Former CSIS agent Phil Gurski discusses possible Chinese retribution against Canada after a high-profile arrest.
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on December 3, 2018. Way back in medieval times there was a concept known as sanctuary. Under this notion, those who had committed crimes could place themselves beyond the long arm of the law by hightailing it to a church or monastery, where supposedly divine law trumped the […]
This piece and a rebuttal both appeared on the Resilience Post Web site on December 6, 2018. One of my favourite Monty Python skits (and I have tonnes of those!) is the one in which John Cleese plays a drill sergeant who is teaching a bunch of recruits how to defend themselves against an adversary […]
Today marks a very solemn occasion in Canadian – and world – history. 29 years ago, on December 6, 1989, misogynist Marc Lepine went into a classroom at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique and, after separating the men from the women, killed 14 of the latter before cowardly taking his own life. His excuse? Lépine’s suicide note blamed […]
A little less than a month ago we marked (‘celebrated’ is definitely the wrong word) the centenary of the end of the First World War. This was a solemn occasion on which we recalled the deaths, injuries and destruction in not only the ‘Great War’ but also in WWII, the Korean War and others. It […]
Once a month or so I get an email entitled “Updates on Radicalisation Research” from something called ‘Radicalisationresearch.org’ ( I assume it is from the UK because of the way ‘radicalisation’ is spelled – either that or Canadian although I doubt that). This newsletter usually lists a dozen or so papers written in a number […]
Keeping with the theme of the OPV/TSAS conference on PVE (preventing violent extremism) in Edmonton last week I’d like to pick up on a theme that is getting a lot of attention in Canada, that of right-wing extremism (RWE for short). There was a panel on this menace that I had to unfortunately skip as […]
I have just returned from a CVE (countering violent extremism) conference in Edmonton organised by the Organization for the Prevention of Violence (OPV), the Canadian Practitioners’ Network for the Prevention of Radicalization and Extremist Violence, and the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society (TSAS) where I gave a presentation on what we know about the extremist […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on November 26, 2018. We all know that many nations have a foreign intelligence service that sends spies here, there, and everywhere to collect the information its government tells it to in order to protect state interests. There is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which has been featured […]
So the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a Vice News reporter has to hand over to the RCMP records of his conversation with a terrorist and this is a ‘dark day for press freedom‘?? In fairness, the ones who think that are from Vice News and as they fought the original order to […]