AS SEVERAL colleagues write in this week’s print edition, Western democracies are in a bind over how to stop their citizens being seduced by violent ideologies. With terrorism threatening every capital city, the issue is bound to concern central governments and their security services. But the initiatives that work best are often grassroots ventures, undertaken in places which have seen acute problems—for example, local youngsters heading off to Syria.

Canada exemplifies the type. Two places have blazed a trail in the field of counter-radicalisation. One is Montreal, the starting-point of a project that later extended across Quebec; the other is Calgary.

Take the Francophone province first. The Centre for the Prevention of Radicalism Leading to Violence was set up by Montreal’s mayor a year ago. This followed terrorist attacks in both Quebec and Ottawa in October 2014, and reports of several young Quebeckers going to fight with Islamic State. Benjamin Ducol, the centre’s research director, stresses that it is independent of the police, though it does tell the police if it sees a security threat.

In its first year, the centre got almost 700 calls from concerned parents, schools, the police and even a few individuals worried about themselves. In 130 cases, it made “interventions”: a social worker and a psychologist did an assessment and decided how to help. The cases involve not just radical Islam, but also neo-Nazis, skinheads, ultra-leftists and single-issue radicals. Those who suffer from what Mr Ducol calls “rigid thinking” get psychotherapy. Some need religious guidance and are put in contact with an imam and religious scholars.

In Calgary, too, reports of young men heading off to Middle Eastern war zones stirred local people into action. Christianne Boudreau, a Calgary woman whose son converted to Islam and was killed fighting in Syria, has formed an international network for mothers in similar situations.

The city’s flagship project, called ReDirect, has been undertaken by the police, but in a low-key style. It was launched last September, initially as a panel consisting of two police officers and a social worker. It is now setting up a “case-planning team” that involves health professionals and schools. Its leader, Sergeant Paul Dunn, likes to describe the effort as “community-led” and he emphasises that it takes in many forms of extremism, not just the Islamic sort; the aim is to nip extremist thinking in the bud rather than simply wait and react once it is in full flower.

People involved in the projects in Montreal and Calgary have said they would welcome a dollop of federal assistance so long as it was administered sensitively and didn’t crush the spirit of local zeal. As of last month, such help is on its way. Canada’s 2016/2017 budget statement proposes spending C$35m ($27m) over five years on a small federal team whose title is a model of delicacy: the Office of the Community Outreach and Counter-radicalisation Co-ordinator. One of the aims will be to better understand the causes of radicalisation.

This means that the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau has broken with its Conservative predecessors’ resistance to touchy-feely approaches to violent extremism. The previous prime minister, Stephen Harper, said famously he would not “commit sociology” when faced with terror. To help pay for its new project, the Liberal government has just saved itself a few dollars by reversing another Conservative policy and axing the Office of Religious Freedom, a diplomatic brainchild of Mr Harper (as was predicted in a recent Erasmus post). From now on, the promotion of religious liberty will be folded back into the advocacy of human rights in general.

Behind all these moves is the hard reality that for Western governments, the danger from hardened jihadists returning from Syria (along with home-grown terrorists and other kinds of extremists) is so acute that the broadest range of responses is wanted, from sociology to phone-tapping. In Britain, a Conservative government’s initial reaction to fighters returning from Syria was described within security circles as “let-them-all-rot-in-hell”; more recently British ministers have been careful to say they will deal with returnees on a case-by-case basis, which can mean anything from prosecution to religious instruction to surveillance. In response to extremist ideology, governments want the biggest tool-box they can get, and will not let their own ideology stand in the way.