CdnArtyWife said:
good point...and that reminds me of something my mom always used to say "locks are for honest people, if someone wants to break in bad enough, they will"
but at least more checks, more often will maybe deter the average trouble maker...and possibly make the general public more aware of the possibility of threat...or am I just being naive?
It would certainly make the public more aware (and cause a bit of grumbling among them as the traffic backs up into Oromocto), but I would think some kind of threat assessment should me made before deciding on security measures. I'm not an expert in security, but I am familiar with risk assessment as used in design (of structures, etc.). The idea is to consider the likelihood of an "incident", and the severity of the "incident" should it happen. In civil engineering this means we take more care to avoid more serious failures, and are less concerned about less serious failures. As an example, hospitals are designed to a higher standard of resistance to earthquakes than office buildings because the consequences of a hospital being severely damaged in an earthquake are more serious than those of an office building being damaged (not least because the earthquake is likely to cause the hospital to get a lot of business!).
So applying the same thinking to military base security, the likelihood of hard-core terrorists striking any given CF installation would seem to be fairly small, but if they should be attacked, some installations would result in more trouble for the Forces than others. It's well known that the Halifax dockyard contains more than half of the navy's pointy-end in a fairly small space, and security at the dockyard is correspondingly tight (heavy gates, fences, etc., all visible to anyone who happens by on the street). CFB Gagetown, on the other hand, doesn't seem quite so juicy, being spread out over a huge area, so the severity of an "incident" would probably be somewhat less than the Dockyard and the same level of security might not be appropriate there.
As others have pointed out, there is a symbolic value to attacking any military target, so that would probably skew the issue somewhat. How much is a question I'll leave to wiser minds than mine.