Quebec is a very interesting province for many reasons, not least of which is the tremendous change in the role of religion over time. It is no exaggeration to state that the Catholic Church ruled the roost for centuries, telling Quebecers how to live, how to procreate and who to vote for. This dominance came […]
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Humans are really good at categorisation. Babies learn pretty quickly how to group different objects into sets depending on a variety of criteria – colour, texture, function, etc. This ability may actually be ingrained in us and it is believed to play a huge role in language acquisition. But sometimes our knack for categorising things […]
I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. Almost a year ago I wrote that the Canadian government would be placed in a difficult position should one of our citizens who chose to travel to Iraq to fight the terrorist group Islamic State alongside Kurdish forces was caught by the […]
I am a glass half full kind of guy, someone who seeks to find the positive in life. I am an optimist tinged with realism. Three decades in intelligence and 15 years in counter terrorism do tend to give one a good look at the less savoury aspects of life on this planet and as […]
It makes sense to adapt existing models to handle new phenomena where there are enough commonalities between the existing and emerging issues. I am not so sure it is easy to make that determination but if the costs and downsides of modifying approaches we already know well are low then I suppose no harm is […]
As scarcely a day goes by that we are not accosted with yet another story on a terrorist attack somewhere it is of little surprise that this form of violence has become a topic of conversation everywhere. What was once of interest to a niche market of specialists and confined to articles in little read […]
It has been yet another difficult day on the terrorism front. A truck plowed into a crowd of Christmas shoppers in Berlin, killing at least nine. The Russian Ambassador to Turkey was killed by an off-duty police officer at an art gallery in Ankara. And three people were shot outside an Islamic Centre in the Swiss […]
I have just returned from the 2016 Anti-Terrorism and Active Shooter conference in Niagara Falls where I was honoured to have been asked to open the 2-day event with a talk on Western foreign fighters. The conference, now in its fourth or fifth year, has rapidly become a go-to event and one of the premier […]
OK, it’s done. Donald Trump has become the US’ 45th President, markets have swung wildly, people are panicking, some fear the Apocalypse. Take a deep breath and calm down. As the 44th President, Barack Obama, predicted last night, the sun did indeed rise this morning (even if I cannot see it in cloudy Ottawa). A […]
In the wake of a Canadian Federal Court decision that my former employer – the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) – illegally retained data that it had collected legally under a court warrant, the fur is really flying. Every major Canadian media outlet has been all over this story and the reporting has been uniformly […]