Public Safety Committee on April 26th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Good morning, everybody.

I call the meeting to order. Welcome back. I hope everybody took full value of the two weeks back home staying in touch with constituents or finding a few days to do something completely different. Here we are back at work.

Welcome to the 19th meeting of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. We will start by acknowledging we're meeting on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin people.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the House order of November 25, 2021. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application. Members and witnesses participating virtually may speak in the official language of their choice. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of floor, English or French.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motions adopted by the committee on Thursday, February 17, 2022, the committee is resuming its study of the rise of ideologically motivated violent extremism in Canada.

With us today by video conference we have Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network; Barbara Perry, director, Ontario Tech University, Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism; and Dr. Heidi Beirich and Wendy Via, Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

Welcome to all. Up to five minutes will be given for opening remarks after which we will proceed with rounds of questions.

I now invite Mr. Balgord to make an opening statement of up to five minutes.

Mr. Balgord, the floor is yours.

[Evan Balgord, Executive Director, Canadian Anti-Hate Network]

Thank you very much.

My name is Evan Balgord. I'm the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.

We're an anti-fascist and an anti-racist non-profit organization. Our mandate is to counter, monitor and expose hate-promoting movements, groups and individuals in Canada. We focus on the far right because it gives rise to the most issues of ideologically motivated violent extremism.

Today, I'm going to give a recent history of the far-right movement to explain in part how it escalated to the convoy and the occupation, and then I will describe the threat we are currently facing today.

I started doing this work originally as a journalist about five or six years ago. Today, our far-right movement was really born out of a racist anti-Muslim movement. We had hate groups spring up that were emboldened by Trump's election and his rhetoric about Muslims, and then they took to the streets to protest against our Motion No. 103, which was to broadly condemn Islamophobia.

At the time there were groups involved that you might recognize, like the Proud Boys and the Soldiers of Odin, and there were two threats largely emerging out of this space. The first was that they were assaulting people at demonstrations. Those could get quite violent. The second was that they were harassing Muslims in their places of worship, which was quite concerning to them.

Of course, Motion No. 103 passed and the sky didn't fall, so they needed a new issue. They rebranded and started calling themselves Yellow Vests Canada. When they did that, they added new grievances. They said it's not just Muslims, but also also about oil and gas, and western separation. But, of course, make no mistake: If you went into the Facebook groups at those times, you would find regular occurrences of largely anti-Muslim racism—although you'll find every form of racism and anti-Semitism present—and you would also find calls for violence, oftentimes towards politicians.

They also had a convoy, interestingly enough, called United We Roll. A lot of people who organized that convoy would later organize the more successful occupation of Ottawa. You can see how you can draw a straight line from one thing to the other.

This was also around the time we saw the rise of livestreamers and content creators being more important than “hate” groups. These are individuals like Pat King, who would go on to have an oversized impact on the occupation.

Their convoy, United We Roll, was a bit of a flop. It did not meet their expectations, and the Yellow Vests Canada movement dwindled, although they were still holding weekly demonstrations in most of our cities. Then came the pandemic, which was like manna from heaven for these groups.

Far-right groups and racist groups are also conspiratorial groups at their core, right? They believe there's this Muslim or this Jewish or this globalist takeover of Canada or of the world. At they core, they are conspiracists. So, when COVID came around, they very genuinely adopted COVID conspiracy theories. But this was also very dangerous and led to very awful second-order effects, because regular people were being fed misinformation and disinformation about COVID, and they would go out and find groups of like-minded people. Who were those groups of like-minded people? Well, they were started by our right-wing extremists here. We had more normal people coming into contact with our far-right movement. That was bad because a lot of those people got radicalized and we started to have marches in the hundreds and the thousands in our cities to protest things like public health measures. That all kind of culminated with the convoy, and we saw that they were now capable of occupying Ottawa.

One of the things I want to point out moving forward is those people haven't gone anywhere. They're back to their regularly scheduled programming. They are still holding their large demonstrations in various cities and some of them are returning this weekend to Ottawa as part of a Rolling Thunder convoy, which will not be as significant, but the point is that this just continues and it grows.

I want to describe two threats we're facing today. We are talking about ideologically motivated violent extremism. That means extremism that gets violent or criminal. That's a lot of what we're talking about here. We have threats like the threats of a terrorist attack or the threat of a mass violence incident. We have the threat that this movement of convoy-supporting COVID conspiracists. They're not all racists; they're not all violent. Not all the people on January 6 were either. There were groups in those midst that decided they were going to try to do a coup, and they swept up a lot of the other people there.

The same thing is kind of happening here. We have more extreme elements of our far-right movement than others, but as a whole they are becoming a threat to our democracy. The goal of the whole thing is an undemocratic overthrow of the government so that they can take power and persecute their perceived political enemies. That would mean putting doctors, journalists and politicians on trial and perhaps executing them. That's what a lot of them want to do.

That's a pretty significant threat. That's the ecosystem threat, right? We can't just talk about ideologically motivated violent extremists in a vacuum—

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

You have 10 seconds left, sir.

[Evan Balgord]

Certainly.

I'll just end by saying that we need to be focusing on shrinking the size of that far right ecosystem, because then we'll have fewer IMVE threats coming out of it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you very much.

I would now like to invite Ms. Perry to speak for up to five minutes in her opening comments.

Ms. Perry, the floor is yours.

[Dr. Barbara Perry, Director, Ontario Tech University, Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism]

Thank you very much, and thanks for the opportunity.

Evan, thanks for providing a good segue for me. I really want to emphasize the lessons we can learn about the far right movement more broadly from their engagement in the convoys or the occupation.

There are really four points I want to stress here. One is what it tells us about their organizational capacity. We really saw the capacity to organize, in a Canadian context, unlike we've ever seen it before, on a large scale, largely facilitated by both the encrypted and unencrypted social media platform. That theme will sort of be running through what I say today, because that was also the venue through which they were able to display this adeptness that they really have in terms of their ability to exploit broader popular concerns, grievances and anxieties and weave them into their own narratives. As well, there are the implications of social media platforms for the deployment and, disturbingly, the ready acceptance of the sorts of disinformation, conspiracy theories, etc. that we see underlying much of far-right activism but particularly in the context of the convoy and COVID much more broadly, as Evan suggested.

The convoy and the occupation also tell us a great deal about the risks and threats associated with the right-wing movement in Canada. Obviously we have the threats to public safety, as we saw in Ottawa in particular, not just in terms of the disruption of the whole downtown community but also in terms of the harassment, the hate crime, the threats, the intimidation of people of colour or LGBTQ+ people or even people who were wearing masks in the downtown area.

We see threats to national security. Obviously the fact that they occupied that space so close to Parliament Hill is paramount, but also very important to keep in mind is the threat to border security that we saw in the border blockades, especially with the discovery of the artillery and weapons in Coutts associated with far-right groups.

On dangers to democracy, there's obviously the threat that Evan referred to in terms of attempts to overthrow a democratic government, but even more broadly than that the far right in this context is also very concerned with enhancing that erosion of an array of key institutions—surely the state but also science, media and education and academe as well.

The next point, the final key point in terms of the pattern, is the failure of law enforcement in this context to properly evaluate and prepare and understand the risks associated with the far right and, more broadly again, their failure to intervene and counter right-wing extremism generally. In fact, in the convoy and in other contexts, we've seen sympathy for the far right, and here, with the fundraising donations coming from law enforcement. We've seen social media platforms and pages that are devoted to law enforcement also sharing some of these conspiracy theories and this disinformation.

The last point I want to make is about what the points of intervention are, given what I've identified here as some of the key lessons. The first is the need to enhance not just critical digital literacy but civic literacy as well. There was an awful lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about the nature of the charter, about the role of the Governor General, about how governments operate generally. Both of those pieces are important.

Another point of intervention is around the law enforcement/intelligence community enhancing their awareness, their capacity and their willingness to intervene around right-wing extremism.

Finally, there is a need to create opportunities and incentives to engage in civil dialogue and engage across partisan sides whether we are talking about the general public or whether we are talking about politics.

I will end there. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you very much.

I would now invite either Ms. Via to give us an opening statement for five minutes.

[Wendy Via, Co-Founder, Global Project Against Hate and Extremism]

Good morning, committee members. Thank you for the honour of inviting us to speak today on the important issue of ideologically motivated extremism.

My name is Wendy Via, and I'm joined by my colleague, Heidi Beirich. We co-founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an American organization that counters ideologically motivated extremism and promotes human rights that support flourishing, inclusive democracies. We particularly focus on the transnational nature of extremist movements and the export of hate and extremism from the United States.

The United States, Canada and many countries are currently awash in hate speech and conspiracy theories like QAnon, anti-vax, election disinformation and “the great replacement” spreading on poorly moderated social media. It is indisputable that social media companies are major drivers of the growth of global hate and extremist movements, conspiracy theories, the radicalization of individuals and organization of potentially violent events.

The consequence of this spread is a polarization of our societies and violence in the form of rising hate crimes and terrorist attacks. The tragedies of the Quebec City mosque shooting, the Toronto van attack and others, such as the shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the mosques in Christchurch, are a horrific reminder of the toll that hate and online radicalization can take. These movements also manifest in direct threat to our democracies, as we've seen so clearly with the January 6 insurrection and the trucker occupation that held Ottawa hostage for weeks.

Canada and the United States have long had similar and intertwined white supremacist, anti-government and other hate movements. In recent years we have seen American hate and militia organizations, including the neo-Nazi The Base, the anti-government Three Percenters, the misogynistic and racist Proud Boys and others establish themselves on both sides of the border. Because these organizations attempt to infiltrate key institutions, both countries are facing the issue of extremists in the military and the police, though to varying degrees.

In the U.S. and other countries, political figures and media influencers with tremendous online reach, and in particular, former president Donald Trump, have legitimized hate and other extremist ideas, injecting them into the mainstream political discourse and legitimizing bigoted and fringe ideas across borders. Research shows that Trump's campaign and politics galvanized Canadian white supremacist ideologies and movements, and his endorsement of the trucker convoy, along with media personalities like Tucker Carlson, undoubtedly contributed to the influx of American donations to the trucker siege.

In addition to the key role of social media, a more systemic driver of extremism is the growing demographic diversity in both countries which, along with histories of white supremacy, though different in each country, fuel nostalgic arguments that a more successful white past is being erased and intentionally reconstituted with communities who do not belong. The movements pushing these ideas will likely become stronger in the years to come, as they have a historical foundation and sympathy that other extremist movements will never achieve. It is for this reason that countering them is of the utmost importance.

If I may, I'll offer some recommendations here with a broader list in our written testimony.

This growing problem will not be solved without taking on the online social media and financial spaces. Absent a domestic law with teeth, tech companies will not reform their practices. Importantly, the tech companies must be held to account in all languages, not just American English. A sovereign democracy cannot thrive when there are massive ungovernable spaces. Most research into the impact of social media on our democracies and societies is generated by civil society and focuses on the U.S.

Independent research of online harms should be funded. We should improve cross-border co-operation, particularly in terms of transnational travel and sharing of intelligence and threat assessments. We should fully implement the Christchurch Call commitments, of which Canada was an original signatory. We should put in place and enforce strong policies against extremism in the military and police forces, from recruitment to active duty to veteran status.

Finally, extremist movements are emboldened by endorsement of their ideas from influential people. They can also be diminished by public rejection and publicly and forcefully condemning hate, extremism and disinformation whenever possible.

I hope these suggestions will be helpful.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to our first round of questions from colleagues around the table.

We will begin with Mr. Lloyd.

Sir, you have six minutes. The floor is yours.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My first question is to Mr. Balgord from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.

Mr. Balgord, would you say that your organization is an objective organization?

[Evan Balgord]

We wear our biases on our sleeves. We are very proudly anti-fascist, and we focus on the far right. We focus on the far right because, if you speak with anybody who is a researcher of this or an expert in national security threats, they will agree that ideologically motivated violent extremists and threats today are primarily coming out of far-right organizing.

Thank you.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

I appreciate the honesty, Mr. Balgord. It's important. I'm not diminishing some of the work that you do.

I come from an area where last summer we had a hundred-year-old church burn to the ground, and dozens of people had to be evacuated from an apartment building close by, which nearly went up in flames and killed dozens of people, but you just don't hear it talked about in this country. I understand that it's not your organization's mandate to talk about these things. As you've said, you're clearly focused on the far right.

During the convoy protests, your executive director—I believe that's his position—Bernie Farber, posted a tweet with a photo of a vile anti-Semitic flyer and claimed that this was a picture of the flyer being circulated in Ottawa among the trucker protesters. Upon further examination, it was proven that this exact same photo was taken in Miami, Florida, weeks before the protests ever began.

Can you explain why the executive director of your organization was claiming that this photo was being circulated at the protests when, in fact, it was a photo that was from a completely different country weeks before the protests?

[Evan Balgord]

Thank you very much for giving me a way to address this.

First off, that was our chair. I'm the executive director. I was privy to the email chain that led to him tweeting that out. What had occurred was that somebody in Ottawa had reached out and said that they saw that flyer there, and they provided the photo. At that moment, Bernie was not aware that the photo itself was taken from an American source.

What the person was trying to communicate to our organization was that they saw the same flyer, but they had attached the photo from the States. It was our error in not communicating that more clearly, where the photo itself originated from. What the person was reporting to us was that they had seen the same flyer in Ottawa.

Thank you.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

You have no evidence other than hearsay that the flyer was being distributed in Ottawa, correct?

[Evan Balgord]

That is correct. We took the report from somebody on the ground, and our chair put the information out there.

I would say that we did see very similar messaging in Toronto. There was somebody who was wearing a billboard with essentially the same messaging.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Let's move on here. We're talking about the Ottawa protest, but I appreciate your clarification on that matter.

You've raised some pretty disturbing allegations about the potential for a terrorist attack, a mass violence event. I think we can all be thankful that this didn't happen during the protests, and I think it sort of undermines the argument that was being made by many, including by organizations such as yours, that this protest had violent motivations, that they had a desire to commit violence. The fact that we didn't see a terrorist attack or mass violence event sort of undermines the claim.

You've connected the United We Roll protest, which came to Ottawa in 2018, I believe.... A lot of people from western Canada concerned about the carbon tax, pipelines being blocked.... How do you draw this connection between white supremacy and fascism with people who are concerned about protecting their livelihoods?

[Evan Balgord]

We don't, and I am always very careful at every juncture to point out that not everybody who was involved in the convoy is necessarily racist or necessarily violent.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

There's a broad generalization here about a protest in saying that it was organized by the same people—

[Evan Balgord]

Yes.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

—and that this is a conspiracy to spread white supremacist and fascist views under the guise of pipeline and carbon tax politics. What evidence do you have to back up that claim?

[Evan Balgord]

If you look back at the Yellow Vests Canada movement, and this is well documented, you'll find hundreds of examples of death threats and racist comments towards Muslims. That's the Yellow Vests Canada movement that I just addressed.

In terms of your earlier comment about the organizers and how we make statements of that nature, I point to one of the key influencers and organizers of the convoy, Pat King, who said the mandate would only “end with bullets”.

We saw other organizers who had previously made Islamophobic statements—

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Nobody had ever heard of this Pat King fellow before these convoy protests in Ottawa, yet you're saying that these people were involved with the United We Roll protests in 2018.

[Evan Balgord]

That's correct.

[Dane Lloyd, Conservative, Sturgeon River—Parkland, AB]

Do you have any evidence of a direct connection? Can you provide that evidence, since you've made this claim?

[Evan Balgord]

Sure.

Tamara Lich was in fact an organizer of United We Roll and she was one of the key organizers of the convoy. That's one example.

Pat King [Inaudible—Editor] at the time of the convoy.