CANADIAN INCIDENT DATABASE (CIDB)

The Canadian Incident Database (CIDB) is a publicly-accessible database describing terrorism and violent extremism incidents with a Canadian connection, between 1960 and early 2015. These include incidents occurring overseas involving Canadian perpetrators, targets, and victims.

In December 2013, Public Safety Canada and Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) awarded TSAS funding from the National Security Data Initiative (NSDI) of the Canadian Safety and Security Program (CSSP) to develop the CIDB. The NSDI is overseen by representatives of Public Safety, RCMP, CSC, FINTRAC and Statistics Canada. The purpose of the CIDB is to provide unclassified information to national security researchers, which can be used to identify patterns and trends in order to improve our understanding of terrorism and extremist crime in Canada.

The TSAS CIDB team involved faculty from five university partners: the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Carleton University, University of Waterloo, and Université de Montréal. Dozens of additional TSAS Affiliates have made contributions as Senior Researchers, Data Collectors, and Data Validators.

The benefit of the CIDB for researchers is the ability to do research on patterns and trends without having to start from scratch in finding a record of incidents, and free access to the CIDB dataset ensures that graduate students and others will be encouraged to contribute data based on their own research. The database provides the most complete record of Canadian incidents publically available.

TSAS is currently seeking funding to update the data in the CIDB, and to complete Phase II of its planned development.