25,000 Canadian passports are stolen every year - and no means exists to alert Canadian immigration officials where they have gone.

And Canadian authorities have arrested a ninth man in the UK terrorism plot. Guess who he turns out to work for? The Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

If you count the oil-sands of the Canadian West, Canada has the largest oil reserves on earth. But that's not the only way the northern dominion resembles the desert kingdom. Like Saudi Arabia, Canada has been misruled for many years by a corrupt political elite hopelessly indifferent to the terrorist threat growing up on its soil. There's one crucial difference though between the House of Saud and the Liberal Party of Canada: Canadians have the power to rid themselves of this discredited bunch at the ballot box. Rumor is that tainted prime minister Paul Martin may call a desperation election as early as this weekend. Although his poll numbers have been sliced in recent weeks by a series of scandals, he apparently fears that even worse revelations may arrive in the coming weeks - and wants to get the election out of the way as quickly as possible.

Will the stunt work? Well it's been tried twice before by two other prime ministers who arrived at closing time for their political party: John Turner in 1984, Kim Campbell in 1993. Each of them was crushed by a political landslide. Turner deserved it; Campbell did not - but here's hoping that history repeats itself one more time.

The British roundup of eight terror suspects should remind us of how deeply terrorist organizations have penetrated the nations of the West – as if after Madrid we needed any reminding.

OK, well yes, some of us still do need reminding.

Barely three months ago, Israeli security forces arrested a Palestinian-born Canadian, Jamal Akal, and charged him with plotting a campaign of murder in North America.

A shocking story – but I expect it came as no surprise to my former National Post colleague, Stewart Bell, Canada’s premier national-security reporter. Now Stewart has produced an important new book, Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terror to the World detailing the dismaying story of “the terrorists who use Canada as a base, the carnage they cause around the world, and the political leaders in Ottawa who let it all happen.” I read this book in galleys three months ago and blurbed it as an “urgent call to action.” The call is all the more urgent post-Madrid.

Bell’s stories are specific and vivid. His conclusion is searing: Canada has allowed its territory to be used as a base for terror – because Canadian politicians are too complacent and too timid to put a stop to it.

“Canadians are fortunate to have reasonably competent security, intelligence, and police agencies; however, the success of these services usually comes in spite of their political bosses, not because of them. CSIS [the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service] and the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] have been effective at monitoring the activities of terrorist groups in Canada, but they have been unable to put them out of business, in large part because their political masters have not given them the tools to do so.” (p. 210.)

Canada now has a new prime minister, Paul Martin. Martin’s predecessor, Jean Chretien, was deposed in large part because he botched the security relationship with the United States. Yet Martin’s own record is very disturbing, As Bell shows, as recently as 2000, by which time his leadership campaign had accelerated into high gear, Martin accepted an invitation to a fundraising event for a front-group for the murderous Tamil Tigers – against the express advice of Canadian intelligence. The temptations of ethnic politics trumped both security and intelligence. As Stewart Bell’s reporting demonstrates, in Canada, politics remains trumps over security even after 9/11. Cold Terror is important work, and not only for Canadians – but for all North Americans concerned with the safety of this shared continent.

Sharia in Canada

Meanwhile, www.secularislam.org, the important website of the Muslim dissenter "Ibn Warraq," has a thought-provoking essay by Iranian expatriate Azam Kamguian about Canada's decision to permit sharia courts to arbitrate family and other disputes between Canadians of Muslim faith. With this decision, taken last October, Canada becomes the first Western country to allow sharia the force of law.

Under sharia, "a woman's testimony ... counts only as half that of a man. So in straight disagreements between husband and wife, the husband's testimony will normally prevail. In questions of inheritance, whilst under Canadian law sons and daughters would be treated equally, under the Sharia daughters receive only half the portion of sons. If the Institute were to have jurisdiction in custody cases, the man will automatically be awarded custody once the children have reached an age of between seven and nine years."

Kamguian fears that "many people from Muslim origin will be pressured into accepting arbitration by the Islamic Institute on matters of civil and family law." And indeed Kamguian suggests that such pressure is already being applied: "Mr. Momtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, and a leading proponent of the Islamic tribunals has said: .... 'On religious grounds, a Muslim who would choose to opt out … would be guilty of a far greater crime than a mere breach of contract – and this would be tantamount to blasphemy or apostasy'."

Such words present a special problem for women, Kamguian contends. "Too many women from Muslin origin living in the west still live in Islamic and patriarchal environments where the man's word and pressure from the community is law. It will take a brave woman to defy her husband, and to refuse to have her dispute settled under Islamic law ...."

Kamguian gets one detail wrong: Sharia arbitration will still be subject to the supervision of Canada's courts. But there is one deeper thing that Kamguian gets right: Al Jazeerah's report on the matter already alleges that any questioning of the spread of sharia into the West "hints at" racism.

Yesterday afternoon, I drove past the monument to Tomas Masaryk on my way home from work. Somebody had placed a large wreath at the statue's base.

Tomas Masaryk was of course the first president of Czechoslovakia: a nationalist and a democrat. His son, Jan, served as Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister: He was murdered by the communists during the 1948 coup.

By purest coincidence, at that exact moment, my radio was playing the speech given earlier that day by the Slovak prime minister on his country’s accession to NATO. You wouldn’t know from all the air raids being launched on the administration by the media, but yesterday was the day that seven more former East Bloc countries joined the Western alliance: in addition to Slovakia, also Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

Both halves of the country Masaryk founded now belong to the realm of liberty – as do the three Baltic states that the great writer Czeslaw Milosz once feared had been erased from human history.

A great day – and maybe also a day on which to remember that many of the people who condemn George W. Bush for liberating Iraq once condemned Ronald Reagan for promising to liberate Central and Eastern Europe from communism.

I do think it was rather petulant of Richard Clarke to complain on “Meet the Press” that the administration is out to “destroy” him. Clarke hurls a series of terrible accusations at the administration and its senior staff – and is then outraged when they reply that Clarke is wrong? Or when they point out that what he says today contradicts what he has said in the past? Or that he might possibly have other motives than those he acknowledges? Or when they note that he seems strangely tolerant of far worse mistakes by the previous administration?

Clarke argues that the issue shouldn’t be personalized. At the same time, he himself criticizes his former colleagues in highly personal terms. He complains of being the victim of an “attack machine.” But his own attack has been rolled out with a mechanical precision that should impress BMW.

For all the to-ing and fro-ing about Clarke’s intentions and integrity, however, we’re basically back at the same old argument about who the enemy is. The Clintonite view – classically expressed by Clinton NSC staffers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon in The Age of Sacred Terror is that we are up against a purely stateless terror network. Al Qaeda is its own independent thing, disconnected from Arab governments. In the current Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria takes the argument one step further, arguing that al Qaeda does not need states at all.

This way of looking at things has its advantages – principally that it spares the United States the unwelcome task of re-examining its relationships with its traditional allies in the Middle East, and especially with Saudi Arabia.

But this way of looking at things also has one big disadvantage: It’s not true.

Without the indulgence and complaisance of governments worldwide, al Qaeda could never have taken form. If the Saudis had cut off the flow of funds to al Qaeda, if Afghanistan had denied al Qaeda its territory, if Pakistan had not formed a tacit alliance with al Qaeda and the Taliban, if radical governments like Iraq had not incited anti-American and anti-Western extremism, and if moderate governments like Egypt had not appeased it – minus all these ifs, al Qaeda would never have become the menace it has become.

President Bush’s achievement in the war on terror is to have seen the problem for what it is, without illusions – and then to have had the courage to act. Richard Clarke’s attempt to present the 1990s as a heroic age of struggle against terrorism is an audacious upending of the facts. The United States was hit and hit and hit again – and never even acknowledged to itself who was hitting it and who was paying for the hits.

But while President Bush should get full marks for what he has done, the administration has done a worryingly bad job this week of defending its record. Why shouldn’t Condoleezza Rice, for example, testify to the 9/11 commission? The administration’s fears about separation of powers are valid enough – but the commission is not a congressional committee, it’s a blue-ribbon panel of experts from both parties. Why put yourself into a position where you have to explain why it’s OK for Rice to talk to “60 Minutes” but not to the nation’s designated investigators of the worst disaster in its modern history?

In action, the Bush administration is bold. But in communication, it is extraordinarily cautious – more afraid of saying the wrong thing than of omitting to say the right one. Calvin Coolidge said that you never have to apologize for what you don’t say – but that’s not right. The things the administration didn’t say to make its case for Iraq; the things it isn’t saying to explain why it over-ruled Richard Clarke – these omissions have been and are damaging. The more fully the Bush administration lays out its case, the more convincing that case is.

This administration came into office to discover that al Qaeda had been allowed to grow into a full-blown menace. It lost six precious weeks to the Florida recount – and then weeks after Inauguration Day to the go-slow confirmation procedures of a 50-50 Senate. As late as the summer of 2001, pitifully few of Bush’s own people had taken their jobs at State, Defense, and the NSC. Then it was hit by 9/11. And now, now the same people who allowed al Qaeda to grow up, who delayed the staffing of the administration, who did nothing when it was their turn to act, who said nothing when they could have spoken in advance of the attack – these same people accuse George Bush of doing too little? There’s a long answer to give folks like that – and also a short one. And the short one is: How dare you?