Author: Phil Gurski

The other day I had lunch with an old friend who, like me, worked in the Canadian intelligence community.  We had  a wide-ranging chat over a number of issues – Donald Trump, what each of us was up to these days – but as inevitably happens when two people with our backgrounds get together the […]

There is an interesting piece in today’s Ottawa Citizen about a woman who was once the ‘pretty public face‘ of one of Canada’s nastier white supremacist organisations, Heritage Front.  Elizabeth Moore joined the group in high school and even became a spokesperson, a role she embraced, before doubts started to set in and she left […]

Now that Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the horror in Barcelona many people are asking ‘Why Spain?’  France, the UK and Belgium they understand since there has been a spate of attacks in recent years.  Perhaps even Sweden and Germany are on some peoples’ list even if these nations have suffered comparatively less. In […]

The carnage unfolding in Barcelona as I type is getting to be depressingly familiar.  An individual drives a vehicle (car, van, 18-wheeler) into an unsuspecting crowd of people, strewing them like bowling pins.  Innocent people are injured, some horribly, and some die (maybe mercifully quickly or agonisingly slowly).  While no group has yet to claim […]

A lot of people are very worried about the rise of the far right these days in light of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia on the weekend, at least based on the number of articles and op-ed pieces that I have come across in my news scanning as well as the number of media interviews […]

When I was in grade 13 – which in my day was the last year of high school in the province of Ontario, which I suppose just underscores how old I really am – I remember taking an exam in functions and relations, one of three mathematics options at the time ((calculus and algebra were […]

I do not suffer fools gladly.  Maybe that is a personality fault and maybe I should be a nicer person in the face of sheer stupidity.  But there are times where someone says something that is so utterly inane that it requires a response. The Munk Centre in Toronto held a very interesting debate in […]

The Globe and Mail featured a fascinating story in its weekend edition (August 12) on suicides in Toronto in which people throw themselves in front of subway cars. This has to be a particularly gruesome way to take one’s life and I really feel for the drivers of the subway.  I have heard that they […]

I am not going to jump on the bandwagon and categorically call what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia yesterday an act of domestic terrorism.  At least not yet.  There are still too many unknowns.  All we know so far is that James Alex Fields, a 20-year old man from Ohio, left his home to join an […]

I see that Ernst Zundel died the other day.  For many Canadians of a certain age Mr. Zundel was famous, or rather infamous, for being, well, to be blunt, a pain in the ass.  He was a Holocaust denier, a neo-Nazi and an all-around rabble-rouser.  He often surrounded himself with hard-hatted supporters when he made […]