This piece appeared in The Hill Times on June 11, 2018. All is takes is a cursory glance at the news on any given day to conclude – erroneously as I hope to show – that Islamist extremist terrorism is a daily event that threatens us all. We read of bombings in Afghanistan, beheadings in […]
Category: Perspectives
Hubris, defined as “excessive pride or self-confidence or arrogance”, is a human emotion that has long fascinated me. There are individuals who exercise it with alarming regularity – a certain US President whose name rhymes with ‘dump’ readily comes to mind – and it is often seen as a fatal flaw that results in someone’s downfall. For instance, Napoleon could […]
This article was posted in The Hill Times on July 9, 2018. A week ago a relatively small crowd in Vancouver’s Stanley Park commemorated the single greatest terrorist attack in history (as determined by deaths) prior to 9/11. And Canada featured prominently in it. I refer of course to the downing of Air India flight 182 […]
Quick! Name the top ten causes of death in Canada! Can you? Here is one list I found in the wondrous playground and source of all wisdom we call the Internet (the data is from 2012: the rightmost column is percentage of yearly deaths: 1. Malignant neoplasms (cancer) 30.2 2 Diseases of heart (heart […]
Imagine the following scenario. There is a person who comes from a good home, not necessarily privileged perhaps, but who ‘has it good’. Despite this advantage in life – let’s face it, many people don’t have it so good – this person becomes bored. In their boredom, this person hooks up with a gang that […]
Does anyone else remember the CBC Radio show Basic Black? I loved that show, which used to run on Saturday mornings and did so from 1983 to 2002. The show’s host, Arthur Black, would interview a number of guests, some of them quite eccentric, who came from all walks of life. It was a truly […]
The other night my wife and I went to see a play written by legendary British crime writer Agatha Christie called The Unexpected Guest at the Ottawa Little Theatre. This particular performance was quite good and the ending, much in keeping with the title, was unexpected (at least to us it was: perhaps “whodunit” was obvious to […]
As I -and many others – have mentioned before, Indonesia is by far the largest Muslim nation on Earth. This often comes to a surprise to many as the southeast Asian country is not located within the ‘normal’ region we associate with Islam (i.e. the Middle East) and is surrounded by nations that are most […]
How NOT to protect national security
That we live in a time obsessed with threats to national security and what to do about those threats is beyond question. Whether we are talking about terrorism, gun crime, migrant flows, climate change or other risks to the planet and its constituent nations the conversation and debates surrounding the best approaches to meet and […]
This piece was published in The Hill Times on July 2, 2018 Here is a fundamental question for Canadians: what do you want from your security intelligence service? What are your expectations of CSIS, an agency of several thousand civil servants which has been plying its trade for more than three decades in the […]