Public Safety Committee on May 10th, 2022

[Vidhya Ramalingam]

Thank you very much for the question.

We really admire the Canadian government's forward planning around this threat. This is an emerging threat that not only the Canadian government but also global governments need to be concerned about.

Some of our main findings around the Canadian incel movement I mentioned in my briefing, but I want to talk a bit about prevention here. Some of the main findings we have discovered in the early stages of that work are that incel communities are open to mental health interventions and behavioural health interventions. This is actually no different from other forms of violent extremism—really across the spectrum. Whether we're talking about al Qaeda and Daesh inspired violent extremism or whether we're talking about the far right or the far left, we have consistently found, across the spectrum, that these audiences are open to behavioural health interventions.

With the violent incel community, in part because we found high levels of discussions around their mental health and well-being already on platforms, there is an opening for us here to use mental health interventions as a way of starting a conversation with people who are at risk of violence.

We would really encourage the Canadian government to invest heavily, as I mentioned, in behavioural health models, in building on the existing prevention and social service provision organizations across the country, and also equipping them to be able to handle cases coming from this violent misogynistic movement as well.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Ms. Ramalingam.

In your remarks, you also talked about a gap in digital security and the importance of filling it. You touched on this in the answer you just gave us.

What more can the government do to fill that gap?

[Vidhya Ramalingam]

Thank you for your question.

I think Canada is very well placed, actually, to take the long-standing programs that the Canadian government has been investing in for the last 10 years and start to build their digital capacity to deliver their work online.

I mentioned some of our findings from a study that we ran five years ago, which was looking at what was then the current level of digital capacity among Canadian prevention practitioners, and it was very low. We need to work to improve that, so I would suggest that the Canadian government work to deliver training and capacity building to organizations that need to start using social media to signpost their services online.

I would also suggest that we start to look at large-scale programming across the entire country, and not just focus on the few territories and provinces that have been heavily invested in and already have these programs on the ground but also really start to look at parts of the country that don't have these programs—in particular, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Atlantic provinces and the territories. We need to build up specialist teams that can cater to audiences that are at risk in those regions and start to bring services for those audiences online.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much.

It is therefore necessary to ensure better distribution of resources across the entire country, because there are still gaps to be filled.

[Vidhya Ramalingam]

Yes, that's correct.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you.

I now invite Mr. MacGregor to take us to the end of this round of questioning with his six-minute block.

The floor is yours.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Ramalingam, I'd like to start with you. Thank you for joining our committee today.

You were talking about the focus on al Qaeda and Daesh. I'm going to assume that is because over the last couple of decades with those two groups and their perverse interpretation of Islam and their barbaric ways of enforcing that interpretation, there were very clear and worrying growth trends in both of the ideologies. Is that right? I'm assuming that's why we had the focus on them.

[Vidhya Ramalingam]

We set out.... The evidence that led to that first project being focused on al Qaeda and Daesh inspired terrorism and far-right terrorism was largely because it came off the back of several worrying events in Canada and globally that had been inspired by Daesh and al Qaeda.

When we first ran that version of Canadian redirect, we found that the vast majority of searches for extremist content in Canada were for far-right extremist content as opposed to al Qaeda and Daesh related content, but that's not the only—

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you.

I'm sorry to interrupt, but my time is limited.

[Vidhya Ramalingam]

Sure.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

What I guess I'm trying to get at is that there is a reason that far-right extremism and violence is a subject of focus right now. It is manifesting itself physically around the world in many violent acts. Can you expand on that, please?

[Vidhya Ramalingam]

Yes, absolutely.

My career for the last 10 years has been focused on working with governments to reprioritize their prevention funding specifically to take into account the rising threat coming from the far right. This is not a problem that affects only Canada. We only need to look south of the border to the United States to see the clearest-cut evidence of this. In the last several years, the level of attacks coming from violent far-right actors has increased substantially in the United States, as well as across the globe. We would strongly recommend that the Canadian government, as well as global governments, invest in prevention proportionately based on what the data tells us around the growth of far-right terrorism.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you for that.

With the January 6 Capitol attack specifically, there was evidence that U.S. federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies knew about the potential violence as early as November 2021. Here in Canada, before the illegal occupation of our capital city and the many examples of violence that came from that, reported by our police agencies, there was evidence that the occupation was coming in early January. We need to learn lessons from our past so we don't repeat the same mistakes in the future.

Do you have any specific recommendations using those two specific examples of what we really need to be on the lookout for before this manifests itself in a very violent and physical way?

[Vidhya Ramalingam]

Yes, absolutely.

We are in a moment of prolonged crisis. Domestic extremist movements, IMVE movements across the ideological spectrum, thrive on moments of crisis, and they basically use these moments to turn anxiety and fear in society into an opportunity for them to grow. That is what we saw on January 6 in America. We saw extremists grasping onto the insecurity and anxiety following the U.S. presidential election, and that's what we saw with the convoys in Canada. We saw extremist groups taking advantage of social polarization and using that moment to manipulate and to grow in Canada.

We need to be a bit more front-footed and looking ahead at the crises on the horizon. We need to ensure that our prevention programming is equipped to pre-empt those crises so we're not just reactive and dealing with violence after the fact, but we're pre-emptively going out to individuals who may be at risk in our community and working with them to ensure they know violence isn't the way.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Ms. Ramalingam, in the United States, of course, there is a very real attempt of revisionist history of what happened on January 6. I see the same narratives playing out here in Canada, a different storyline compared to what actually happened. How, in your opinion, do we best fight these revisionist histories?

[Vidhya Ramalingam]

This is a moment where we're seeing a very worrying blending and metastasization of disinformation narratives and violent extremist narratives. Some of these narratives have been pushed heavily by violent extremist groups over the last several years, and then we're now starting to see the mass movement of disinformation and conspiracy theory narratives.

To get in front of that, we need to do work not only with the people who are pushing these narratives, but with the wider community that is encountering them online. We need to build their digital literacy and their ability to critically consume media when they come across it online. For that, I would recommend that the Canadian government be thinking about much larger-scale programs to build critical media consumption skills across the entire population.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you.

Very quickly, my last minute goes to Mr. Hadley. You said that designation is a critical part of removal; however, what do we do about followers, like former members of Proud Boys who are still using platforms to share content? It may not be “terrorist”, but it still qualifies as violent extremist messaging. I'm worried that we're playing this game of whack-a-mole. How do we effectively deal with that and go beyond relying on just designating groups?

[Adam Hadley]

Certainly, designation is a blunt instrument. What we would recommend is the reform of the designation process. We recognize that legal processes do take a while and require resourcing; however, in many jurisdictions, there is—

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

I'm sorry. You have just 10 seconds, please.

[Adam Hadley]

—very limited focus on the designation processes, so we would recommend revisiting those processes so that can be done more quickly and more accurately so it is appropriate for the Internet era.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you very much.

We move into our second round of questions. We might be able to get almost all of it in. We'll see how disciplined everybody can be.

Mr. Shipley, I will start with you with a five-minute slot.

Go ahead whenever you're ready, sir.

[Doug Shipley, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We'll try to be disciplined.

I'd first like to start off with Ms. Ramalingam. I was looking at a brief description of what your organization focuses on, and the analysis of gender-based violence caught my eye. We've heard from other witnesses in this committee that genders participate differently with extremist groups. Could you expand on whether this is true? Does it depend on what type of extremist group we're talking about?

[Vidhya Ramalingam]

Thank you for your question.

Whenever I talk about gender, I think it's really important for us not to go in with assumptions. I tend to hear, and I've often heard across the policy spectrum internationally, this notion that only men are really getting involved here and not women. I do want to say here that we have evidence to show the counter. Globally, in fact, across the United States, Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, we tend to find that 25% of the audience engaging with right-wing extremist content is actually women, people who self-identify as being women. That's not to diminish the fact that we do tend to find that on average 75% of the folks who are engaging with this content online are men.

In addition to that, we need to recognize the real intersections between the misogynistic violent movements—I mentioned violent incels—and far-right extremism communities. We've also seen violent misogyny intersect with other forms of extremism, including al Qaeda and Daesh inspired extremism and across the ideological spectrum.

I would encourage us to really look at the data here as we're designing prevention mechanisms but to recognize the gender-specific interventions that are required.

[Doug Shipley, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you for that.

I'd like to go back to your opening remarks. You're going to have to excuse me for these comments, because I am really out of my element. I don't spend a lot of time on the Internet. I don't search a lot of things, so I need some clarification.

You talked about 170,000 searches for IMVE. Can you explain what that means, please? More specifically, what could some of the searches perhaps entail?