OTTAWA | Violent and armed far-right groups well established in Canada and Quebec took part in the assault on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday, leading experts to fear that such violence is occurring here.
The III%, an anti-Islam militia with a strong presence in Quebec and the Proud Boys, a small group founded by the Canadian Gavin McInnes, were at the forefront of the insurgency and visible in several images.
During the election campaign, Donald Trump called on the Proud Boys, who glorify guns and freedom of expression in particular, to stand ready for the fight if the elections do not turn out in his favor.
Terrorist
For New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh, Ottawa must designate the Proud Boys as a terrorist organization in order to prevent it from gaining further influence.
For now, only one far-right Canadian organization is on this blacklist.
“It is more urgent than ever that the government immediately ban and dismantle all hate organizations operating in Canada,” he said Thursday.
According to him, Canada is not immune to manifestations of violence and hatred similar to those which took place in Washington.
The founder of the Cultural Action Party of Canada, a far-right movement in Vancouver, took advantage of Wednesday’s violence to threaten Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on a social network.
“Will chaos in Washington be replicated in Canada when Trudeau becomes prime minister for a third term online,” asked Brad Salzberg. He’ll be lucky if he gets through without serious damage. “
The pandemic effect
David Morin, of the UNESCO Chair in the Prevention of Radicalization and Violent Extremism at the University of Sherbrooke, believes that “it would be wrong to believe that we are immune, as shown, for example, by the rise of conspiratorial thinking in the past. pandemic ”.
“I don’t think we would see violence here on the scale that we saw in Washington, but there is growing tension and the potential for similar violence on a smaller scale,” said Barbara Perry, of the Center on Hate, Prejudice and Extremism at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
The criminologist adds that the pandemic increases the risk of an act by extremists. They could, for example, attack the provincial authorities, because they believe that they threaten their rights and freedoms by imposing containment measures.
This is moreover an argument on which the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, Maxime Bernier, “a wannabe Donald Trump ”according to Mme Perry.
The Quebecer, however, does not have sufficient popularity to motivate a mass movement like the Republican did, she emphasizes.