Thank you, Chair and members of the committee.
My name is Vidhya Ramalingam. Eleven years ago, when a far-right terrorist murdered 77 people in Norway, I led the EU's first intergovernmental initiative on far-right terrorism. It's in that role that I first started working with Public Safety Canada and saw first-hand the resilience and strength of Canadian practitioners working to ensure that no more Canadians take a violent path.
I now lead Moonshot, an organization working with the governments of Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia and other global partners to build online prevention capabilities fit for the challenges of the 21st century.
The threat posed by IMVE actors and groups is undoubtedly growing more sophisticated both online and off. Moonshot started studying Canadian engagement with this content on search engines in February 2019. In little over a year, we tracked over 170,000 individual searches for IMVE content across Canada. As Canadians spent more time online as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, the engagement increased. Searches for far-right content increased 19% weekly during lockdown measures. In Ottawa we tracked a 35% increase after Ontario's state of emergency was declared.
We have seen greater engagement with conspiracy theories. Over a year we tracked over 25,000 searches across Canada for white supremacist conspiracy theories such as the Kalergi plan, the great replacement and white genocide.
In partnership with Public Safety Canada, we also produced the first systematic online study of the Canadian violent incel community online. The Canadian incel ecosystem is spread across both niche and mainstream platforms, including Twitter, YouTube, Telegram and Reddit. Canadian users on incel sites were 65% more likely than global users to post news stories about incels and were especially celebratory of incel violence that occurred in Canada.
However, we are not without tools to respond. Perhaps the greatest challenge for governments today is how to bring our prevention models into the 21st century. We have to intervene where extremist groups are seeking to recruit: online. In 2022, every prevention model needs a robust digital component. This must be delivered safely, ethically and responsibly, with user privacy at its heart.
Our recommendations for Canada are, first, strengthen pre-existing behavioural health and other wraparound services for prevention, specifically mental health support, community outreach as well as adjacent fields such as suicide prevention. Frontline practitioners such as Équipe RAPS and CPN-PREV in Quebec, OPV in Alberta and Yorktown Family Services in Ontario are best positioned to intervene.
Our second recommendation is to adapt the entire suite of prevention services for online delivery. In a 2017 study, Moonshot found that only 29% of Canadian practitioners were using social media in their prevention work. We need to build the digital literacy and capacity to deliver their work online. There are an abundance of online tools and methodologies we can use. For example, from 2019 to 2020, we worked to ensure that every Canadian searching for extremist content online would be offered a safer alternative to terrorist content. We used advertising tools to safeguard approximately 155,000 violent, far-right searches and around 16,000 Daesh and al Qaeda related searches. The natural evolution of this work should see the use of these tools to connect Canadians with prevention services that can work with them to change their paths.
Finally, third, signpost terrorism prevention services such as hotlines, counselling and exit offers online. Evidence shows us that this works. Moonshot found audiences at risk of far-right extremism in the U.S. were 48% more likely than the general public to take up offers of psychosocial support services online. In the last year alone, Moonshot has channelled over 150 individuals at risk of violent extremism across the U.S. into text message counselling sessions via online engagement. Now we're working with the U.S. government to launch state-level models to off-ramp at risk Internet users into local support programs, starting with New York state.
Here in Canada, we need to signpost local services to Canadians engaging with extremist content online. To do this, local providers and networks like CPN-PREV need sustained investment to run interventions, extend their service hours and support the professional and mental well-being of staff. These organizations fill a critical gap in Canada's public safety infrastructure. The government should invest in these models and support efforts to take their interventions online, where their services are needed the most.
Thank you for your time today.