Evidence of meeting #31 for Public Safety and National Security in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was far-right.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
I call this meeting to order. We have a quorum, and I'm sure Shannon will join us shortly.
This is the 31st meeting of the public safety committee, and we are studying ideologically motivated hate crime. We have two outstanding witnesses this afternoon: Dr. Christian Leuprecht, who is well known to this committee, and Dr. Barbara Perry.
Maybe I'll ask you for your seven-minute statements in the order in which you appear on the notice of meeting, and then we'll move to questions.
Dr. Leuprecht.
Dr. Christian Leuprecht Professor, As an Individual
Mr. Chair, vice-chairs and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me today to discuss this very important topic. I would be happy to answer your questions in either official language.
I've provided my text in English, so I will follow it.
Violent extremism in Canada is a marginal phenomenon, and situations arising out of ideologically motivated violent extremism garner a lot of public attention. That's followed by political commitments or opportunities, such as the hearings that we're having today, to move on certain policies.
Detecting domestic IMVE and disrupting it is costly, and costs are disproportionate to the benefit. There are many other threats, such as cyber-threats, foreign interference and foreign espionage, that are far more consequential for Canada's security, prosperity and democracy, but they're difficult to quantify publicly in the absence of human casualties. If done better and more systematically, rebalancing Canada's national security and policing posture, with a greater emphasis on cyber, organized crime, money laundering and protecting Canadians from foreign malign actors, would have a far greater benefit for public safety and for depriving IMVE of resources and enablers than the current approach, whose track record seems neither particularly efficient, nor particularly effective.
Who is likely to sympathize with, provide material support for or actually engage in violent extremism and why has become one of the more pressing security questions of our time. That question is made more difficult by the very small number of those in this category, on the one hand, and the vast majority of people in comparable circumstances who are very resilient to radicalization. I provide some numbers that I will skip over, but I'll simply point out that, as shown in testimony before this committee, terrorist attacks and incidents, although extremely tragic, are very rare compared with many other incidents of violence and violence related to ideology.
We need to distinguish between ideologically motivated violent extremism and ideologically motivated extremist violence. One concerns the narrative; the other concerns action. We can lay this out in two pyramids: the narrative pyramid and the action pyramid. These two pyramids are distinct from one another. In the action pyramid, we have terrorists at the apex, then radicals and, below them, activist sympathizers. You got a similar description from Tim Hahlweg of CSIS, with passive engagement, active engagement and mobilizing to violence.
The relationship between thought and action isn't clear. It's not a conveyor belt, and it's not causal. This raises a host of questions. How do individuals end up in one of those three radical action categories? Are there three different kinds of people who end up in these different categories? What are the drivers of the transition between these categories? What motivates an individual to cross boundaries, passing from non-radical to radical or from radical to terrorist? What are the barriers to these transitions? Why do so few people become radicalized, and is there anything special about these few? Do the categories of action and the transitions between different categories depend on the particular cause being espoused, or do all movements and issues exhibit commonalities in the structure of radicalization?
From the perspective of intelligence and law enforcement, we might also ask, is it possible to tell which category of action an individual will move toward by examining an individual’s attitudes? More generally, can current attitudes predict the future political trajectory of a particular individual?
It turns out that the relationship between narrative and action is indeterminate. Few in the narrative pyramid ever move to action, and action is not necessarily motivated by belief in a narrative. I've sketched 12 mechanisms—at the micro, meso and macro levels—that we've identified. It turns out that ideology is one of those 12, and in quite a few cases ideology is not present at all. People engage in violence for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with ideology, so it's neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for violence.
When ideology is present, more often than not ideology becomes the justification and the rationale for the violence rather than the cause of the violence per se.
For policy purposes, we need to treat the problem of narrative and the problem of action as distinct problems. We see this as such in Canada, the problem of mass radicalization—that is to say, entire communities that are radicalized—is not really a problem. What we see is individuals who are radicalized. This is a question about those individuals who are sympathetic to violence.
I would say that in terms of those investigations—I explained this in my brief—we don't have a particularly great track record in terms of the RCMP and success of the RCMP.
Democracy is on a slippery slope when we merely hold political beliefs that, however objectionable they may be, end up being equated with criminal behaviour. With the exception of a few offences such as incitement and hate speech that cross into the criminal realm, the hallmark of democracy is to police criminal action, not opinions.
Generally speaking, radicalization per se—a shift in beliefs, feelings and actions towards increased support for one side or the other—is not a problem. The challenge and test for democracy always comes at the margins.
I would conclude by saying that overplaying and politicizing the threat of IMVE by going after a needle in a haystack.... A better approach would be for the government to improve how Canada is postured to detect, disrupt, contain and deter against the full spectrum of national security threats in the first place. To that effect, we can focus on federal police reform to make federal police more functional, with a foreign human intelligence service and a dedicated criminal intelligence service.
There are many far greater threat vectors to public safety that Canadian communities confront day in and day out. They are from non-conventional threats by state and non-state actors such as cyber, and conventional threats such as organized crime, money laundering and the like, on which a government concerned about national security could take concerted action that would have far more direct and immediate impacts on public safety than IMVE.
Dr. Barbara Perry Professor and Director, Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, As an Individual
Thank you very much for the invitation to appear. I very much look forward to sharing my thoughts and engaging in some conversation.
I did share with you two graphics to illustrate my comments today. The first is a sort of typology that we've been building around the diversity of the far-right movement. That's really my focus, looking at right-wing extremism specifically. I want to sketch out in a very short period of time some of the contours associated with the far right that we identified in the study that we published in 2015, which was funded by Public Safety, but also coming out of the current study that we're working on, also funded by Public Safety, which is an update of that first one.
The first graphic, the categories of the far right in Canada, is quite important in terms of reminding us of the diversity of the movement when we think about the far right. Even in 2015 when we were looking at the movement, the focus was really on those very traditional kinds of groups that you see at the top—skinheads, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and what have you. Since then there's been sort of a diffusion of the movement in different directions, not a splintering so much as a coalescing into much more discrete categories so that there are identifiable strands that are specifically anti-Muslim, specifically anti-immigrant or specifically misogynistic, for example.
In addition to that, we have the accelerationists. Each of these I can unpack a little bit for you in the Q and A if you like, but the intent of this graphic is just to highlight the diversity that we're seeing within the movement.
The second graphic that I shared with you is the distribution as we saw it in 2015. You see the concentrations there in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta in particular, and to some extent in B.C., for a total, as a conservative estimate, of just over a hundred active groups associated with some arm of far-right extremist ideologies.
In the current study, we've identified over the past four to five years an incredible growth in those numbers to at least 300 groups now, and again, that is across the country. We're seeing more activity down east for example, but other than that, the concentrations have stayed fairly similar, that is, with higher concentrations, again, in Ontario and Quebec and Alberta.
I'll just share with you a few of the other trends we're identifying in the current study. I referred to the growth in numbers that we're seeing, and I should say that's growth in numbers of groups and growth in numbers of individuals drawn to various elements of far-right extremist ideologies. Just as we're seeing a diffusion of the movement itself, in terms of the numbers of focal areas, we're also seeing a diffusion, or an atomization almost, with respect to the movement itself—that is, more individuals being drawn to small elements, sort of cherry-picking from the narratives of an array of different groups and ideologies to suit their own needs, whatever they may be.
We are seeing a lot more of those floaters, as we're starting to call them, but we are also seeing more groups, that is, new chapters of groups that were existing in 2014 and 2015, as well as new groups that have emerged on the scene, most notably the Proud Boys and Soldiers of Odin.
We're also seeing a shift in the demographics associated with the groups. Just as we tend to think of the far right as the skinheads and the neo-Nazis, I think we tend to think of it as a youth movement. That is certainly still the case. There are an awful lot of youth aged 16 or 17 to 24 or maybe early thirties involved in the movement, but we are seeing many more middle-aged and older folks coming to the movement as well.
Accompanying that is a shift in other kinds of demographics, in terms of education and income or profession in particular. There are more middle-income earners or above. We look at January 6 events in the U.S., for example, as sort of an inflated illustration of what we're seeing here. A fairly large proportion of those people were professionals—accountants and doctors and lawyers—and we're seeing some of that here as well, so it also applies then that many have a higher level of education, university degrees and advanced degrees in some cases.
I think that's especially the case within that element that refers to themselves as the alt-right. These were sort of the ideologues, if you will, of the movement as opposed to the shock troops, who are those more traditional Nazis or skinheads on the streets.
One of the other trends that we're seeing is increasing coalition building or alliances, and early on in this phase of the study, 2015-16, 2016-2017, even 2018, we were seeing much more coalition building across groups, strategizing across groups within the movement, planning and codeveloping protests, rallies, concerts and a whole array of other activities. We've seen a lot of that, but we're also now seeing, in the context of COVID, especially in terms of lockdown and anti-masks and anti-vaccination activities, efforts to leverage or exploit those very mainstream grievances and fold them into far-right narratives as a way of expanding their audience, grabbing people and sort of leading them down the garden path, if you will.
The last trend that I want to highlight is probably one of the most dangerous, and that is that we are seeing an increased fascination with gun rights and with being fully armed within the group. Even for the Proud Boys, one of their mantras is “we love our guns”. We see that in a number of other groups. We see images of them online with stockpiles of weapons and engaging in paramilitary training. We have that, that they're heavily armed.
What we're also seeing—and this is another project we're on right now with DND—is looking at the contours of the far-right within the context of the CAF, because we've had a number of high-profile cases of late. Again, looking at the events of January 6 in the U.S., there is evidence of links between members of the CAF, current or former, and the far-right movement. We have the arms, we have the training and the third dangerous sort of potentially lethal element of that are the xenophobic ideologies that often inform these groups. I think that is one of the trends that we really need to keep our eyes on.
I will leave it at that and flesh out anything that is of interest as we move forward.
Thank you for your time.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Thank you, Dr. Perry.
We'll turn to the first six-minute round with Mrs. Stubbs, Ms. Khera, Ms. Larouche and Mr. Harris.
Conservative
Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB
Thanks, Chair.
Thank you to both of our witnesses for being here today, for offering your expertise and your time to us.
Dr. Leuprecht, you commented, I thought, quite compellingly about the difference between words and actions, and the different scales and kinds of people who might be identified when talking about these complex issues. I wonder if you might comment and expand on the differences between terrorists, radicals and activists.
Professor, As an Individual
It's a very good question in light of what my very talented colleague, Dr. Perry, just presented.
If we think of this as a pyramid, at the top we have people who are engaged in illegal action and violent action. Those are the people we commonly refer to as terrorists. Below that, we have people we refer to as radicals, who are engaged in possibly one or more forms of illegal actions, whether they are an illegal protest, perhaps firearms violations, or so forth, but they're not violent per se against third parties or the public. Below that, you have activists. Those are people who, for instance, might possibly sympathize with radicals or with terrorists, but they aren't engaging in forms of illegal action, illegal speech, incitement, hate and the like.
We often conflate these in public discourse, and I think it's important for intelligence, for enforcement purposes and for policy purposes to treat these as three distinct problems. One might be a problem of counter-radicalization, persuading people. One might be a problem of making sure we have the right incentives in place so that people who might be engaged in illegal action don't engage in violent action, and for those who are predisposed or engaging in violent action, make sure we have the criminal intelligence capabilities to detect and disrupt those before they can do harm.
Conservative
Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB
Thank you.
Added to that, on your points about the predictors of people taking action, I think in your research you suggest that religion, political opinion and country of origin are all bad predictors, or not necessarily predictors that will result in action.
I wonder if you have any comments on what purpose CSIS's categories of motivation serve.
Professor, As an Individual
There is a temptation in the public discourse, I think, to reduce this to monocausal explanations, and clearly, religion can be one of them. There are so many people who are religious, and virtually none of them become violent. Many of the people who become violent, for instance, are not religious or don't adhere to, say, any ideology of any particular form. Understanding that the predictors are multi-faceted and combine in different ways in different cases is critically important.
I think this is where some of the structural work that Dr. Perry is doing can help us. It can help us to identify some people who may be at higher risk, but then ensuring, for instance, that when we're talking about youth—and as any of us who have children of our own or are familiar with youth know, youth do things that we would prefer them not to do—we get them the right intervention and the right help, rather than necessarily and immediately criminalizing viewpoints that in and of themselves we find objectionable but that aren't necessarily criminal.
Conservative
Shannon Stubbs Conservative Lakeland, AB
To your point about protecting public safety through preventing and creating consequences for criminal activity, do you have any comments to expand on in terms of reforms or changes or concrete solutions for federal policing or other intelligence services?
Professor, As an Individual
I would say that the much-vaunted risk reduction measures that CSIS was granted, commonly known as “disruption”—the ones that do not require warrants—have proven quite effective and successful at reducing risk.
I would also say that we have a federal police force that spends 85% of its time and resources doing provincial contract policing, which detracts from its federal mandate. I cite at least one case, the Victoria Parliament plot, which was extremely unsuccessful, given the resources that were invested into this case, where the RCMP was chastised by the judge for its entrapment practices.
I think we need to be better postured in terms of federal policing. We need to have a separate criminal intelligence service and likely move that out of the RCMP to make that a separate stand-alone entity. We need to have a better sense of the foreign influences here that may be illegal or criminal under Canadian law. To that effect, we need a foreign human intelligence service, because CSIS, for reasons that go beyond our time here, cannot currently engage in that mandate effectively.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
We are beyond our time.
Thank you, Madam Stubbs.
Madam Khera, you have six minutes.
Liberal
Kamal Khera Liberal Brampton West, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to both of our witnesses for being here, but more importantly, for all the work you do.
Dr. Perry, I want to start off with you, and I want to talk about online hate.
I know you've teamed up with Facebook Canada to address instances of online hate. It is a topic that we've certainly discussed in committee. You have declared that online platforms have been a gift to alt-right groups known for spreading conspiracy theories via video clips.
Could you maybe expand a little bit on your findings and efforts in this area? How do we address promoting hatred on mainstream channels, as well as on underground networks, such as Parler and Gab?
Professor and Director, Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, As an Individual
These are all very good questions. They're not easy questions by any stretch.
One of the most disturbing things we found in this round of work—the Institute for Strategic Dialogue is doing much of our online analysis—is that in two successive years, Canadian posters were among the most active within the far-right ecosystem, if you will.
Just quantitatively, that's problematic. We tend to think we are immune to those kinds of narratives, but there you are. In particular in the first round—that would have been the 2019 report that we did with ISD—we actually found that they were, in fact, second and third in two of the most extreme platforms, Fascist Forge and Iron March. These are the ones that are most likely to promote violence, and mass violence in particular.
Again, quantitatively, that is the problem, but it's also a problem qualitatively, given the breadth of the speech, the viciousness of the speech as it's directed towards particular individuals or particular communities, whether it's emails or posts directed towards an individual or it's those who vilify particular groups. It's rampant online, obviously.
I think we have to consider the impacts of this on a sense of community, a sense of belonging and a sense of security, as well. It is something that absolutely silences communities. It makes them less willing to engage online, which has become the way we communicate—especially now, with COVID.
How do we confront it and how do we regulate it? It's such a challenge. We've been exploring it globally over the last five or six years. We've been trying to constrain the most heinous sorts of speeches.
When I'm talking about hate speech here, I'm talking about dangerous speech, speech that promotes violence, that explicitly promotes vilification and that directs hatred towards particular groups. Warman v. Kouba identified these sorts of elements of speech as the hallmarks of hate.
I think we need to put much more pressure on social media giants to enforce their community standards. Most of them are at least as strong as our own federal definitions. We need to encourage the actual use of those. I hear so many...from the research but also from the people I work with. They are identifying speech that seems to cross those boundaries, which.... There's no response to the complaints, so I think we need to hold their feet to the fire.
In terms of the alternative platforms, that's where the real challenge lies because access to the darkest spaces is more difficult for researchers, for police, for journalists and for anyone who wants to know what's happening there. There are challenges there because they're specifically set up to avoid any sort of community standards. Most of us are at a loss as to how to respond to those. Again, perhaps we put pressure on the domains to not host them, as happened with Parler. I think it was after the January 6 events.
I think that is a new challenge presenting itself.
Liberal
Kamal Khera Liberal Brampton West, ON
Thank you for that.
You also noted in your remarks that IMVE is usually directed at groups that are already stigmatized and marginalized. You said it is a mechanism of power.
Can you expand a little bit on which groups are targeted and how?
Professor and Director, Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, As an Individual
I should add—maybe that's another trend I should start talking about—that again, in response to the online piece, we're seeing a really dramatic upsurge in anti-statist narratives online, specifically anti-Trudeau narratives. It's not just those marginalized communities. In this case, perhaps it's the champions of those marginalized communities who also become targets.
We continue to see anti-immigrant sentiment leading the way, along with anti-Muslim sentiment. In some regions of the country, anti-indigenous narratives are particularly popular. We seem to be seeing a bit of a resurgence of anti-queer and anti-trans narratives among some of these groups as well. It's interesting because it will shift over time in terms of immigration patterns, perhaps, or in terms of the assertion of rights by particular communities, that sort of thing. These groups seem to be the key targets in recent days.
In the context of COVID, I think we also need to raise the issue of anti-Asian narratives and violence.
Finally, I should add that anti-Semitism is always there, barely below or barely above the surface. It's almost a foundation for so many other forms of hatred. Often those Jewish conspiracy theories are used to explain the evil ways of others, that it's Jews who are responsible for drugs in Black communities or—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
We will have to leave it there, but thank you.
Ms. Larouche, welcome to the committee.
The floor is yours. You have six minutes.
Bloc
Andréanne Larouche Bloc Shefford, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to both witnesses for being here today to speak to us on such an important topic.
Mr. Leuprecht and Ms. Perry, your opening statements were quite informative.
My first question is for Ms. Perry.
In your opening statement, you referred to the link between the far right and the anti-women movement, if I understood correctly. I'd like to hear more about that.
You also mentioned at the end of your remarks the radicalization of members of the Canadian Armed Forces, or CAF. I know that, in November 2020, the University of New Brunswick gave you and researcher David Hofmann a $750,000 grant to carry out a three-year study on hateful ideologies and extremism within the CAF. According to the announcement, you had ongoing conversations with General Jonathan Vance, the then chief of the defence staff, who had sought out your advice and expertise.
Can you tell us why the former chief of the defence staff reached out to you for your expertise?
I'm especially interested in the advice and recommendations you gave the former chief of the defence staff. As your research reveals, sexism and misogyny are common threads in right-wing extremist groups.
What advice did you give the former chief of the defence staff who wanted to address the problem in the CAF?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
I would just point out that I doubt you received $750 million. I dare say that you received $750,000. If you could, if possible—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
I think it was the interpreter then.
Anyway, if you could bring it back to the actual study, that would be good.
Thank you.
Professor and Director, Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, As an Individual
I will just respond briefly to the first one. That was the question of misogyny in the movement. There's no doubt that misogyny from the get-go is embedded in the far-right movement. It is grounded in racism, yes, and anti-Semitism but also in patriarchy.
One of the mantras is the 14 words, which is well known, I think: We must ensure the existence of the white race and a future for our children. If we're going to ensure that, we have to control our women, and our women's sexuality in particular. That expands into other elements of the movement as well.
We do see that continuing within the movement, so there's some overlap. I should say that, in all of these areas, there's some overlap between what we think of as the incel movement and the far-right movement, but not all incel activists are necessarily far-right.
With respect to the CAF work, it's very early days for us. We're still waiting for our research ethics approval at the university level. We do have a post-doc working independently on a targeted engagement grant with the DND as well, looking specifically at policy interventions.
I will talk about areas rather than specifics, because we are seeing issues around people who are already in the movement and who enlist in the CAF, often in the reserves, to get the kinds of training that they think they need and can bring back to the movement. We're seeing problems already as people enlist. We're seeing problems with people being recruited while they are in service, and then we see problems with veterans, people who have left the military and are looking for a familiar place to belong. Very often, they are being lured into the movement.
We're looking at strategies in all three of those areas in terms of screening tools at the outset and ways to monitor and identify radicalization in service. Also, there's this gap between Veterans Affairs and the CAF once people have left in terms of the kinds of supports they get in this area specifically, so that's another area that we really need to build out, I think.
As you know, the DND and all branches have identified or created new orders around hateful conduct and engagement in identifiable groups—not “identified”, but “identifiable” groups—with hateful conduct at their core, so part of our task will be helping to operationalize them or identify ways that those orders can be operationalized as well.
Thank you for those questions.