Search: “national security”

In case you didn’t notice – or don’t care – today marks the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution. It was this day in 1979 that the Ayatollah Khomeini-led revolt against the Shah of Iran consolidated victory in what became known as the Dah-e-fajr (the ‘ten days of dawn’ in Farsi, the period between Khomeini’s […]

In the classic Lewis Carroll book Through the Looking Glass, Alice in has an interesting exchange with Humpty Dumpty. When she expresses puzzlement over how he is using the word ‘glory’, he replies as follows: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to […]

There is an old saying “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”. It means that if you want to exert influence and win people over it is better to use nice rather than nasty means. US President Trump has clearly never read this saying (from what I hear he doesn’t read, period, and […]

(with apologies to Erich Segal) Some of you may have heard of a horrific accident last April in rural Saskatchewan when a bus carrying members of the Junior A Humboldt Broncos hockey team collided with a tractor-trailer whose driver had run a stop sign. 16 young men and their coach died and others were injured, […]

What an end to the week it was! Breaking news out of Kingston, Ontario (about 2 hours south of Ottawa and 2.5 east of Toronto) that the RCMP had made two arrests in what was being called a terrorism investigation. Reports of planes flying over the city for days doing surveillance. Talk of bomb material. […]

We Canadians may be shy folk (at least when put next to our southern neighbours) but we also tend to point out, nauseatingly perhaps, when one of ours makes it big on the international scene. Think Saturday Night Live, created by Canadian Lorne Michaels and featuring many, many Canucks over the years: Martin Short, Mike […]

Last July 22 I was in Toronto on the waterfront giving a presentation to an audience on extremism. I don’t quite recall who they were but it might have been a group that does Ontario Legislature security. My talk was well received and I even got to sell a few of my books – so […]

If there is one thing I take pride in it is my commitment to speaking and writing only on matters on which I think I have something meaningful or useful to say. Our world is all too crammed with ‘instant experts’ willing to weigh in on just about anything, although more often than not they […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on December 19, 2018. July 1 is, of course, our national day.  Whether you celebrate it like we do here in Ottawa with a series of events centred on Parliament Hill capped by the awesome fireworks display or in your own local way (at the cottage, in your […]