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On whether we have sufficient resources for surveillance

I would say that we’re on the margins of being able to do it. The other issue is that there are radicalized people in Canada who have never gone abroad. Islamic State and al-Qaida decided a few years ago to give advice to people who wanted to go fight in Syria and Afghanistan: stay in your own countries and cause havoc there. That advice is being taken around the planet, particularly now that the caliphate is over. So we have that lot to worry about as well.

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press/File

On combatting terrorism in general

We’ve become very effective at playing what I call “whack a mole.” The West is more than capable of suppressing terrorist activity. But we’ve not begun trying to get at the root causes. The fanaticism that was shown by the last few thousand Islamic State fighters in Syria — if that’s any indication, terrorism isn’t going to go away. Somebody somewhere has to start saying to themselves: what are we going to do about Islamic State, al-Qaida, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, Hamas, Hezbollah?

On foreign espionage in Canada

There are two countries — Russia and China — that are particularly problematic. Generally speaking, they’re going to try and be as disruptive as they can. Both of them are what I call revisionist states; they’re both unhappy about their position in the world and they effectively have no limitations on what they can do to advance their positions. So they have decided they are going to try and acquire as much intelligence from the West as they can, including intellectual property. The bigger worry is espionage through the use of cyber tools. It’s generally thought that China uses the vacuum cleaner approach — they’ll extract anything from any country they can. The Russians are generally thought to be much more surgical.