THE FENIANS: BROTHERHOOD OF FOOLS OR CANADA'S FIRST TERRORIST THREAT?

BY PHIL GURSKI
PUBLISHED MARCH 6, 2026
DOUBLE DAGGER BOOKS

REVIEWED BY PHIL GRATTON

When Phil Gurski told me he was writing a book about the Fenians, I was intrigued. Phil is best known for his books on terrorism and national security, yet I had never thought of the Fenians in those terms. I probably hadn’t given them any serious thought since high school, to be honest. A shadowy group known for a few skirmishes. Somehow linked to Louis Riel, and to the assassination of D’Arcy McGee. A vague threat to the young Dominion of Canada. But nothing more.

Growing up in a Franco-Ontarian community, the major historical dramas that shaped my worldview were the French versus English language disputes, our love-hate relationship with Americans, and our participation in the World Wars. The Irish nationalist struggle that gave rise to the Fenian movement barely figured in these stories.

Gurski’s book definitely changed this for me as I found myself going down a rabbit hole of angsty Fenian malaise. But what makes this book particularly engaging is the author’s decision not to write a comprehensive history of the Fenians—as Phil noted, others have already done that—and instead to narrow his focus to Eastern Ontario and the St. Lawrence frontier, examining how local communities experienced and responded to what they perceived as a genuine threat.

After years spent thinking about national and international issues, I find myself increasingly drawn to local history and to understanding the people, communities, and events that unfolded much closer to home. Gurski transforms what had always seemed a distant historical episode into a relatable story. Well done, Phil Gurski. Well done.

I grew up near Russell, Ontario, formerly known as Duncanville, a community featured in the book as an example of local participation in the armed response to the Fenian threat. It helped me appreciate that the threat was experienced directly by ordinary people living in communities not far from where I grew up. It wasn’t just something to be debated in capitals like Ottawa or Toronto. 

The death hand of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, taken after he was assassinated on April 7, 1868. It was created because his face was too disfigured from the gunshot to make a traditional Victorian death mask. On display at the Bytown Museum in Ottawa. Photograph by Phil Gratton.

I’m also a product of both French-Catholic and Canadian constitutional traditions, and, frankly, the Fenians fit neatly into neither. While my sympathies naturally rested with the builders of Confederation, Gurski’s book encouraged me to look beyond the familiar heroes and villains of the history I’d been taught and to better understand the nationalist grievances that animated the movement. 

Understanding those grievances—however Quixotic they may seem today—gives us a fuller appreciation of the competing loyalties and tensions that shaped British North America in the years following Confederation.
And then there is the question of terrorism.

It’s a term that’s been stretched, politicized, and redefined so often that it often becomes meaningless (though not nearly as meaningless as the dreadful “IMVE”—but I digress). Definitions and frameworks change. Whether a group is considered terrorist often depends as much on where one sits as on what the group actually did.

I have long taken the view that terrorism is best understood as a methodology, but this is still debated by others smarter than me. The academic study of terrorism often suffers from reductionism—a tendency to reduce a complex human phenomenon to ever-smaller analytical components in the hope that categorization will yield understanding. Good luck with that.

Terrorism, whatever it may be, resists easy categorization and has always been more than the sum of its parts.

So, were the Fenians Canada’s first terrorist threat?
Gurski provides a thoughtful and well-reasoned “it depends” answer. To find out where he lands, you’ll have to buy the book*, available at these fine locations:

•    Amazon.ca – The Fenians: Brotherhood of Fools or Canada’s First Terrorist Threat?

•    While you’re at Amazon, you can also pre-order Phil’s next book: 9/11 The Unfinished Battle: Why Jihadi Terrorism Is Stronger, Wider, and Far From Over.

*Seriously, the answer is on pages 94–95. Go buy a copy.

About the Author: Phil Gurski

Phil Gurski is the President and CEO of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting Ltd. (www.borealisthreatandrisk.com). He worked as a senior strategic analyst at CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) from 2001-2015, specializing in violent Islamist-inspired homegrown terrorism and radicalisation. From 1983 to 2001 he was employed as a senior multilingual analyst at Communications Security Establishment (CSE – Canada’s signals intelligence agency), specialising in the Middle East. He also served as senior special advisor in the National Security Directorate at Public Safety Canada from 2013, focusing on community outreach and training on radicalisation to violence, until his retirement from the civil service in May 2015, and as consultant for the Ontario Provincial Police’s Anti-Terrorism Section (PATS) from May to October 2015. He was the Director of Security and Intelligence at the SecDev Group from June 2018 to July 2019. Mr. Gurski has presented on violent Islamist-inspired and other forms of terrorism and radicalisation across Canada and around the world. He is the author of “The Threat from Within: Recognizing Al Qaeda-inspired Radicalization and Terrorism in the West” (Rowman and Littlefield 2015) “Western Foreign Fighters: the threat to homeland and international security” (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), The Lesser Jihads: taking the Islamist fight to the world (Rowman and Littlefield 2017), An end to the ‘war on terrorism ’ (Rowman and Littlefield 2018), When religion kills: how extremist justify violence through faith (Lynne Rienner 2019), The Peaceable Kingdom: A history of terrorism in Canada from Confederation to the present (Double Dagger Books: 2022), and From village to Vimy to victory: Russell soldiers in the Great War (self-published: 2023) He regularly blogs, podcasts (Canadian Intelligence Eh! – available on his Web site), and tweets (@borealissaves) on terrorism. He is a digital fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies at Concordia University. Mr. Gurski is a regular commentator on terrorism and radicalisation for a wide variety of Canadian and international media. He is fluently trilingual in English, French and Spanish.