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The latter is hard to believe. Back in October 2014, CSIS deputy director of operations Jeff Yaworski testified before the same Senate committee that the number at that time was 80. How did it drop by 20 in two years?

That question was actually put to Coulombe in his 2016 appearance. He explained that in some cases people have come back to Canada and then returned again for round two of fighting, dropping off the list of those with firm footing on home soil.

In other cases, some people who were on the list were later found to be travelling abroad but not for terror purposes so shouldn’t have been on it in the first place. Fair enough. But if that’s the case, this suggests that the numbers publicly presented just this week have remained more or less static not just since spring 2016 but since the fall of 2014. It’s hard to take this seriously, at least without further explanation.

This is largely because over the past couple of years, we’ve been told several times that there are close to 200 extremists abroad who have yet to return home, with around 100 of them based in Iraq and Syria. Are we to believe that none of these 100+ individuals have returned since December 2015, even since the recent fall of the caliphate? What happened to them? Where did they go? We know of a few who were killed, but all of them?

Putting these numbers together is an art not an exact science. And even though Goodale was responding to a question about ISIS fighters, the number he gave actually covers all extremist groups operating in the broader region. From that perspective, we should cut our security services a degree of slack. But we should still expect them to be forthright as much as possible.

Instead, they’re being misleading. The question is whether they’re also misleading Goodale and Trudeau or if our politicians do have a more accurate picture of the count and that they are in turn misleading the public.

Twitter: @anthonyfurey

afurey@postmedia.com