Thank you for having invited me to appear here today.
I'll be happy to answer your questions in both official languages, but I'll be delivering my address in English.
While violent extremism in Canada is a marginal phenomenon, situations arising out of IMVE garner a lot of public attention, followed by political commitments and opportunities, such as these committee meetings, to move on certain policies. Detecting IMVE and disrupting it is costly, and those costs are disproportionate to the benefits.
Other areas, such as cyber-threats, foreign interference and foreign espionage, are far more consequential for Canada's security, prosperity and democracy, but are 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, etc., would have a far greater benefit for public safety and depriving IMVE of resources and enablers than the current approach, whose track record seems neither particularly efficient nor effective.
Who is likely to sympathize with, provide material support for or engage in violent extremism and why have become two of the most pressing security questions of all time. Pragmatically, the question is made more difficult by the small numbers of those in this category, on the one hand, and the vast majority of people in comparable circumstances who exhibit a staunch resilience against radicalization, on the other hand.
We need to distinguish between ideologically motivated violent extremism and ideologically motivated extremist violence. The former concerns the narrative; the latter concerns action. We can sketch these in the form of two pyramids. At the apex are those who feel a sense of personal, moral obligation, followed by those who justify the narrative, and below them are those who sympathize with it. In the action pyramid, you have the terrorists at the apex, then the radicals who support them and below them are activist sympathizers.
During testimony before this committee on May 12, 2021, CSIS's Tim Hahlweg used a comparable analogy when he referred to three tiers: passive engagement, active engagement and mobilizing the violence. Chief Superintendent Duheme testified that he was gravely concerned with the extremist views that are first fostered, for instance, online, and can lead to actual physical violence. However, Mr. Hahlweg was much more nuanced in acknowledging that there is neither a conveyor belt nor a causal relationship.
In fact, the relationship between narrative and action is indeterminate. Few in the narrative pyramid ever move to action, and action is not necessarily motivated by a belief in the narrative. Ideology is only one of the 12 micro-, meso- and macro-mechanisms that drive radicalization. Ideology is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for radical action. That is, ideology does not cause extremist action, and many incidents of extremist violence are not necessarily motivated by ideology. When ideology is present, it turns out to be a rationale to justify extremist action and violence that people had already intended to engage with, in any event. In short, decades of evidence from psychology confirm that what people say is a poor predictor of what they will actually do.
For policy purposes, countering or changing a particular narrative, such as IMVE, is quite distinct from the problem of stopping people from perpetrating extremist violence or actions. The aforementioned numbers show that extremist violence in Canada, however problematic, remains rare and isolated. CSIS, CSE and the NSICOP acknowledge as much in their annual report, which highlights other issues, such as cyber. However, these issues are less politically appealing than IMVE.
Similarly, sympathy toward violence or breaking the law—that is, the problem of mass radicalization—is not widespread in Canada among any community, in contrast to select subgroups in some European countries, for instance, and, arguably, the United States. As Chief Superintendent Duheme confirmed during his testimony:
The most common threat actors we see are individuals with no clear group affiliation, who are motivated by highly personalized and nuanced ideologies that lead individuals to incite and/or mobilize to violence.
He went on to refer to the “increasingly individualized and leaderless nature of this threat environment”, while Mr. Hahlweg confirmed that “there's no common ideology that binds these groups.”
In other words, both violent extremism and extremist violence and action are marginal phenomena in Canada that I think we can reasonably well contain.