Last week saw the emergence of a very interesting report by the Montreal-based Centre for the Prevention of Radicalisation Leading to Violence (known by its French acronym CPRMV) on the situation at the College de Maisonneuve, from where several young people had left to engage in jihad in Syria. The centre, which was stood up […]
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.
The public has a complicated relationship with intelligence agencies. On the one hand we love to watch James Bond and Jason Bourne films, despite the fact that the ways these spies work has very little if anything to do with how things really happen. On the other we get frustrated because these agencies tell us […]
The renowned US journal Scientific American put out a fascinating article today in which leading scholars were asked what the top 20 “big questions” facing humanity in the future. The questions posed ranged from space exploration to medicine, but it was the following that caught my eye (reproduced in its entirety: for the complete list […]
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Neutralising the radicalisers
If there is one thing that any serious researcher or professional who has studied radicalisation to violence knows all too well is that the process or path from normalcy to extremism does not happen in a vacuum. And it certainly does not take place on one’s own. The term “self-radicalisation”, all too frequently uttered by […]
One thing I find fascinating is the science of lie detection. There is a lot of research out there about which tools can pick up on an attempt to avoid the truth, ranging from eye movement (saccades) to vocabulary use. As a former intelligence analyst I had to undergo periodic lie detector tests. They were […]
As we still reel from the foiled terrorist attack last week in Strathroy, Ontario, we can still rest assured that attacks, successful or not, remain a rarity in Canada. In the period since 9/11 we have had no more than 8 such incidents: on average one every two years. When we compare our experiences […]
The Canadian Minister of Public Safety, Ralph Goodale, will make some comments later today on the Liberal government’s plans on counter radicalisation. The Liberals have promised to create a centre of excellence, to be known as the Office of the Coordinator for Counter Radicalisation and Community Engagement, to be housed within his department. The Minister […]
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How should we respond to terrorism?
I apologise for leading off with a statement of the obvious, but terrorism is real. We in Canada were reminded of that this week when the RCMP and its partners thwarted an attack by Aaron Driver in Strathroy. Regardless of whether Mr. Driver’s attempt was amateurish or not, whether he was an “A”-team member or […]
Another video, another promise of terrorism. You would think that we’d be getting tired of these by now. Every wannabe martyr goes online, films himself (or herself) – or gets someone else to film – rants on about how we in the West are the aggressor against Islam and Muslims, and threatens to kill us […]
Today in the small southwestern Ontario town of Strathroy a young man known to police for having terrorist connections was killed by security forces after he appeared to have exploded a device and had another in his possession. The victim, Aaron Driver, had been arrested in June 2015 after expressing support for Islamic State (IS) […]