure if radical talk will turn into radical actions, but says more needs to be done afterwards.
Whether it's counselling or a program, Dawson says there must be the opportunity for dialogue with professionals for radicalized Canadians in the hopes of deradicalization. "There was no opportunity provided to Aaron to have anything along those lines happen," says Dawson.
Dawson even speculates that the conditions of Driver's peace bond, like cutting him off from his online peers, may have led him to "double down on his identity" as a jihadist.
Any kind of intervention, whether it's by a psychologist or by police authorities ... you're always running the risk that you may cause the person to ... start to moderate their views. But they also may take it as a sign of persecution, and a sign that they need to become even more strident in their orientation.- Lorne Dawson, co-director of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society
Listen to the full conversation at the top of this post.
This segment was produced by The Current's Marc Apollonio, Julian Uzielli and Ines Colabrese.