Borealis Threat & Risk ConsultingCanada is a pretty good place to live. We constantly rank high on every conceivable list (quality of life, happiness, opportunity, openness…) and it is no secret that millions who live elsewhere would give anything to move here. Sure, we are not perfect and we have a few skeletons in our closet (first and foremost […]
A truly astonishing statement came out of a recent OSCE conference on countering terrorism hosted by Germany. Astonishing not for its insight but for the fact that it was made in 2016. Here is what happened, according to a report in Deutsche Welle: For a long time, there was an assumption that the internet was increasingly […]
The Canadian public were made aware of a serious allegation this week that a Sikh resident in BC was running a “terror camp” near Mission, a town of around 35,000 on the Fraser River east of Vancouver. The story came from an article in an Indian newspaper and claimed that Hardeep Nijjar was the “operational […]
As I wrote in a blog post yesterday, today marks the 10th anniversary of the arrest of 17 men in the Greater Toronto Area in the culmination of a massive terrorism investigation by Canadian authorities. In what came to be known as the “Toronto 18” (the last subject was arrested in August 2006) Canadians were […]
It seems that many Canadians, let alone foreigners, have forgotten about the Toronto 18 (I can attest that every time I give a talk on terrorism in Canada and make reference to the 2006 terror cell fewer and fewer people have any real knowledge of what remains the single largest counter terrorism investigation in our […]
If there is one aspect of terrorism that is poorly understood it is the relationship between mental illness and the execution of a terrorist act. All too often the masses agree in the immediate aftermath of an incident that the perpetrator must have been suffering from an undisclosed – or undiagnosed – mental disease. We […]
When a terrorist cell is disrupted, or an individual is arrested at the airport on his or her way to Turkey to join a group like Islamic State, the media rises to the challenge and splashes the news across all platforms. The public responds in kind and for a short time the blogosphere and news […]
One of the most central tenets of the ideology that drives terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Boko Haram and others is the belief that Islam and the West are in a state of war. This war, they maintain, was not instigated from within or by the Ummah, or Islamic world, but rather is […]
The controversy surrounding the Canadian government’s use of the tool known as National Security Certificates does not seem to want to go away. A Federal Court judge has ruled that the government’s case against one more alleged terrorist, Mahmoud Jaballah, is not reasonable and the certificate issued against him in 1999 will be set aside. […]
I have come to the conclusion that Westerners – and Western governments – are not very patient. It is not clear, as least not to me, whether this is due to our 24/7 news cycle, the constant availability of, and distraction from, social media, or the very nature of our capitalist society where results are […]