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Perspectives

Is all fair in love and counterterrorism?

How far do we expect or allow national security agencies to go in stopping violent extremism?

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Perspectives

National security priorities for the Liberal minority government

Here’s what needs to be done by the Liberal minority government on the national security/public safety front.

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Perspectives

Lunch and Learn: How worried should Canadians be about terrorism?

Mark your calendars! I will be speaking on December 3 at the University of Ottawa on the terrorist threat to Canada!

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Perspectives

Canada’s new National Security Intelligence Review Agency gets off on the wrong foot

Most Canadians could be forgiven for not having a deep sense of what the Canadian intelligence community is or what it does. We seldom talk about intelligence matters and most references to these issues come out in the wake of mistakes, perceived or real. Think Air India or Maher Arar and you get an idea […]

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Phil in the media Video

CTV News – Allegation against CSIS

Phil Gurski from Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting on how CSIS gathers information for national security or public safety purposes.

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Perspectives

The Foreign Terrorist Fighter Repatriation Challenge: The View from Canada

This piece appeared on ICCT International Center for Counter-Terrorism on 21 Feb 2019 Over the past few weeks, there have been multiple news items centring on the problem of what to do with terrorist fighters that have been captured by a variety of actors in Syria and Iraq in the battle to destroy Islamic State […]

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Perspectives

Jagmeet Singh and terrorism: the NDP leader just doesn’t get it

Those of us in the intelligence community would often wonder what it would be like to have an NDP government calling the shots.  Generally speaking, we did not see it is a good thing for Canada’s spies.  Whether it was uncertainty over the need to have intelligence services at all or some misplaced sense that […]

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Perspectives

What new Canadian torture directives will mean for intelligence gathering and sharing

There are few people, I imagine, that condone the use of torture.  Well, except those countries or governments who engage in it I suppose.  The list of those actors is one that most would find obvious: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan.  And yet Amnesty International finds that torture is practiced in 141 nations, i.e three quarters of […]

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Perspectives

In search of expertise

This blog entry may get snarky at times and for that I apologise in advance.  But there are a few things I have noticed of late.