Quebec City's military-far right nexus

And the cultural institutions that enable it

One of the four arrested, dining at The Garrison Circle, the only British military club in North America. Bill C21 was a firearms bill. Apparently Lagacé is the problem! Grabbed from Lagacé’s Facebook page.

This week, the RCMP announced that it had made the largest weapons seizure related to terrorism in the history of Canada. Four men, all connected to the Canadian Armed Forces, were charged for their roles in organizing an anti-government milita.

Their weapons were first seized in January 2024. We don’t yet know what happened in the 1.5 years that passed.

The four all lived in and around Quebec City.

In Quebec City, the military’s presence can be felt everywhere. From regularily seeing military vehicles to seeing uniformed soldiers in stores or hospital emergency rooms (I recently listened to the life story of one young soldier in the eye emergency department who didn’t speak enough French to visit emerge on his own). Between the citadel and CFB Valcartier, as an Anglophone, it’s hard to not bump up against the millitary over the course of daily life.

In 2022, a report into the far right and the Canadian military found that the number of soldiers who were radicalizing into full blown fascists was on the rise. Just last week, a military group chat was exposed where members shared racist, misogynistic and hateful posts.

This radicalization feeds into the far right ecosystem in this city, and anywhere that the military has an outsized presence.

Just down the highway from CFB Valcartier, about 20 KMs south, is the Islamic Cultural Centre. There, in 2017, a gun enthusiast entered the mosque and murdered six men while they prayed. From when he was a teenager, he planned to do a mass shooting. Two months earlier, he was in a Ste-Foy mall with his guns, ready to kill people. But he changed his mind, until Justin Trudeau welcomed Syrian refugees to Canada and he decided that he would target the mosque.

The shooter was not connected to the military, though he surely had gone, at least once, to the sporting goods store Latulippe. Everyone goes to Latulippe (it is one of my favourite stores). And while it’s impossible that the shooter was ever serviced by Raphaël Lagacé, one of the men arrested for terror charges, they were in the same kind of universe: gun-loving, young men who were from this outpost of a city, and raised amid a non-stop barrage of anti-Other hatred spewed by politicians and radio hosts and TV stations and the newspapers.

Lagacé’s Facebook account said that he used to work at Latulippe (who knows if that’s true but that’s what it says) in the gun section. He was a gun activist and enthusiast (in addition to aiding terrorism, he has been accused of improperly storing 50 guns. Fifty. Guns.). The mosque shooter was a gun enthusiast too. Lagacé would have been a teenager at the time of that horrific tragedy.

As for what we know about the others: not much. Two of the men (Matthew Forbes and Marc-Aurèle Chabot) were corporals at the time of their arrests. The father of Simon Angers-Audet claims that Angers-Audet had a stroke from the COVID vaccine (he would have been 19 in 2020) and that this pushed him out of the military but he was motivated to return.

He also claims that the men were set up (“framé au maximum”).

From white supremacist house concerts in Quebec City’s outer suburbs, to a white supremacist fight club, from white supremacist street violence to the influence of white supremacist talking points on all of our media, from the white supremacy that grows within the military and is then spewed into the general culture of our city to the regular and credible death threats our mayor gets for being a tepid liberal, the fact that CAF-trained men were forming a far-right militia in Quebec City should surprise no one. Indeed, in the photos released by the RCMP, there is one where seven people appear. Who are the other three and why aren’t they also charged?

This case is again a reminder that the far right poses the greatest threat to the safety of the general public. Maybe these men were disciplined enough to not walk into a mosque and shoot people, but it’s this kind of culture that creates the conditions where someone may be convinced to do an act like this.

Anyone who is paying attention should know this. And yet, back in May when CSIS released a report that said that the biggest threat to Jews in Canada was the far right, CBC’s Elizabeth Thompson sought out comment from a man who insisted that, actually, the threat comes from Radical Islam (TM). Her article focused on Anti-semitism, and said this, from CSIS: "‘Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremists routinely weave antisemitic commentary into their narratives in order to inspire violence and recruit individuals,’ says the report. ‘These new adherents, in turn, use antisemitic commentary, often tailored to current events, in order to disseminate violent messaging.’” This is something that you can see within three seconds of searching around any far-right message board.

Professor Barbara Perry, who does watch this world very closely, explains, "It's not group-based violence that I think is a fear here — I think it is individual acts of violence, motivated and shaped by what they are consuming in those online spaces and that is very difficult to identify," as has been clear by the actions of Alexandre Bisonnette, Justin Bourque, Patrik Mathews, Corey Hurran or any of the truck convoy activists who were active members of the forces. Some of these men were more lone wolves than others but ultimately, they weren’t in an apparent organized milita, unlike the four arrested this week.

Indeed, white men have murdered more people in the name of far right extremism than any other subset in Canadian society.

And still the CBC has to make sure that Canadians are more afraid of brown people than white. In the same article, for some reason that I cannot make journalistic sense of, Thompson writes,

Phil Gurski, president of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting and a former CSIS analyst, said he thinks the greater threat of violent extremism comes from Islamist groups.

"Over the past 10 years the government has under-represented the threat from Islamist groups and over-represented the threat from far-right groups which they call IMVE [aka far right activists]," he said.

Gurski said there have been several arrests of Islamist-inspired groups or individuals planning attacks in Canada.

"We've had virtually no arrests on the far right," he said.

This is objectively untrue and so I made a complaint to the Ombudsman. He asked Nancy Waugh from Journalistic Standards to respond. She summarized the article for me, and argued, “You are well within your right to disagree with [Gurski’s] opinion, which comes from his experience in the security sphere, but I think it is important to point out he is not “blaming Muslims,” he is talking about Islamist groups that turn to violence to achieve their aims.”

(A very similar comment to Katy Latulippe, at one point leader of the moderate far right Quebec City group Soldiers of Odin: “On n’est pas anti-islam, on est anti-islam radical.” From back in 2018.)

Gurski’s real crime is trying to launder the reputation of white extremists in the virtual pages of the public broadcaster. And that broadcaster defends it.

Now, just a few months after the CBC wrote about the CSIS report, we see clearly an example that CSIS no-doubt was aware of while it prepared its report.

I’ve always likened the threat of the far right in this city to a runaway train. Everyone wrings their hands to say that we must stop the train, but nothing ever stops it. People say that maybe we should find a break, but the break is too complicated to engage. Maybe if we throw stuff at it, the train will stop. But it never does. And just as there are people throwing things at the train, there are also people who are helping it to accelerate.

The problem is that this train is enabled by a track that has already been built, and to remove the track or block the train would cause too many problems. Not only are we never going to get rid of extremism in the military, extremism is the reason that the military exists. It is a force that does and has always use violence to maintain white supremacy. Of course it will be a hotbed of extremism in an era of austerity, a housing crisis, a food security crises and exetential threats posed by climate change.

Add to that the fact that the federal Liberals want to triple military spending while cutting public funds by 30% and you have bucketloads of gasoline being poured onto a raging fire.

And what’s worse, our institutions, from the CBC to politicians, from local trash radio to schooling — none of them are equipped to stop the train. They can’t even keep their eye on the train as it hurtles towards the town. One story of a young person who is brown doing what looks like terrorism is enough to get them to all look away. White supremacy is the linking thread thoughout and until we seriously tackle it, this threat will only continue to grow.