CREDIT: Mike Cassese, Reuters Tactical police officers patrol Pearson Airport on Sept. 11, 2001. Many Canadians think that in the years since 9/11 the terrorist threat has been overblown, and airport security measures are only 'window dressing.'

At a recent meeting in Calgary, an unusual gathering of intelligence officials, academics, students and members of the public took part in an unusual town hall debate.

The subject was worthy of Peter Mansbridge, but those who gathered for the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies (CASIS), were not his normal crowd. The topic was Canadian complacency, specifically the question of whether Canadians are too complacent about national security threats.

The debaters were well qualified and silver-tongued: Reid Morden, a former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and former deputy minister of foreign affairs, and Catherine Ford, a veteran journalist and former opinion writer for the Calgary Herald.

The debaters each had their passionate say on the issue. Mr. Morden argued persuasively that the threats were real and that complacency was a worrying phenomenon rooted in the public's inability to fully understand the nature of the dangerous world we live in. Ms. Ford took an opposite tack, and not just for the sake of the show.

She characterized the current climate of Canadian thinking as seized by undue alarm, and attacked many of the security practices adopted by our government since 9/11 as nothing more than "window dressing."

The usual stories of the inconveniences of air travel and the absurdities of some airport security precautions had the frequent fliers in the audience on side. In Ms. Ford's view, Canadians had what she called a "right to complacency." It might seem, at first glance, an odd idea, but there are some underpinnings to it worth considering.

The point of convergence between such seemingly polar opposites -- too complacent, versus rightly complacent -- is a view that Canadians have been ill-served by their governments since 9/11 and the advent of what used to be called the "war on terror," and now has a new and ominous label, "the long war."

By ill-served, both Mr. Morden and Ms. Ford agreed that there are over-arching problems: failures of political leadership, failures of communication, and an unwillingness to re-think long-rooted traditions of secrecy. Ron Atkey, former chairman of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, joined the fray, pointing to the phenomenon of "over-claiming" the requirements of national security confidentiality by the government. It was revealed in the case of Justice Dennis O'Connor's inquiry into the case of Maher Arar, and extends more broadly to the issue of a reluctance on the part of political leaders and the security and intelligence community in Ottawa to fully inform Canadians about what the real world of threats might be.

The au dience, of about 150 people, was evenly split on the issue when the debate's question was called. Roughly 50 per cent concurred that Canadians were too complacent, and were in Reid Morden's corner. Fifty per cent disagreed and joined Ms. Ford. That's Canadian, that's democratic, that's healthy. But the vote points to a problem that went undiscussed.

We don't have, in this country, any consensual view of what national security threats to Canada might really be. Worse, we don't even have a definition of threats -- terrorism is often a shorthand, but our bag of frighteners should contain much more than that, across the range of man-made and natural threats to our security and way of life.

Definitional confusion aside, there is also a very Canadian tendency to assume the government will or should fix our confusion for us. There is an important truth here, but some big pitfalls as well. The government does need to be able to speak to the Canadian public with more clarity, more detail and more credibility, and simply more often, about its intelligence take on threats. But nested in such a proposition is this thorn -- if we are too willing to rely on government information strategies alone, we are also likely to be too pliable and insufficiently critical as citizens.

The answer is a twin responsibility. The public has to be better able to make up its mind about threats to national security. The government, for its part, has to be able to communicate the official version of threat assessments openly, and be prepared to foster greater public education.

What we need is a better social contract between government and citizens in a new, post 9/11 world of threats. How we achieve this goal is not easy.

Some modest proposals: First, there should be a requirement for an annual and detailed report on national security threats and responses, to be tabled in Parliament by the government of the day.

Second, one of the key sectors that we look to for public education, namely our universities, need to take much more seriously the need to build security and intelligence teaching and research into their curricula. Universities can be faddish, but security is not a fad that has caught on. Canadian universities need a kick, or a kick-start, in the form of independent government funding, to support security and intelligence studies, much like that first given to defence studies back in the 1970s.

Tim Weiner, a New York Times journalist and author of an acclaimed recent history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, recently called for the creation of a $20-billion fund for national security studies and training in the United States. Americans think big (or at least remember their Jonathan Swift).

But even a tiny fraction of that budget would go a long way to train a new generation of Canadians, some of whom might go on to make careers in the intelligence field, and all of whom would be in a better position to decide for themselves on threats to security and the proper attitude to take in response.

Maybe we could feel more comfortable, in an ideal world, with Catherine Ford's argument that Canadians live in a safe country and have a right to complacency. That "right" comes with a price tag -- more government openness and more public education. A knowledge deficit, whatever the root causes, is never a good thing for a democratic society. The debate that occurred in the Calgary town hall needs to spill out into the streets and become a national debate.

Wesley Wark is a past president of the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies and a visiting research professor at the University of Ottawa.