Category: Perspectives

This is a big year for us in Canada.  Sure, we are a youngish nation and celebrating 150 years may sound quaint to our older international cousins, but it is a cause for celebration nonetheless. I am looking forward to the commemoration as I was six when we marked our centennial in 1967 and don’t […]

I know that in a world of 24/7 news and intense competition to be first with a breaking story that time is of the essence.  Individuals and news outlets feel that they do not have the luxury to wait to publish for fear that another individual or outlet will scoop them.  In their haste, there […]

Residents of London have undergone yet another terrorist attack.  The nation that survived countless IRA attacks and threats in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and which saw the carnage of July 2005 and the attempted beheading of a military member in Woolwich in 2013 is reeling from yesterday’s events where a man ran over people […]

These past couple of months have not been good for Canada’s spy service.  First, the Federal Court ruled that CSIS has been negligent in informing it of a programme whereby it ‘illegally kept’ data (which it had collected legally under warrant) on Canadians.  Then there is the criticism that the Service shared questions with the […]

The announcement that Canada has reached a settlement with three citizens who claim that information shared by CSIS with Syria led to their arrest and torture is big news.  We don’t know, at least not yet, what this compensation amounts to but we do know that the Trudeau government  has apologised for “the role Canadian officials […]

I can’t imagine what it feels like to see your child arrested.  My children were no different than most I suppose, occasionally doing things they should not have, but nothing too serious, nothing that warranted police attention.  Thankfully, I was never placed in that position. Now imagine that authorities arrest your child after you called […]

We seem to be having a hard time figuring out what to call our struggle with terrorism.   Leaving aside the belief, held by me and others, that framing counter terrorism in terms of war is a bad idea, it is clear that we keep changing our minds about what we are really involved in. […]

One of the most oft-cited ‘push factors’ for why people become radicalised and join terrorist groups is the nebulous idea of ‘alienation’.  Read any story or academic paper on the subject and you are bound to come across a phrase something like “the most vulnerable to radicalisation are alienated (NB or marginalised) youth”.  Go ahead […]

I know that I need to stop carping about the proliferation of ‘alternative facts’, otherwise known as lies.  I am obsessing about pointing them out all with the full knowledge that there are far too many and they are coming in too fast and furious to keep up.  I suppose I want to provide an […]

We have developed a wonderful system in the West where everyone has the right to a fair trial and to see the evidence collected against them.  Defence lawyers are in many cases tireless defenders of all.  We – well at least most of us that is – have also set in place generous refugee acceptance […]