Have you ever been to a baseball game or a hockey game? If so, then you know that there are risks at both from flying balls or pucks. Some people get hurt, sometimes seriously, when they are struck by a horsehide ball or a vulcanised rubber puck traveling at very high speeds. Hockey made changes […]
Category: Perspectives
I have just had the pleasure of seeing Steven Pinker give a talk at the Ottawa Writers’ Festival about his new book Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress. Picking up where he left off in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined, Mr. Pinker makes a compelling case […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 19, 2018 Of all the groups that we can describe as extremist in nature, if not necessarily violent extremist, none can be as bizarre as the one that calls itself ‘Freemen on the Land’ (a.k.a. sovereign citizens). This small coterie of Canadians hews to a number […]
Here we go again. Another terrorist attack by someone ‘known to police’, this time in southwestern France. A Moroccan hijacked a car after shooting the driver and a passenger, followed some police officers jogging nearby, shot and wounded one, went to a local supermarket where he took hostages and shot several before a tactical squad […]
I know I have gone over this material before but there is nothing like an anniversary to occasion yet another look at an incident. The ‘incident’ I am referring to is the 15th anniversary of the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003. No matter what side of the political spectrum you belong to I […]
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Stop the politicisation of terrorism
This post appeared in The Hill Times on March 19, 2018 Remember Willy Horton? No, not the former Detroit Tigers baseball player, the former convicted murderer. He became famous (infamous?) in 1987 when, after he was released on a prison furlough programme, he raped a white woman and assaulted her fiance (Horton was African […]
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Tech and terrorism – part 1
This past week I had the opportunity to attend a fascinating workshop in Montreal sponsored by Concordia University’s Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies (MIGS) entitled ‘Tech Against Terrorism’. A number of academics, private sector entities and think tanks all came to talk about the challenges behind identifying and removing terrorist content from the Internet and […]
Canada was long known as a nation of peacekeepers, of the multinational kind. We used to send lots of our men and women to conflict zones around the world to do our part in keeping warring parties from slaughtering each other in the hopes that the UN, under which we served, could cobble together some […]
Those of us in the intelligence community would often wonder what it would be like to have an NDP government calling the shots. Generally speaking, we did not see it is a good thing for Canada’s spies. Whether it was uncertainty over the need to have intelligence services at all or some misplaced sense that […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 26 I do not really want to flog the Jagmeet Singh/Sikh extremism story ad nauseum – many others have done that – but there is one thing that the leader of the NDP does that concerns me and needs to be addressed. In truth he has […]