This article was posted in The Hill Times on July 9, 2018. A week ago a relatively small crowd in Vancouver’s Stanley Park commemorated the single greatest terrorist attack in history (as determined by deaths) prior to 9/11. And Canada featured prominently in it. I refer of course to the downing of Air India flight 182 […]
Author: Phil Gurski
Phil Gurski is the President and CEO of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting Ltd. Phil is a 32-year veteran of CSE and CSIS and the author of six books on terrorism.
Quick! Name the top ten causes of death in Canada! Can you? Here is one list I found in the wondrous playground and source of all wisdom we call the Internet (the data is from 2012: the rightmost column is percentage of yearly deaths: 1. Malignant neoplasms (cancer) 30.2 2 Diseases of heart (heart […]
Imagine the following scenario. There is a person who comes from a good home, not necessarily privileged perhaps, but who ‘has it good’. Despite this advantage in life – let’s face it, many people don’t have it so good – this person becomes bored. In their boredom, this person hooks up with a gang that […]
Does anyone else remember the CBC Radio show Basic Black? I loved that show, which used to run on Saturday mornings and did so from 1983 to 2002. The show’s host, Arthur Black, would interview a number of guests, some of them quite eccentric, who came from all walks of life. It was a truly […]
The other night my wife and I went to see a play written by legendary British crime writer Agatha Christie called The Unexpected Guest at the Ottawa Little Theatre. This particular performance was quite good and the ending, much in keeping with the title, was unexpected (at least to us it was: perhaps “whodunit” was obvious to […]
As I -and many others – have mentioned before, Indonesia is by far the largest Muslim nation on Earth. This often comes to a surprise to many as the southeast Asian country is not located within the ‘normal’ region we associate with Islam (i.e. the Middle East) and is surrounded by nations that are most […]
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How NOT to protect national security
That we live in a time obsessed with threats to national security and what to do about those threats is beyond question. Whether we are talking about terrorism, gun crime, migrant flows, climate change or other risks to the planet and its constituent nations the conversation and debates surrounding the best approaches to meet and […]
This piece was published in The Hill Times on July 2, 2018 Here is a fundamental question for Canadians: what do you want from your security intelligence service? What are your expectations of CSIS, an agency of several thousand civil servants which has been plying its trade for more than three decades in the […]
A lot of ink has been spilled of late (can we still talk of ‘ink spilled’ in the digital age?) about the gun violence wreaking havoc in Toronto. Other cities in Canada have similar, albeit smaller scale, problems although Toronto’s is getting much attention because of the death toll. So far in 2018 there have […]
Sorry to be repetitive but some things are just worth repeating. So I will once again cite that great philosopher/New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra when he famously said: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Mr. Berra’s sage advice notwithstanding, many people foolishly think they can predict the future. Some do it […]