This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 22, 2018 If there is one thing we have learned about Joshua Boyle it is that he is an odd duck. He apparently made over 62,000 edits and contributions to Wikipedia over a 13-year span (if my math is correct that makes 15 a day) on […]
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If you want to know what CSIS does and why it does it, a good place to start is the CSIS Act which dates back to the creation of that organisation out of the former RCMP Security Service back in 1984. The Act has stood up fairly well over its first three decades despite several […]
Years ago when I was still with CSIS I was part of the debriefing of a source we were running on our counter terrorism investigations. During our chat he said something that struck me as really profound. We were talking about the radicalisation process and he noted, based on what he had observed, that the […]
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A mother’s dilemma – and society’s
I am a parent and that means I worry about my kids. Not that I have any real reason to do so since my three are all grown up, on their own, doing well and appear for all intents and purposes to be well-adjusted, functioning human beings (thanks in no small part to their mother!). […]
One of the more ‘interesting’ terrorism cases to develop in Canada over the past few years is that of John Nuttall and Amanda Korody, two converts to Islam who planted pressure cooker bombs on the grounds of the BC Legislature in Victoria on Canada Day 2013 with a view to punishing average Canadians for their […]
Shakespeare must have had a lot against lawyers. It was the great English playwright after all who had a character in Henry IV Part 2 say “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’. There has been a lot of debate over what this quote means – in any event it has stood […]
When I was growing up in London (Ontario) there was a famous quasi-mythical family that lived near the town of Lucan, about a half-hour away, in the 19th century. The Donnellys, or the ‘Black Donnellys’ as we were taught about them, were Irish immigrants who were killed by a mob in 1880 in a feud […]
As it is wont to do, the federal Department of Public Safety has just issued its annual “Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada”. This year’s edition contains statements such as: The main terrorist threat to Canada continues to stem from violent extremists inspired by terrorist groups, such as Daesh and al-Qaida Daesh, and […]
Canadians seem to have a love-hate relationship with their security and law enforcement agencies. They rightfully demand to be kept safe and want their spies and cops to stop terrorism and serious crime before it happens. At the same time they sometimes express horror at the methods used to guarantee that safety. I am fully […]
We have had a couple of very good successes in terrorism trials in Canada. The Toronto 18 back in 2006. Operation Samossa in Ottawa in 2010. The VIA train plot in 2013. The Victoria legislature Canada Day plot also in 2013 (before a judge erroneously – in my opinion – dismissed the jury verdict on […]