Search: “national security”

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on May 29, 2018 As Canadians we expect the authorities tasked with keeping us safe to do as they are mandated.  We spend a lot of taxpayers’ hard-earned money on law enforcement and national security agencies and we demand an efficient use of those dollars.  We want results, […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on April 23, 2018 Way back when I was an analyst at CSE I recall a conversation with an workmate about who was more important to the organisation (we were both young and full of piss and vinegar).  He worked on the ‘Soviet problem’: I was assigned along […]

The other day I had lunch with an old friend who, like me, worked in the Canadian intelligence community.  We had  a wide-ranging chat over a number of issues – Donald Trump, what each of us was up to these days – but as inevitably happens when two people with our backgrounds get together the […]

Canadian courts are showing themselves to be prudent and worthy interpreters of the law of the land when it comes to terrorism.  A number of cases have now worked their way through the system and in the majority of them the Crown has successfully made its argument that a small number of Canadians are guilty […]

One of the great Canadian novels of the 20th century was Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan.  It is the story of the troubles between Canada’s two European founding nations – the French and the English (both had been preceded by the First Nations thousands of years earlier).  The phrase “two solitudes” has entered Canadian English […]

The new Trudeau government is clearly in a consulting mood.  It seems that they want to get Canadians’ views on a whole bunch of things, ranging from climate change to pipelines to refugee policy.   And now they are asking what Canadians think on national security. Last week Minister of Public Safety Ralph Goodale made […]

In the run-up to the British referendum on whether to stay in the European Union or not there were many dire predictions on how a leave vote would effect the United Kingdom.  We are already seeing significant economic fallout and the weeks and months to follow will likely bring more negative consequences in the political […]

The controversy surrounding the Canadian government’s use of the tool known as National Security Certificates does not seem to want to go away.  A Federal Court judge has ruled that the government’s case against one more alleged terrorist, Mahmoud Jaballah, is not reasonable and the certificate issued against him in 1999 will be set aside. […]

The new Liberal government sure has made some rapid changes to the practices of the previous Conservative government.  The long-form census  has been restored.  Scientists have been unmuzzled.  And there is a sense, as stated by the PM himself, that “Canada is back”, meaning that the ideas and values most often associated with the majority […]

Now that Stephen Harper is an ex prime minister, we can be sure to see dozens of articles on his legacy as our leader (in fact, they started to appear hours after he lost the October 19 election).  Depending on your political stripe, he is either a great PM or one of the worst.  There […]