On Tuesday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper named Richard Fadden as his new National Security Advisor, a job which, you might have guessed, is both important and influential in that you end up talking to the prime minister of a G8 country likely every day, if not more often, about, well, national security.
On Wednesday, of course, terrorists killed 12 journalists and policemen in Paris.
Later this year, we will have an election where national security and our collective response to the world’s terrorists may be an issue. I try to connect all three of those dots in a column offered up for publication in our newspapers tomorrow. [You can read it now here].
That column draws heavily on a speech Fadden — whose bio is worth reviewing — gave in 2009 just after he was appointed head of CSIS. Newspaper will only give me 625 words worth of space so I was only able to impart a small bit of what Fadden said back then. I encourage you to read all of what he said in 2009 and can report that, in my discussions with current and former Harper insiders, Fadden’s 2009 thinking would be very much in keeping with the prime minister’s thinking right now in 2015.
I’m told, though I am unlikely to be able to confirm this with Fadden himself, that he pretty much wrote this himself and rather than offer it to PCO higher-ups where the “good bits” would likely be gutted, he just went and gave the speech. The source for these remarks is here [PDF]: Continue reading Harper's new national security advisor on the threat of terrorism