Author: Phil Gurski

One would think that a state has fundamental rights and obligations in the same way that people do.  Any state must, for instance, have a monopoly on the use of force since in the absence of such we would live in anarchy.  I agree that the state exists only – or rather should exist only […]

You gotta feel for the Kurds, history’s version of ‘always a bridesmaid, never a bride’.  Oft described as the world’s largest ethnic group without a country to call their own, the Kurds have come ever so close on several occasions.  They were kinda promised autonomy following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the post […]

If you want to know what CSIS does and why it does it, a good place to start is the CSIS Act which dates back to the creation of that organisation out of the former RCMP Security Service back in 1984.  The Act has stood up fairly well over its first three decades despite several […]

Years ago when I was still with CSIS I was part of the debriefing of a source we were running on our counter terrorism investigations.  During our chat he said something that struck me as really profound.   We were talking about the radicalisation process and he noted, based on what he had observed, that the […]

On my first trip to Singapore many years ago I was struck by signs placed throughout the airport that warned of severe penalties for drug trafficking.  If my memory isn’t failing me, I seem to recall that those signs didn’t mince words.  They made it quite clear that the penalty for peddling in illegal drugs […]

I am a parent and that means I worry about my kids.  Not that I have any real reason to do so since my three are all grown up, on their own, doing well and appear for all intents and purposes to be well-adjusted, functioning human beings (thanks in no small part to their mother!).  […]

Is there any more annoying phrase than “the world needs more Canada”?  There is a book by that name by Heather Reisman, head of Indigo books, and a frequent slogan used by that chain.  It refers, I think, to the notion that Canada is such a nice place and that we Canadians are just so […]

I have a confession to make: I hate going through a metal detector whenever I attend an Ottawa Senators’ hockey game.  It isn’t that it takes too long (it doesn’t), or that the staff are mean (they are actually quite nice, very Canadian), or even that sometimes the line backs up out the door and […]

One of the more ‘interesting’ terrorism cases to develop in Canada over the past few years is that of John Nuttall and Amanda Korody, two converts to Islam who planted pressure cooker bombs on the grounds of the BC Legislature in Victoria on Canada Day 2013 with a view to punishing average Canadians for their […]

I learned a new word this week: swatting.  This phenomenon describes  when someone calls in a fake crisis to get local law enforcement involved and often entails sending out the SWAT team (hence the name_ to an address to prevent a murder or resolve a hostage situation.  This very thing happened to a Calgary woman […]