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“We need to understand what positive messages can counteract that poison. We need to know how to intervene with the right tools at the right time in the right way — all to head off tragedies before they happen, as much as humanly possible.”

A fast-paced RCMP investigation into a martyrdom video recorded by a masked man who vowed to attack Canada led police Wednesday to the Strathroy, Ont., home of Aaron Driver, a radicalized Muslim convert and ardent supporter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The RCMP Emergency Response Team confronted him after he got into a waiting taxi and he detonated an explosive device. Police then opened fire and he was killed. RCMP believed he was on his way to bomb an urban area.

The incident has sparked debate over whether government counterterrorism is adequate, but Goodale said Canadian police and security agencies, working with the FBI, had “foiled the would-be terrorist’s plot in a remarkably short span of time.”

He acknowledged, however, that the close call last week, as well as the October 2014 attacks that killed two Canadian Forces members in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Ottawa, had “led to a genuine appetite among Canadians for a serious examination of Canada’s current national security framework.”

Driver was well known to counterterrorism police, who had been investigating him since December 2014, when he was living in Winnipeg and posting pro-ISIL propaganda online under the alias Harun Abdurahman. He had also interacted on social media with terrorists in the United States, Britain and Syria.

After police arrested him in June 2015 on a terrorism peace bond, he moved to Ontario to live with his sister. Despite court-imposed conditions on his conduct, he was apparently still able to get to an advanced stage of preparing a bomb attack.

Goodale said the his top concerns were “lone wolves who get sucked into perverse and extreme ideologies that promote violence.” The Liberals were “committed to meaningful national security consultations” that would intensify in the fall, he said.

sbell@nationalpost.com

StewartBellNP