Author: Phil Gurski

Every time you attend an Ottawa Senators home game there is a moment, usually during the second period, where a member of the Canadian military is honoured in a commemoration called ‘Heroes’ Ridge’.  Fans stand and give the soldier a standing ovation – even the players on the ice tap their sticks – and I […]

You all know what a Rorschach ink blot test is.  Invented back in 1917 by a Swiss psychiatrist working on his own in an asylum, the test has been used for decades and has also been the butt of jokes for almost as long. In the movie What About Bob, hypochondriac Bill Murray relates the […]

Now that the recommendations of the Iacobucci Commission in Canada have finally been implemented and three Canadians who claim to have been tortured in Syria with the alleged complicity of the Canadian government and CSIS have settled their case, it is time for a comment.  A few weeks have passed and I for one can […]

Knowing that what you are doing is the right thing is important.  There are all kinds of ideas in all kinds of fields of study and practice but they are not all equal.  Some are clearly better than others.  One way of telling which ones are which is to measure what they purport to do. […]

It is really hard to come up with a definition of terrorism that all agree on.  Every country seems to have its own version and while there are of course similarities there are also differences and some of these may have legal ramifications.  Then there is the non-legal definition: i.e. what the average person thinks […]

The news coming out of Stockholm is all too familiar these days.  A man stole a beer truck and drove it down a popular pedestrian mall in the centre of town, mowing down people before crashing into a storefront.  The use of a vehicle to cause terror has become a trend of late and attacks […]

The RCMP announced yesterday that they have arrested Pamir Hakimzadah and charged him with leaving Canada to join Islamic State, meaning that he is charged with terrorism. This is a big deal.  It represents, to my knowledge, the first returning foreign fighter to be charged under the provisions of section 83.01 of the Canadian Criminal […]

Terrorism is sure getting complicated.  The good old days, if I may call them that, were easy by comparison. Terrorists were easy to spot because they tended to chuck bombs or fire weapons at people, the larger the crowd the better.  Then we got to the airline hijacking phase in which most incidents ended relatively […]

Some potentially disturbing news on the terrorism front came out the other day in Canada. According to reports, four employees at Pierre Elliot Trudeau airport in Montreal (it used to be called Dorval) had their security clearances revoked over concerns that they had become ‘radicalised’.  The men had access to restricted areas, one had talked […]

There sure seems to be a lot of hand wringing over travel these days.  We have had two bans imposed by the US, one ridiculous (the generic ban on anyone coming from 6 Muslim countries) and one more realistic, albeit still open to question (the ban on electronic devices for passengers boarding aircraft in 10 […]