Phil Gurski

Phil Gurski is the President and CEO of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting Ltd. (www.borealisthreatandrisk.com). He worked as a senior strategic analyst at CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) from 2001-2015, specializing in violent Islamist-inspired homegrown terrorism and radicalisation. From 1983 to 2001 he was employed as a senior multilingual analyst at Communications Security Establishment (CSE – Canada’s signals intelligence agency), specialising in the Middle East. He also served as senior special advisor in the National Security Directorate at Public Safety Canada from 2013, focusing on community outreach and training on radicalisation to violence, until his retirement from the civil service in May 2015, and as consultant for the Ontario Provincial Police’s Anti-Terrorism Section (PATS) from May to October 2015. He was the Director of Security and Intelligence at the SecDev Group from June 2018 to July 2019. Mr. Gurski has presented on violent Islamist-inspired and other forms of terrorism and radicalisation across Canada and around the world. He is the author of “The Threat from Within: Recognizing Al Qaeda-inspired Radicalization and Terrorism in the West” (Rowman and Littlefield 2015) “Western Foreign Fighters: the threat to homeland and international security” (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), The Lesser Jihads: taking the Islamist fight to the world (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), An end to the ‘war on terrorism ’ (Rowman and Littlefield 2018), When religion kills: how extremist justify violence through faith (Lynne Rienner 2019), The Peaceable Kingdom: A history of terrorism in Canada from Confederation to the present (Double Dagger Books: 2022), and From village to Vimy to victory: Russell soldiers in the Great War (self-published: 2023) He regularly blogs, podcasts (Canadian Intelligence Eh! – available on his Web site), and tweets (@borealissaves) on terrorism. He is a digital fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies at Concordia University. Mr. Gurski is a regular commentator on terrorism and radicalisation for a wide variety of Canadian and international media. He is fluently trilingual in English, French and Spanish.