Commentary
Remember when car thefts were all the rage? News story after news story told us that this form of crime was
skyrocketing in Canada: almost doubling in Ontario and Quebec, up by a third in Alberta, and a fifth in Atlantic Canada in 2022. People were flocking to buy newfangled locking mechanisms, and some owners even put
retractable steel or concrete bollards in their driveways!
This scourge was indeed worrisome and received significant media coverage, but it has been superseded by another, much more dangerous one that has not been given nearly enough attention: terrorism arrests in Canada.
According to a
briefing the RCMP put together for former Public Safety Minister David McGuinty, under the Trudeau government last December, terrorism charges in 2024 jumped 488 percent—a five-fold increase over the previous year!
Now do I have your attention?
According to the RCMP, violent extremism (synonymous with terrorism) remained a “prominent national security threat” and the force had disrupted six terrorist plots in 2024 alone.
When I read this my mind hearkened back to 2013 when, while I was with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Canadian agencies foiled two attacks in the same summer (the Victoria Canada Day plot and the Via Rail plot). And I thought that was a banner year!
And what might these plots have been in connection with? Mostly the ISIS terrorist group, which many in Canada may think (wrongly) has been consigned to the trash heap of history. You may have heard of
the father-son team arrested in Richmond Hill in the “advanced stages” of executing a terrorist act in the name of ISIS, or the plot by
two Ottawa teens to bomb a pro-Israel rally on Parliament Hill, again to benefit ISIS. Since those arrests, not much has been published. (Yes, I support the need to ensure an uncompromised investigation and prosecution, but no further reporting?) Then there was the Pakistani student “studying” in Canada who was
arrested at the Quebec-Vermont border on his way to New York City to attack a Jewish centre. He too was alleged to be an ISIS wannabe.
Where is the outrage? Where is the call to devote more resources to CSIS and the RCMP to uncover more plots? What will it take to wake up the bureaucrats in the nation’s capital? A successful attack?
I would like to assume that this is all being taken very seriously, but the past decade tells me otherwise. Upon my retirement from CSIS in May 2015, a scant six months after the ISIS-inspired killing of two Canadian soldiers in Ottawa and St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, the jihadi threat was by far the most serious. We then witnessed a few more attacks—
Edmonton,
Strathroy, and
Scarborough in 2016 and 2017—again by Islamist terrorists smitten by ISIS. The trendlines were clear.
But the government decided that it was time to move on. There were more important fish to catch: far right extremists and “violent incels” (but not those who attacked a Coastal Gas Link
project in B.C. in 2022). It was no longer fashionable to talk about jihadism. Quite the contrary: it was “racist” to do so.
Any serious analyst of terrorism on a global scale can draw only one conclusion: a quarter century after 9/11, jihadi violence is still by far the most lethal brand of terrorism on the planet. Several credible open-source studies, including the well-respected
Global Terrorism Index, have been saying this for years. No, our protectors cannot ignore other bad actors, but neither can they pretend that the elephant in the room is not a jihadi one.
That this RCMP briefing is only coming to light AFTER the election—one in which national security received very little attention—doesn’t surprise me, but it does irk me at the same time. Did the former Liberal government want to bury this news? Will the new Liberal government, and the new Public Safety Minister, Gary Anandasangaree, take this to heart and ensure that the resources are allotted proportionally? How long before the next jihadi plot (more likely now because of the ongoing war in Gaza)?
Stay tuned … but don’t hold your breath.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
