CSIS director Michel Coulombe waits to appear at the Senate national security committee meeting to discuss Bill C-51, the anti-terrorism Act, in Ottawa on April 20, 2015.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shows little concern over the threat posed by battle-hardened jihadists returning to Canada. He even argues they can be rehabilitated. But documents unearthed from CSIS - some of them marked "top secret" - reveal alarming information about how Canada's spy agency views the jihadist threat, what they're doing to track it and their concerns about future attacks on home soil. Anthony Furey reports in this three-part series.
The terrorism threat in Canada posed by jihadists is ever-changing, hard to pin down and requires continual monitoring, according to the upper brass at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
"The Service has never before faced a terrorist threat of the scope, scale and complexity of Sunni Islamist-inspired terrorism," reads an unclassified committee briefing note prepared for an unidentified individual in October 2016.
The document not only reveals troubling news about the severity of the threat in Canada, but appears to conflict with the tone of public statements previously made by both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale.
During a 2017 year-end interview with CTV, Trudeau said remorseful returning fighters "can be an extraordinarily powerful voice for preventing radicalization in future generations."
Comment: Just another example of the schizophrenic response to radical Islamism (which would never have existed to the degree it does now without support from Western intelligence agencies). See, for example: