Phil’s Phathomings Episode 1 – Canada needs to ensure that immigrants do not bring nefarious plans to our country
Canada, like many other nations, needs robust immigration. Our fertility rates are dropping below the 2.1 minimum to keep our population stable and immigrants can help grow our economy. The vast majority of those who seek to move here do so for the right reasons: starting a new life, taking advantage of opportunities, seeing Canada as a great place to live and work. A few, however, have other ideas in mind (criminals, terrorists, those seeking to play out homeland conflicts on our soil). These need to be screened out and prevented from arriving on our shores in the first place. What happens, then, when a government kneecaps security screening? Bad things ensue…
Bad immigration practices can become public safety problems
CSIS Public Report 2025 – pg 35
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About Phil’s Fathomings
In a world of multiple voices and opinions it can be very hard to know where to turn. One choice is to look to those who actually worked in counter-terrorism in the national security world.
In these short podcasts, 30-year Canadian intelligence veteran Phil Gurski reflects on a wide range of national security and intelligence issues and seeks to provide insight into what they mean and what we need to do about them.
About Phil Gurski
Phil worked as a senior strategic analyst at CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) from 2001-2015, specializing in violent Islamist-inspired homegrown terrorism and radicalisation. From 1983 to 2001 he was employed as a senior multilingual analyst at Communications Security Establishment (CSE – Canada’s signals intelligence agency), specialising in the Middle East. He also served as senior special advisor in the National Security Directorate at Public Safety Canada from 2013, focusing on community outreach and training on radicalisation to violence, until his retirement from the civil service in May 2015, and as consultant for the Ontario Provincial Police’s Anti-Terrorism Section (PATS) from May to October 2015. He also headed Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting from May 2015-2025.
He was the Director of Security and Intelligence at the SecDev Group from June 2018 to July 2019 and the Director of the National Security Programme at the University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute from 2020-2022. He has also taught on national security issues at George Brown College, the University of Ottawa and Georgian College. Mr. Gurski has presented on violent Islamist-inspired and other forms of terrorism and radicalisation across Canada and around the world and is actively sought by Canadian and international media on national security and intelligence issues. He has written hundreds of op-eds on these matters for several Canadian media since 2016.
He is the author of The Threat from Within: Recognizing Al Qaeda-inspired Radicalization and Terrorism in the West (Rowman and Littlefield 2015) Western Foreign Fighters: The Threat to Homeland and International Security (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), The Lesser Jihads: Taking the Islamist fight to the world (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), An end to the ‘War on Terrorism (Rowman and Littlefield 2018), When Religion Kills: How Extremist Justify Violence Through Faith (Lynne Rienner 2019), The Peaceable Kingdom? A history of terrorism in Canada from Confederation to the present (self-published: 2021, republished by Double Dagger in 2022), The Fenians: Brotherhood of fools or Canada’s first terrorist threat? (Double Dagger: 2025), as well as a forthcoming book on the terrorism landscape globally a quarter century after 9/11 (9/11 The Unfinished Battle: Why Jihadi Terrorism Is Stronger, Wider, and Far From Over).
