Public Safety committee  That's a great question. The challenge here is that ideology and identity become intertwined. When we attack someone's ideology, we're also attacking their identity and all the defence mechanisms come up. They either lash out or shut down. How do you get through that? In Life A

Public Safety committee  The short answer to that is nobody likes to look at their own flaws and their own stuff. It's difficult for people to acknowledge that this is happening within their group. It's always happening somewhere else. I think there's that blindness to seeing what's clearly there and ope

Public Safety committee  It shouldn't be the primary focus, but they should be equipped to handle it when it shows up. Like I said, it's a matter of cultural competency training. I think that school threat assessment teams, as opposed to just counsellors, are the more accurate place where that should hap

Public Safety committee  This is going to sound counterintuitive, and I think Professor Davies said this earlier, but these are emotional things. We're not going to be able to necessarily go and tell a person facts and figures to sway them. The answer is to go in through the heart. At the core of Life Af

Public Safety committee  It's changed quite a bit since then. With the anonymity of the Internet, the ability to raise money is very different. When I was involved, there wasn't a great deal of money. If you were going to be involved in it, it was a good way to go broke. Having said that, I think that w

Public Safety committee  Certainly. Around the world, globalization has alienated people. These policies are happening at a very high level. It's very much possible for different programs to further alienate people. There are always unintended consequences. What are the unintended consequences? I think

Public Safety committee  It's Life After Hate, not me personally. It's the whole team.

Public Safety committee  Going back to what I'd said earlier, there are people who have the skill sets to engage people who are radicalized—like social workers, psychologists and stuff. They are already in society and might be better placed. Again, the example I'll use is a school counsellor who has co

Public Safety committee  I was at the end anyway, but I would just reiterate that these responses need to be carefully thought out and nuanced. It's a whole-of-society response. We need to use a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. That's what I would add in. Regarding social media companies, I've spent time in

Public Safety committee  Absolutely. As we try to get exit programs—those are programs to help rehabilitate and get people to leave these groups behind.... These groups are fairly new in North America. They've been running for 20 years in Europe. I would point you to the Radicalisation Awareness Network

Public Safety committee  There are two aspects to that. There's what we can do before people get radicalized and what we can do after people get radicalized. There are already fairly robust intervention services within the country. Obviously, these could be improved, and public safety is working towards

Public Safety committee  I think that's changing, but I think it certainly was the case. Until the last couple of years, we were very focused on responding to ISIS and al Qaeda-inspired terror threats, and ignored the white supremacist terror threat, but I think that's changing. That certainly is importa

Public Safety committee  Thank you for having me. My name is Tony McAleer. I'm the author of The Cure for Hate: A Former White Supremacist's Journey from Violent Extremism to Radical Compassion. I spent 15 years in the violent far right in Canada and the U.S. as a follower, a recruiter and a leader. I