Across the democratic world, national security is no longer just a technical matter—it’s becoming a defining test of a state’s ability to protect its people in an era of relentless digital disruption. Foreign adversaries, criminal networks, and cyber-enabled actors are exploiting gaps in Western legal frameworks faster than governments can adapt.
The result is a growing tension: between the need to safeguard privacy and civil liberties, and the urgent need to modernize the tools that keep societies safe. Many of the assumptions that shaped Canada’s security architecture were built for a pre-digital age—and those foundations are now straining under unprecedented pressure.
What happens when adversaries operate at digital speed, but the law does not? And what does a credible 21st-century security framework look like?
To explore these questions, Dr. John Gilmour joins Inside Policy Talks. Gilmour—a terrorism and intelligence expert who has served in the security and intelligence branch of the Privy Council Office and worked with CSIS—is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and teaches at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University.
On the podcast, he tells Christopher Coates, director of foreign policy, national defence, and national security at MLI, that the real challenge is the widening gap between threat capabilities and Canada’s outdated legal authorities. While public debate often centres on the potential overreach of new tools, Gilmour argues that failing to update them carries risks of its own—risks that adversaries are already exploiting.
