Is far right extremism gaining ground in Canada?

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Jordan: A lot of extremism takes place online, and a lot of extremist recruitment happens there too. Same thing for organising protests and planning demonstrations, but organising is really, really hard, especially for people on the ends of the political spectrum. As you might imagine. There is a lot of arguing and infighting and trying to figure out who really believes what and who’s willing to do what about it. But sometimes it works. And when it does, you get this A year and a half after the convoy left Ottawa, we are still learning about it, about how it came together, why this event worked when so many previous attempts had failed, how Canada’s far right groups managed to finally find that common ground and turn it into action. A new report examines all of this, and it draws a line from the occupation of Ottawa back to a series of political events that began in 2015, the ongoing polarisation of everyone in this country, not just people on the far right, and it tries to make sense of if the convoy was lightning caught in a bottle or a harbinger of extremist violence yet to come. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the big story. Stephanie Carvin is a former national security analyst. She is the author of Stand On Guard, reassessing Threats to Canada’s National Security. And most recently, just about a week ago, a report for the Centre for Media Technology and Democracy at McGill on polarisation and far right extremism in Canada, which she’s also writing a book, at least one book about. Hello, Stephanie.

Stephanie Carvin: Hello.

Jordan: Let’s get this out of the way first, because I mentioned the convoy in the intro. When we’re talking about that in the context of this report, can you just be specific about what aspects of the convoy we’re discussing?

Stephanie Carvin: For the purposes of this report, it’s referring to the movement that existed between the end of January, 2022 to just past the middle of February, where there were occupations in Ottawa as well as Winnipeg. There were attempts to basically seizes control of, of bridges, some of which were successful, such as the Ambassador Bridge as well as certain checkpoints in, in British Columbia, and the infamous coops border blockade, which actually saw, you know, alleged plot to kill 12 RCMP officers by far right extremists. So I think that is effectively what we mean. But I, what I’m trying to show in the paper is that the movement was much broader and much more longstanding that I think most Canadians actually realize,

Jordan: Well, that’s what we wanna talk about here. I mean, if in the thick of it, or maybe even just the immediate aftermath of, you know, those specific occupations, if you’d asked those who supported and those who condemned the convoy, what it was, you would’ve gotten two completely different answers. How would they have described it?

Stephanie Carvin: Right. That’s exactly correct. It’s, it’s, it really is a tale of two convoys. So, I mean, look like I’m gonna put all my bias cards on the table. I live in Ottawa. I was receiving some very unpleasant email during the convoy and things like that. People did not like what I was saying about it. So obviously the people in Ottawa were unhappy about it. There’s a lawsuit against the convoy organisers. They saw them as a menace, that they were disrupting the city, the, the nonstop honking the constant smell of diesel fuel for people who don’t know. I mean, Ottawa is a very residential city. I mean, you can live within a five minute walk of parliament, and a lot of students do. Right. Especially interns and things like this. So, you know, they’re, they’re renting and many of the buildings, and they were experiencing this 24 7 for, for three weeks. And, you know, they felt that they were basically being targeted and held hostage by this movement that they saw as occupiers . And were frequently using that kind of language. On the other hand, you have the convoy itself, and I mean, you know, you, if you went back to the public order emergency commission in the fall of, of last year or fall 2022, you know, and if you heard the convoy organisers talk about it, they said it was Woodstock. That it was basically a love fest that they never saw any of the anger that that was there. They never saw any of any racism or sexism or, or any kind of hate towards anybody. Like we loved everybody. It was a big love fest. You didn’t understand it. Right. So I think that this is a really important point to make, especially when, when we’re going back, is that they’re really, you know, I keep thinking that, you know, there’s myself and there’s a convoy supporter, and every day we wake up, we put our trousers on, we look at the same sky, but we see entirely two different worlds in which this convoy took place. And, and that’s been really interesting and, and somewhat scary to me really ever since it took place.

Jordan: And that’s the polarisation aspect of the report. But in terms of the extremism aspect, if we wanted to figure out, you know, you mentioned it’s bigger and longer than most of us realised. If we wanted to figure out what actually gave rise to, I guess, the conditions that allowed the convoy to take place, you know, how far do we have to go back? What do you have to start looking at?

Stephanie Carvin: So really with regards to the convoy, it is something that goes far back. And I wanna say this, ’cause you know, anytime you talk about the convoy, people get very angry if you don’t point out that not everyone there was a Nazi. Yes. There were lots of people who were just fundamentally upset. Well,

Jordan: The Nazis wouldn’t have been able to do it by themself. Right? The whole point was, is exactly this is how they got the rest of the people on board. And that’s what I want to explore here.

Stephanie Carvin: Yeah. And so when it, but you know, just in telling this tale, I just wanna say that this was a movement that had been building and was primed to exploit the pandemic anger that I think had been building up. So, where do we start? I would say we would start in 2015, really. And 2015 is this really interesting point for a number of reasons. One is that we have a couple of political developments that are taking place at this time. The first is, and the most important I would say is the, the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. And why that is so important is that he’s the first presidential candidate who is openly saying extremely, like, really in the modern era. We should be clear about that. Right. some you know, started his campaign by demonizing migrants from central America, Latin America, you know, and really kind of kept up that tone of, of racism and sexism throughout his entire campaign. And that kind of created a permissive space, I think, for people to say things that, you know, perhaps they’d always kind of secretly felt it, it really kind of gave it like an open permission, I think, to hate and to do so online. Right. Because, you know, he, you know, media outlets are covering this stuff like they would a normal presidential candidate, even though he was anything. But a second thing that happened though here in Canada, was the election of the Trudeau government. And kind of in ways that we saw the far right moving towards more kind of radicalization and being upset in the wake of the election of Barack Obama in 2008. I think we actually saw a bit of a similar movement here in 2015. And that when Trudeau came in, you know and, and this is not me giving him credentials, but he decided to declare himself a feminist. He was gonna bring in refugees that he was, you know, openly going to work towards, you know, the promotion of

Jordan: He was very openly progressive.

Stephanie Carvin: Yeah. I think that’s right. And I think that generated a lot of backlash in particular on the Syrian refugees issue. And this is the third thing that happened, which was the fact that you had basically this announcement to bring in 25,000 and soon to be 35,000 refugees to Canada. And this is what really I think, kind of started setting things off. You know, you have this kind of increasingly permissive environment, and then at the same time you have a government which is suddenly saying, yes, we’re gonna bring in more migrants. And it really kind of brought out a lot of protest groups. And we, we can get into the who those groups were in just a minute, but where this then also takes place where we start seeing the original convoys is, or attempts at convoys and, and kind of weekly protests is M 103. If people don’t remember, M 103 was a non-binding resolution in Parliament, which basically stated that, you know, Islamophobia is bad and we should look into it. And other forms of religious discrimination. It was a very harmless motion and Iqra Khalid was the MP that brought it forward. And it, it, people just went crazy. You know, they said, this is censorship. This is the bringing of Sharia to Canada. This is going to be the end of democracy as we know it. And we started seeing weekly protests outside city halls on highways. You know, people think the convoy was actually the first convoy. It wasn’t. And people started trying to organise convoys as early as 2017. And this is, this is where this happened. So this is a movement that built up over time. And what we saw is different far right actors, far right groups who had changed their image from, you know, skinheads and, and things like this to kind of almost a preppy look to trying to kind of infiltrate these groups, drive these narratives forward, and really make these permissive environments and network and networks that were kind of driving these ideas forward. And this is really kind of where the convoy originates, is kind of these four events that created this political environment that led to a network of people who were, you know, genuinely upset, but also a network of kind of far right activists that were willing to take advantage of this anger and to try and polarize the Canadian public further.

Jordan: You gave me the perfect segue, ’cause the next part I was gonna talk about is polarization. I won’t dwell on it for too long, because if people have been listening to this show, they will know that A couple of weeks ago, our guest host Justin Ling, interviewed former conservative leader Erin O’Toole, about political polarization in Canada. So, you know, there’s a lot of context in that conversation, but for our purposes here, maybe just can you explain how polarization created the conditions that allowed these groups to grow from that base into something strong enough to actually get the convoy on the road?

Stephanie Carvin: Great question. I think polarization is the process by which individuals tend to take on more extreme views that are within their social networks over time, right? So, for example, I’m gonna use the Barbie movie because if you were online this weekend, the Prime Minister tweeted,

Jordan: The Prime Minister, went to see Barbie, and it was in fact polarizing.

Stephanie Carvin: And it was in fact polarizing. So let’s just say for example, that you have a friend, you know, a group of friends, and you have like a, a little chat group at work, and you have one friend who’s just totally crazy about the Barbie movie is constantly talking about it, is wearing pink, is showing pictures of it, bought some Barbies over time, the people in that group, if they’re favourable enough to Barbie, are going to become more favourable to Barbie over time. Right. Especially, and, and, you know, they, they end up talking to each other, exchanging ideas and things like that. So, you know, the idea is that over time you tend towards the most extreme within your particular network. And what we have now with social media is the ability to really kind of filter out alternative use. And I don’t like this idea, you know, we call it just, you know, social media bubbles and things like that. But it’s not just an echo chamber. It’s the fact that within these social media bubbles that individuals are, you know, actively trying to shock that they’re trying to have the most controversial view, that they’re constantly trying to one up each other in these social media bubbles on all different sides of the political spectrum. And what ends up happening is that happen, what was normal, perhaps when the group started out eventually shifts, right? And, and kind of our idea of, of what’s normal, kind of polarizes becomes more extreme over time. And that’s really the phenomenon that we saw with regards to, I think really the period between 2014, say, through to the convoy, which is where social media bubbles we, we tend to say as, as just normal humans to kind of follow people who agree with us, who share similar views, and that we no longer get exposed to other perspectives that, that we might have. And I think what we have seen is the rise of, of true believers, but also people who are just doing it for fun, people who find this kind of stuff funny as a result of this. These social media bubbles have been primed for more and more kind of extreme content over time. Right. And also to kind of really reject, I think, other perspectives that that might, that other people might have. Right. And so I think this also contributed, and where this really became important, I think is not just kind of on the far right, but also within, you know, certain groups that were concerned about pandemic anti-vaccine groups, for example. They became ripe for even more disinformation over time, especially as they’ve convinced themselves that mainstream media is, is effectively lying to them and can’t be trusted.

Jordan: What exactly is the Canadian far right? Like, we’ve used it to describe everything from, you know, militant people who identify as Nazis and wanna leave the country to angry shit posters with memes, , or people who are mad, they have to get a shot. Like, where does one end and the other begin for these purposes?

Stephanie Carvin: So there isn’t really a great definition of the far right. It’s one of the hardest things that I think when you’re, when you’re working the space that you are trying to deal with essentially. Because I think when we think of the far right, it’s not so much that there’s like a kind of, of of creed. For example, if you think of De or Al-Qaeda, for example, de being you know, what we call the Islamic state, you know, they, they kind of have a, a, a core narrative around, you know, the belief and the need to create a a, I guess so-called caliphate, the idea that the west is fundamentally evil and should be confronted. And, and these kinds of things with the far right, they don’t have the same kinds of, of narrative. Rather, it’s, it’s a range of influences and grievances that often are coming from particular personalized worldviews that can be inspired by a range of sources and all different kinds of media, whether it’s books, videos in particular we’ve talked about online the online environment and, and conversations with friends. And so I think what is concerning here is that really anyone can be upset with the government. I’m not sitting here, I think, you know, I, I worry that, you know, sometimes I’m sitting here and, and people think I’m defending the government when I talk about anti-authority or anti-government views, I’m not, right. What I’m really talking about is people who believe that, you know, society is fundamentally corrupt and the only way to deal with it is through some kind of violence. Right? And typically when we think about far right, you know, there, there’s far, there’s far right extremism, which isn’t necessarily violent. You just kind of fundamentally, you know, hate the government, just don’t believe it and things like this. But when we do worry about ideologically motivated violent extremists, and these are people who are willing to engage in violence to further their ends, and typically they can be divided up into what’s often four categories. One is the xenophobic violence, which is either racially motivated or, or some kind of white nationalist or ethnonationalist kind of violence. You have anti-authority violence. Increasingly we’re seeing gender driven violence. So this is violence that, you know, particularly targets women, if you think of the Toronto van attack and increasingly anti-LGBTQ2SIA violence. And I think that’s been really kind of, of a part of this, the sphere. And finally, you just kind of have people who are, you know, perhaps religiously motivated in some ways, Christian nationalism, people who may take with environmentalism and, and, and be pro oil and gas and want to, to move things forward that way. So, singled issue,

Jordan: This is a wide spectrum you are describing.

Stephanie Carvin: Exactly. And that’s why it’s, it’s very hard to describe. Right. It’s not, it’s, it’s a kind of a pool of grievances. And, and the other thing is too, it’s like these categories, whether xenophobic, anti-authority, gender driven violence or other, they overlap. And so I guess the way I’ve always thought about it is a kind of stew that’s bubbling up and, you know different groups will coalesce around a particular idea and then burst and then kind of fall back into the stew and then re come together again and then fall apart. And because these groups do tend to be very fractious, very few of them live beyond, I would say two to three years before they kind of fall victim of infighting and, and collapsing. But they, the people are still there. So, yeah, I appreciate this is a very imperfect and messy understanding of what the far right is, but that’s one of the challenges we’ve always had in confronting the threat. And I do believe that because of its fractious nature that law enforcements and national security agencies have traditionally downplayed Right. As a threat to Canada.

Jordan: Well, this brings me to the meat of the report here, which is the convoy itself and the actual logistics operations, organizing funding, whatever you want to call it, to get all those people to show up in Ottawa at the same time with the same goal. Given what you’ve just described in terms of a fractious nature, like was this a perfect storm? What had to go right for this to all come together? And I say go, right, you know, from the purposes of the organizers, like, sure, it seems like it would be like herding cats.

Stephanie Carvin: Well, I think the success of the movement was even caught them by surprise. Right? If you look at like the testimony of the organizers, they were clearly overwhelmed very quickly just from the attention that they got. But, but to this wider point, I, I’m not sure there was one single goal. And I think that was actually part of the problem of the convoy itself when it came to, you know, you couldn’t really negotiate with them because they didn’t really have a goal. If you looked at some of the key organizers back in August of 2021 had put out a manifesto, which basically called for the fall of the government, right. And that the Senate and the Governor General would take over along with the Citizens Committee and reestablish the government of Canada along the lines of the organizers. Well, that’s by the way, what we call anti-authority anti-authority extremism. Right. Trying to basically bring down the, the government of Canada. But there were other people there who were just like, look, I just want a lifting of the pandemic restrictions. I think some people just kind of wanted a good time and a party after, you know, two years in lockdown, and some people just wanted to get their businesses back. But what is concerning and what we have seen in subsequent reports that have been produced for the Public Order Emergency Commission or accessed under freedom of information, is that the intelligence agencies were well aware that there were some of the more ideologically motivated violent extremists that were networking in this movement, right. To try and recruits possibly to accelerate or perhaps to even take advantage of an opportunity to engage in violence. And that was in several reports by the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre, which is one of our analytical agencies that we have. It’s housed in CSIS, but it’s separate from CSIS. And I think as a result of that, it was a, a very scary time. So what we saw is that we had kind of a spectrum of individuals, if you think about it, the vast majority of protestors being people who were there because, you know, they probably were just tired of the pandemic. I was tired of the pandemic. Yeah. Like that narrative they had was not hard to understand. Right. One of the things that I think had frustrated the far right prior to, you know, the the 2022 convoy, is that all of their narratives, all their attempts to get a convoy going had never really worked. If you tell people, Hey, we’re gonna go have a convoy to overthrow the government, most people probably aren’t going to join in . Right? They’re thinking, oh, this, this sounds like a great way to be arrested. No, thank you. But if you say, I’m tired of the pandemic, you are tired of the pandemic, let’s go protest in Ottawa, that’s a much more accessible message. People understand that. Right. And I think that’s where this movement caught lightning in a bottle. And this is what we are seeing, the far right constantly try to do is to frame its grievances around issues that it thinks that more Canadians will understand, be susceptible to, and then to try and push their ideas more into the mainstream or even see them enacted politically. And when that doesn’t happen, the concern is that there’s other groups that may be present, which could try to either be recruiting for its cause or engage in some kind of violent activity at an event like something like the convoy.

Jordan: Well, it’s been a year and a half now. We had a whole inquiry about it. You mentioned law enforcement has traditionally found it tough to take these groups seriously. Have we learned lessons from this? And if so, what are they?

Stephanie Carvin: One of the things that’s really interesting is that I have a good friend Michael Nesbitt. He’s a professor at the University of Calgary, and he does really interesting empirical research on terrorism charges in Canada. And now 50% of charges of terrorism are now related to the far right in Canada or ideologically motivated violence extremism. And that’s a huge sea change. We were not seeing those numbers before. In fact, I think all criminal charges with regards to terrorism had been associated with religiously motivated violent extremism between 2001 up to about 2020. So we are seeing a change, I think a recognition that, oh, wait, terrorism and violent extremism comes in more than just one form. Whether or not that’s a good thing, I think is up to, you know, there’s a debate as to whether that’s a, a good or a bad thing. Some people would say, well, just because we’re charging more people from different ideologies doesn’t, you know, stop us from, from targeting other kinds of communities. I think that’s a debate for another day. But I think what we have seen and what we are seeing is a really interesting but unfortunate dynamic. The first part I would say is that a lot of the groups that were around between 2014 and 2020 are no longer operating. Maybe some of your listeners are familiar with groups like pita, which is, it’s actually a German acronym for Patriotic Citizens against the Islamicization of the West. The Soldiers of Odin, the Canadian Combat Coalition, all these different groups that were very active prior to the convoy, specifically on anti-Muslim and anti-immigration protests are no longer really around. They kind of got absorbed by the convoy and haven’t really been around since. But what concerns me is that while the convoy may have kind of eaten up some of these larger movements, I think their ideas are still fundamentally there. I think that the convoy movement itself showed that there is a very energetic movement that is now, now well networked, and has proven to be able to fundraise extremely quickly that can mobilize very quickly around another set of issues. The problem is it hasn’t yet found that issue, but it might be a lot of the convoy protestors tried to find issues. At one point it was about, you know, farmers and, and promoting farmers behind the, all these other kinds of anti-authority views. But where they seem to be finding success right now in particular, is anti-trans gender protesting and what we call anti LGBTQ issues. And what concerns me is we’re now seeing protests, constant protests outside of, you know, drag events. Yeah. Outside of schools. We’re now seeing, you know, in New Brunswick, we have seen a real kind of political disruption over the, these kinds of political issues. And, you know, the far right has mobilized behind the premier in order to ensure that some of the changes he wishes to make to the school curriculum, which some see as as anti-trans, stay permanent. And in addition, we’re now seeing the need to increase security at, you know, things like Pride, Toronto Pride, Ottawa pride, events like this. And a lot of the people who are now behind these threats to the, the trans community and the gay community is real, are people who were prominent figures within the, they’re finding this new issue to coalesce different levels of, of public support on, on, on these, these particular issues. And what’s ironic is that in some cases, they’re reaching out to new Canadians who, you know, for their own reasons may have concerns about sex education in schools and things like that. And they’re trying to force these kind of fake allyships with them, right? The very people that they were protesting against 10 years ago. And, and, and, and to be clear, I don’t blame the marginalized communities that are kind of being targeted in this way. They’re just taking advantage. It’s just to show how opportunistic the far right in Canada really is when it comes to trying to push its agenda forward. It will create any kind of temporary alliance with whoever it wants, whenever it wants, and it’s constantly there trying to, to push these changes. And you do worry that in the background, the more violence elements of this movement are still constantly trying to recruit, are still trying to find ways to, to attract particularly young Canadians to the movement. And I do worry that, you know, this is going to continue to be a source of if not just political instability, but potentially political violence in Canada in the future.

Jordan: Stephanie, thank you for this. Thank you for all your work in this space, and we will look forward to your book, which comes out. I’m putting a deadline on you now in 2024, McGill Queen’s University Press. Go get it.

Stephanie Carvin: Thank you so much.

Jordan: Stephanie Carvin, former national security analyst, author of Stand On Garden, that other book I mentioned, it’s coming out soon. Make sure you get a copy, our favourite person to talk to about extremism in this country. That was the big story for more, including previous interviews with Stephanie. You can head to the big story podcast.ca. You can type her name in at the bottom there, and they’ll all come up. Or you can just leisurely browse search for your favourite topic. We’ve probably covered it by now. If we haven’t, you have to tell us about it. And you have to find us on Twitter at the big story fpn or write to us via email hello at the big story podcast.ca. Or literally tell us about it. Pick up the phone, leave a voicemail, let us know what it is and why we should cover it. That number is 4 1 6 9 3 5 5 9 3 5. The big story is as always available in every podcast player and via a smart speaker if you ask it to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.