Juno News - February 05, 2019


True North's Newest Fellow： Leo Knight

Topics
primetime crime
Mentioned
Candice Bruce MacArthur
Bill Blair might make gun owners store guns in ＂central＂ facilities RAW： Aboriginal protester yells at Jagmeet Singh over pipeline support

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

173.63

Word count

848

Sentence count

60


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Leo Knight is a prolific writer and commentator on the topics of public policy and security in Canada. He has worked in law enforcement, private sector security, and public policy for over 30 years, and is now part of the True North team.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi, welcome to True North. I'm really excited to announce a new addition to our team at
00:00:10.340 True North. Our latest contributor and fellow is Leo Knight. Leo, welcome to the show and
00:00:16.100 welcome to True North.
00:00:17.880 Thanks very much, Candice. I'm happy to be with you.
00:00:20.200 So Leo has a very impressive background, everything from law enforcement to private sector security
00:00:26.340 to being a prolific writer and contributor on the topics of sort of public policy and security.
00:00:34.480 So Leo, why don't you talk a little bit about your background and what you've done throughout
00:00:38.740 your career?
00:00:40.140 Sure. My career started actually before I got into policing. I was a police reporter for the
00:00:46.040 Montreal Star back when it existed in the 70s. I then went from that to the RCMP and then from
00:00:53.000 the RCMP to Vancouver Police. And throughout my law enforcement, I worked in a variety of
00:00:58.480 sections, everything from organized crime investigations to general patrol to homicides,
00:01:04.240 did a whole lot of different things.
00:01:06.900 And then from there, you moved on and had a pretty successful bout in the private sector.
00:01:11.680 What is it that you worked on?
00:01:12.800 Yeah, I took everything I learned in that and then got into business and started building
00:01:16.620 a private security company with my business partner. And we built the largest privately held
00:01:21.300 security company in Canada with offices from Victoria to St. John's. And it was very,
00:01:27.200 very fulfilling. And I retired a couple of years ago.
00:01:30.060 That's great. And so throughout this whole time, you've kind of maintained a presence as
00:01:34.440 a public policy commentator and a columnist. So why don't you talk a little bit about your
00:01:40.100 writing as well? You maintain a really excellent source, resource, which is your website,
00:01:45.260 primetimecrime.com. So why don't you tell us a bit about that as well?
00:01:49.200 I've been doing the website for about the last 15 years. One of the things, when I got
00:01:54.520 out of policing, when I was in policing, I couldn't continue writing and expressing my
00:01:58.420 opinion. They frown on that sort of thing. So once I got into the private sector, I got
00:02:02.900 back into freelance writing and doing columns for all manner of publications. And I've been
00:02:08.960 doing that for the last 30 years alongside with my private sector career.
00:02:12.800 And then what about primetime crime? What is the focus on? And what's the point of that website?
00:02:19.540 Primetime crime is just to bring focus to crime stories that interest me, crime stories that
00:02:26.620 government can affect, crime stories that are interesting. There's a reason why police shows
00:02:32.200 are interesting on TV and why they get good ratings is that people are interested. If there's a particular
00:02:37.700 interesting murder, like the serial killer in Toronto, Bruce MacArthur, people want to know
00:02:42.940 about it. They want to read about it. They've got an interest. So I try and bring that to them.
00:02:46.480 And I try and bring videos on a daily basis, too, that show them what happens in real policing world.
00:02:53.540 Great. Yeah, I love your website. And it's a great resource. So as you know, at True North,
00:02:58.500 we're mostly focused on a lot of overlapping topics, but we're mostly focused on national security,
00:03:04.180 immigration security, and terrorism. And then you have the background in sort of law enforcement
00:03:10.140 generally, but I'm sure you dealt with these kind of issues all the time, you know, in your career,
00:03:15.440 various factions.
00:03:17.200 Well, yeah, I mean, I've been around long enough, Candace, that my first assignment in the RCMP
00:03:23.280 was on the Prime Minister's security detail. And the current Prime Minister was just five years old
00:03:29.080 at the time.
00:03:30.880 Wow.
00:03:31.340 Around the block a few times.
00:03:33.200 Wow. So you've probably seen it all. So what is it that you hope to focus on with your work in True North?
00:03:40.680 And what do you think are some of the biggest, most pressing issues for law enforcement in Canada right now?
00:03:47.280 There's two primary threats to this country.
00:03:51.280 One of them has been around for a long while, and that's organized crime. And it's how,
00:03:56.720 unfortunately, government does not do enough to fight organized crime. And that is one problem.
00:04:02.800 And the other problem is really a post-9-11 problem, where geopolitics have created terrorist
00:04:11.800 situations in many countries around the world. And people for years would say that Canada was not
00:04:18.420 at risk. And I would argue that, no, we're very much at risk, and we need to focus how we protect
00:04:24.340 ourselves, how we protect our public events, how we protect our leaders. All has to have one eyeball
00:04:30.440 on security in the international threat assessment chart.
00:04:33.940 Absolutely. We have to remain constantly vigilant to the threat of terrorism and the global jihadist
00:04:40.820 emergency.
00:04:41.880 Well, Leo, we're really excited to have you as part of our team. We're really lucky,
00:04:44.880 and we're looking forward to all of your future videos and reports. So thank you so much for
00:04:49.200 joining me, and thanks for joining us at True North.
00:04:52.000 Perfect, Candice. You're welcome.