This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Ches W. Parsons and Sheryl Saperia, May 13, 2026
The Parole Board of Canada’s decision to release convicted ISIS recruiter Ashton Larmond plainly acknowledges that he continues to hold extremist views, remains a public safety risk, and is still “comfortable with using instrumental violence.” Just weeks before his release, he punched another inmate in the face, kneeled on him, and broke his nose.
And then he was released anyway, albeit with conditions, in a decision that lays bare the systemic failures of Canada’s judicial system, which has left us with limited tools to keep behind bars the violent and serious offenders who still pose a threat to society.
Larmond, a Canadian citizen, was convicted in 2016 for being at the centre of an Ottawa terror cell. He recruited for ISIS at the height of that organization’s brutality, drawing in multiple individuals, including his own twin brother. Police found 267 extremist videos on his hard drive. His mother called Ottawa Police in September 2013 to say her son wanted to kill on behalf of terrorists.
He is now 35 years old and back in Canadian society after serving two-thirds of a 17-year sentence, because that is what the Corrections and Conditional Release Act requires for most federal offenders on fixed sentences.
The “two-thirds rule” was built for a different era and a different offender. It assumes that time served correlates meaningfully with reduced risk, that most people age out of dangerous behaviour, and that supervised reintegration serves public safety better than continued incarceration. For some offenders, those assumptions hold. For ideologically committed terrorists, they may not.
Terrorism is not impulsive criminality. It is belief-driven conduct, sustained by conviction rather than circumstance. And conviction does not reliably erode with years behind bars. The board’s own assessment makes this explicit. He is assessed as likely to reoffend within three years, with low reintegration potential. The radicalization work appears to have continued inside prison walls. The sentencing judge called homegrown terrorism a “virulent form of cancer.” But the system then treated Larmond’s sentence like that of an ordinary violent offender.
Canadian law does provide two tools, in theory, to keep someone incarcerated beyond the two-thirds mark. The first is a detention order, by which the Parole Board can override statutory release and hold an offender until his warrant expiry date, a term which refers to the end of his full sentence. But the bar is extraordinarily high: the Board must be convinced the offender is likely to commit an offence causing death or serious harm before the sentence expires. Larmond’s documented extremism, his prison assault, and his continued radicalization risk apparently did not clear that threshold. Recruiting others to carry out violence seems to be treated differently under this standard than threatening to commit it yourself.
The second tool is the Dangerous Offender (DO) designation, which allows for indeterminate detention entirely. But a DO application must be made at sentencing for a “serious personal injury offence” under Section 752 of the Criminal Code, which involves actual or attempted violence. Many core terrorism offences, including recruitment, facilitation, and instruction, do not meet that definition.
Moreover, the window for such an application is tied to the original sentencing hearing, meaning that Larmond’s post-conviction prison assault cannot be used retroactively to bootstrap a DO finding years later.
The harm Larmond caused was mediated through others. A man whose recruitment drove his own brother to board a flight to Syria to fight for ISIS is more difficult to classify under our current legal definitions than someone who breaks a jaw in a bar fight. That may not be a defensible distinction in the 21st century.
The challenge of deradicalization is a further complication. It is difficult, uneven, and sometimes illusory. The Parole Board’s own findings suggest Larmond remains ideologically committed and assessed him as likely to reoffend.
Solutions
Parliament has real options here. Serious terrorism offences, including recruitment, facilitation, and instructing terrorist activity, could be explicitly excluded from the statutory release regime. The definition of “serious personal injury offence” under Section 752 of the Criminal Code could be updated to capture high-level terrorism facilitation and enablement. And the threshold for continued detention in national security cases could account for ideology, influence, and network effects, not just the probability of imminent physical harm.
Civil liberty concerns are real, but there is a meaningful space between releasing someone early because the calendar says so and building legal and deradicalization tools specifically designed for the nature of extremist threats. The default should not be mechanically releasing at two-thirds.
Canada has disrupted plots inspired by the same ideology Larmond promoted. We are thankfully good at catching and convicting people who pose serious national security threats. But the sentencing and release framework has not kept pace.
When a system documents a risk, acknowledges a risk, and then releases that risk anyway, the issue is not individual but institutional. And institutional failures have a way of producing preventable tragedies.
Ches W. Parsons is a retired RCMP assistant commissioner and its former director general of national security.
Sheryl Saperia is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Ches and Sheryl are the principals of Pearl Strategic Counsel, a boutique firm providing expert security counsel to corporations, governments, institutions, and private clients, as well as strategic advice and thought leadership on national security, public safety, and civic stability.
