Author: Phil Gurski

With a new government sworn in yesterday in Canada, there is an added impetus to do CVE (countering violent extremism) in this country.  We used to do it, and do it well, until a few – ahem unfortunate – phrases were dropped over the past year by certain government officials.  We can now set that […]

It is not hard to see why politicians have a hard time admitting mistakes.  They work hard and  make difficult decisions and are not always open to accepting that these decisions were wrong.  Some may be too arrogant to see the error of their ways.   It is the rare individual who issues a mea […]

I have already blogged about the use of fear by the governing Conservatives in the most recent Canadian federal election.  Voters were showered with warnings that the Islamic State was everywhere (and may be coming to a bedroom near you) and that only by returning Mr, Harper and his crew would Canadians truly be safe. […]

When we study and analyse terrorist groups, we tend to look at them in categories – Islamist, right-wing, nationalist, single issue, etc. – rather than as a whole. True, eminent scholars such as David Rappoport have written magisterial works that examine multiple terrorist strands across time, but the current trend is to put boundaries around […]

In the wake of the stunning Liberal victory on October 19, two stories have caught my eye that have a bearing on terrorism. The first had to do with the surprise surrounding the “miraculous” comeback of the Liberals who, four years ago, had been declared all but dead.  With their measly 34 seats, there were […]

“Big data” is going to solve a lot of problems we are told.  The ability to amass and analyse huge corpuses of information will assist in spotting business trends, preventing diseases, combating crime and other amazing things.  The collection of all this will allow us to become better predictors of a whole gamut of phenomena.  There […]

There are a lot of misconceptions out there on how intelligence agencies do what they do.  It is not hard to see why this is: after all, spy services work in the shadows and seldom say anything publicly (“I can neither confirm nor deny…”).  On the contrary, if these organisations were open books then they […]

Now that Stephen Harper is an ex prime minister, we can be sure to see dozens of articles on his legacy as our leader (in fact, they started to appear hours after he lost the October 19 election).  Depending on your political stripe, he is either a great PM or one of the worst.  There […]

If there is one thing that terrorist groups like the Islamic State are good at doing, it is getting their message out.  Videos, blogs, tweets, online magazines like Dabiq,  photos and other social media promote the group’s goals, strike fear in the hearts of many and at the same time draw Westerners and others to […]

Canadians have overwhelmingly voted for change.  Mr. Harper is now a former prime minister and Mr. Trudeau is now prime minister elect. The new government will have a lot of challenges before it: the economy and income disparity; the environment; immigration and our role in the refugee crisis; First Nations; and many more. But what […]