This piece appeared in The Hill Times on February 18, 2019. One duty that a government or state has to treat seriously is the protection of its citizenry. Police forces, militaries, security intelligence services and other bodies are created, resourced and run by various levels of government (federal, provincial, municipal in Canada) with the goal […]
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An edited version of this piece appeared in The Hill Times on July 23, 2018 Is Alex Neve, the secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada insane? Full disclosure: I have been a supporter of Amnesty International and its work for decades. I admire the positions they adopt and the advocacy they employ in the interests of […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on May 7, 2018 Pop quiz! What is Canada’s ‘national game’? Duh it’s hockey of course (or ‘ice hockey’ as the rest of the world knows it as if it needed to be distinguished from ‘field hockey’). What with the NHL playoffs on and one Canadian team still […]
One would think that a state has fundamental rights and obligations in the same way that people do. Any state must, for instance, have a monopoly on the use of force since in the absence of such we would live in anarchy. I agree that the state exists only – or rather should exist only […]
When I was in high school the movie Midnight Express came out (yes, I am THAT old). This was a film adaptation of the true story of Billy Hayes, an American arrested and jailed in the early 1970s for trying to smuggle hashish out of Turkey. The movie portrayed Mr. Hayes as the poor American […]
After much delay, the Trudeau government announced today that it will introduce legislation into the House of Commons that contains a significant overhaul on how this country’s security intelligence community operates. Bill C-59 is wide-ranging in scope and seeks to address some of the concerns Canadians raised over the previous Harper government’s C-51, passed in […]
Germany has spent a long time apologising for the actions and crimes of the Nazi regime. Not to mention the price it paid during the Versailles conference in 1919 for its decision to launch WWI (and in that case the price exacted by the victors played a big part in laying the conditions for WWII). […]
Earlier this morning the suspect in the Berlin Christmas market attack that killed 12 and wounded dozens more was shot to death by Italian police in Milan. An international manhunt ended successfully with the killing of Anis Amri, a Tunisian refugee who had spent time in Italy before moving on to Germany. He was known to […]
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 […]
After years of discussions and calls for action, it looks as if the Canadian government is finally getting serious about establishing meaningful Parliamentary oversight for its intelligence agencies. Canada is the laggard in this respect since its main allies (the so-called “5 Eyes” community – Australia, New Zealand, the US and the UK are the […]