Early on the morning of July 8, RCMP officers arrested four suspects — two of them active military members — in an alleged plot to form an anti-government militia.
The Mounties maintain the group had stockpiled a trove of weapons, including dozens of firearms and 11,000 rounds of ammunition, as part of a plan to take control of a piece of land near Quebec City by force.
Three of the suspects, including one of the active military members, are facing terrorism charges. A judge will rule Thursday whether to grant them bail.
In many ways, the police operation that led to the arrests was unprecedented. It’s believed to be the first time an active member of the Canadian military has been charged with terrorism-related offences.
And the cache of weapons seized as part of this case is among the largest ever in a Canadian terrorism investigation, according to Jessica Davis, head of the consulting firm Insight Threat Intelligence.
But suspected cases of far-right extremism are not new to the Canadian Forces. It’s been a recurring issue for over 30 years, one the military has dealt with intermittent resolve and uneven results.
Somalia: The first reckoning
The Forces’ first major reckoning with extremism came after Canadian paratroopers tortured and killed a 16-year-old boy, Shidane Arone, while on a peacekeeping mission in Somalia in 1993.
Prime minister Jean Chrétien’s government disbanded the airborne regiment shortly thereafter. The government later cut short an inquiry probing deeper problems within the unit that lead to the death.
But the inquiry’s final report still revealed that pre-deployment, members of the regiment displayed swastikas and Ku Klux Klan flags at CFB Petawawa.
“[N]eo-Nazis and other varieties of white supremacists were known to be present among CAR members,” the inquiry’s report said.
Only one of the soldiers involved in Arone’s killing was given a sentence longer than a year.
“After the Somali affair, there was really silence. We didn’t really hear much about what was happening in the military,” said Barbara Perry, a professor at Ontario Tech University who has studied extremism within the Canadian military.
“No doubt that there were still problems internally, but it was not something that anyone from the outside was able to look at.”
For the first time, an active member of the Canadian Armed Forces is facing a terrorism-related charge — but extremism in the ranks has been a concern for decades. For The National, CBC’s Jonathan Montpetit explains how the military has been trying to get a handle on the issue for nearly 30 years.
From alt-right to neo-Nazis
Another spate of far-right activity in the military was revealed in the 2010s, largely due to reporting by media outlets and anti-fascism activists.
These incidents coincided with the rise of the so-called “alt-right,” a movement to make radical ideals more palatable to mainstream audiences, as well as the proliferation of extremist networks online.
In 2015, for example, some veterans of Canada’s Afghanistan mission founded the Islamophobic group La Meute in Quebec.
A Radio-Canada investigation found at least 75 active-duty members had joined the group’s private Facebook page, which at that time numbered around 43,000 profiles.
The military told its members to leave the group or risk having a warning placed on their record.
In 2017, four active military members in Halifax were given probation for joining the Proud Boys, a white-supremacist group now considered a terrorist entity.
Around this time, several reservists were also identified as contributors to more extreme neo-Nazi groups and online forums.
In one incident, a reservist in the Royal Canadian Navy posted on Iron March, a now defunct forum for neo-Nazis, encouraging others to join the military to acquire combat skills.
“They pay you to teach you the methods you need to destroy them,” the reservist posted in 2016. He was released by the navy in 2021.
Another reservist, Patrik Mathews, was revealed by the Winnipeg Free Press to be a member of the neo-Nazi group The Base.
Mathews, who was discharged after the affiliation was made public, is currently serving a nine-year prison term in the U.S. for participating in a plot to start a race war.
But overall during these years, the military only rarely took significant action against suspected cases of extremism and hateful conduct, according to documents obtained by CBC News in 2019.
Of 50 cases of suspected hateful conduct recorded between 2013 and 2018, only four resulted in disciplinary measures. It was more common for the military to issue warnings, probation or simply release problematic soldiers.
Researchers stymied
Scrutiny of the military nevertheless heightened with every revelation, and in 2020, under the encouragement of then chief of defence staff Jonathan Vance, a team of researchers were given $750,000 to study the problem.
But members of the research team say they felt stymied by unco-operative military leadership, who barred them from interviewing soldiers and blocked access to facilities.
“My take away was that Vance and the CAF wanted to be able to point to be doing something about the problem of IMVE [ideologically motivated violent extremism] in the ranks without really having to uncover the scope and depth of the issue, or at least have independent researchers confirm it,” Leah West, a professor at Carleton University who was part of the research team, said in a social media post shortly after the Quebec City arrests earlier this month.
Also in 2020, not long after the Black Lives Matter protests, the federal government convened a panel to study hate and discrimination with the Forces.
Among the panel’s top recommendations, when it released its report two years later, was for the military to pay closer attention to the litany of earlier studies and recommendations on these very issues.
“There were a lot of recommendations that were given, and there wasn’t a whole lot of consistent follow-up on what they did,” said panel member Derek Montour, a former U.S. Marine who heads the Kahnawà:ke Shakotiia’takéhnhas Community Services, south of Montreal.
Montour said the panel also found military leadership was often ill-prepared to recognize and deal with incidents of hate and extremism.
“Training of leaders on what to do when they see it is limited, so they feel alone. They’re not sure where to report,” he said. “All of those factors then breed a ground of vulnerability to these [hate] groups.”
New system to track hate incidents
In recent years, the military has been setting up a new system it says will allow it to better track incidents of hate within the ranks.
The Department of National Defence shared figures with CBC News that show since 2020, there have been 120 reports of military members promoting or displaying hate entered into the system, including 20 so far this year alone.
Another column shows that, in the same period, there have been 16 reports of membership or participation in a hate group. It’s not clear from the figures how many of the reports are founded or led to disciplinary measures.
Earlier this month, the Ottawa Citizen reported that reservists in the Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa maintained a Facebook group that allegedly contained antisemitic, homophobic and racist comments.
An investigation by military police, which predated the Citizen revelations, found no evidence of a service offence.
A new investigation has since been opened and the brigade commander responsible for the unit has stepped down.
National Defence did not respond to repeated requests for an interview about its efforts to deal with extremism in the military.
In a statement, a spokesperson said the military is committed to the “culture change” necessary to become a more inclusive workplace and has implemented new protocols and training resources.
The statement added “while we have made great progress, we know that there is still more work to do.”
Perry said she helped train military officials on how to detect far-right extremism when the new protocols were rolled out, only for interest to wane again during the pandemic.
“I think this particular case [in Quebec City] … has obviously put that squarely back on the agenda for the public and for the military as well,” she said.
