ROBSON: 25 years after 9/11, Canada needs a counter-terrorism strategy reset

Twenty-five years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Canada has every reason to remember the 24 Canadians who were killed and the extraordinary response that followed, including the reception of hundreds of diverted aircraft after US airspace closed. But an anniversary of this magnitude should also be an audit of whether the security architecture built in the aftermath still reflects the threats Canada faces today.That audit begins with an awkward fact sitting in plain view on Ottawa’s own website. Public Safety Canada still identifies Building Resilience Against Terrorism, released in 2012, as the comprehensive strategy guiding more than 20 federal departments and agencies involved in counter-terrorism.The age of a government document would matter less if it were simply an archival reference. Yet the strategy remains Ottawa’s overarching public framework, even though one of its central sections is titled “The Terrorist Threat – 2011” and describes a landscape centred on al-Qaeda, Canadians travelling to Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, and the expanding availability of extremist propaganda online.More revealing is what the strategy promised would happen next. Its designers anticipated that terrorism would evolve and committed the government to reviewing its approach, monitoring implementation, and producing an annual public report to inform Canadians about changes in the domestic and international threat environment.Ottawa’s own terrorism-reporting page still describes those reports as a way to give Canadians the latest threat information while demonstrating openness and transparency. It also identifies the 2018 Public Report on the Terrorism Threat to Canada as the latest report in the series..That eight-year gap is more than a communications problem because the threat being explained has changed substantially. Canada’s security institutions have not remained frozen: laws have changed, new terrorist entities have been listed, operational priorities have evolved, and Ottawa introduced a separate strategy to counter radicalization to violence. The weakness lies instead in the widening distance between those evolving responses and the public strategic framework meant to connect and explain them.The latest CSIS public report makes that distance difficult to ignore. Nearly one-in-ten terrorism investigations now include at least one person under 18, according to the service, with children as young as 13 appearing in some investigations, while nihilistic violent extremism, or NVE, has emerged as a particular concern among youth and young adults.That environment is considerably harder to map than the organizational terrorism that dominated the years after the September 11 terrorist attacks. A vulnerable teenager may move between mass-shooter culture, neo-Nazi material, misogynistic communities, nihilistic networks, and more conventional terrorist propaganda without following a stable ideological path, while encrypted platforms, gaming environments, and algorithmic content shorten the distance between exposure and mobilization.The shift is already reaching the courts. The latest federal prosecution report says 20 individuals faced terrorism-related offences in 2025–26, eight of them young persons, while six of the ten terrorism peace-bond proceedings before the courts involved youth. The Director of Public Prosecutions described the increase as a “marked escalation” in young people’s involvement in terrorism-threat activities.A Montreal investigation last month illustrated how several of these risks can now converge. On August 21, the RCMP arrested a minor after information from the FBI led investigators to an alleged plan to attack a Montreal school; police said the youth had allegedly used artificial intelligence in potential attack planning and posted threats on Telegram, prompting an application for a terrorism peace bond under section 810.011 of the Criminal Code..Canada is also confronting networks that blur older distinctions between terrorism and other forms of predatory online violence. Western Standard has reported both on RCMP warnings about violent online networks targeting children and on Canada becoming the first country to list 764 as a terrorist entity, alongside Maniac Murder Cult and Terrorgram Collective.These networks matter because the behaviour around them can cross several institutional boundaries at once, involving child exploitation, coercion, self-harm, online sadism, extremist propaganda, and potential terrorist violence. A modern counter-terrorism strategy should explain not only what Canada considers a terrorist threat, but how authorities respond when that threat develops inside spaces traditionally treated as ordinary criminal or child-protection matters.Canada’s closest partners have already revised their public frameworks around this changing landscape. Britain adopted CONTEST 2023, recognizing a threat that had become more diverse and less predictable, while Australia released a new counter-terrorism strategy in 2025 and New Zealand introduced its own new framework that year with an annual work programme.Ottawa should now conduct the same strategic reset. Canada needs an updated public counter-terrorism strategy that defines the threat environment of the 2020s, clarifies responsibility where national security intersects with conventional crime, sets measurable priorities, and restores the regular national threat reporting that the 2012 strategy itself promised.None of this requires broader surveillance powers or elastic definitions of terrorism. A modern public strategy should make government more accountable, not less, by forcing Ottawa to explain what has changed, where responsibility lies, and how its response remains proportionate to the threat.The most enduring security lesson of the September 11 terrorist attacks was that yesterday’s assumptions can become dangerous when governments fail to recognize how quickly threats evolve. Twenty-five years later, commemorating that lesson while relying on a 2012 public strategy and a terrorism-reporting series that stops in 2018 would miss its central point.Canada learned after the September 11 terrorist attacks that security frameworks must change when the threat changes. The audit in 2026 is whether Ottawa still remembers that.

ROBSON: 25 years after 9/11, Canada needs a counter-terrorism strategy reset

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