The latest episode in the Conservative Party of Canada leadership race is particularly surreal. Pierre Poilievre, well ahead in voting intentions, shook hands with a supporter last weekend at a campaign event. The supporter in question turned out to be Jeremy Mackenzie, founder of the Diagolon — a man and group associated with “violent extremism” by the Integrated Center for Terrorism Assessment (CIET), the federal agency tasked with tracking threats to national security.
We understand that in a walkabout, a politician does not necessarily know the identity of all the people he shakes hands with. But since then, the identity of the character has become public. Conservative leadership candidate Jean Charest and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh have both asked Pierre Poilievre to report the individual. For now, it’s radio silence on Poilievre’s side. And this silence does not seem to particularly affect the candidate’s campaign.
Even a few years ago, the incident would have seemed surreal to anyone who follows politics from near or far. We note, however, that the leader of the race for the Conservative Party can now shake hands with a violent extremist monitored by Canadian anti-terrorism authorities, calmly, without making waves. After all, Mr. Poilievre and several of his fellow MPs also had no problem showing up with the so-called “freedom convoy” in Ottawa last February.
Yet CIET also identified the convoy as an important recruiting and networking “opportunity” for several violent extremist movements, according to a report made public last week through a Freedom of Information request. This does not mean that all participants in the convoy belonged to violent extremist groups, of course. Rather, it is said that their presence was significant enough, particularly among the organizers, to make it very problematic, even dangerous, for elected officials to associate themselves with them.
This recruitment and this networking, and by extension therefore, this growth of violent groups associated with the extreme right since last February, have become palpable. Just two weeks ago, QAnon supporters attacked police officers in Peterborough, Ontario, imagining they were carrying out their “citizen’s arrest”. And several journalists – women, especially racialized ones – have been the subject of a targeted hate campaign for several months.
Emails, written on a similar model, take up the hateful vocabulary and theories of far-right groups, while punctuating them with rape and death threats. Given the gravity of the situation, the Toronto StarGlobal News, the Hill Times and the Canadian Association of Journalists even had to make a joint outing to denounce the situation and challenge the police services, which allegedly failed to treat several complaints received seriously enough.
So let’s sum up. Far-right activists, many of whom have been identified as terrorist threats, helped cripple the nation’s capital last winter. Since then, they have multiplied, and some of them attack not only elected officials, but also journalists, and even police officers.
Imagine for a moment that it is the leader of a terrorist group associated with Islamism who shakes hands with Pierre Poilievre, or who sends death and rape threats to journalists. Do you think the impact on the Conservative Party leadership race would be the same? Do you think that the seriousness of the threats received would be trivialized so much? Let’s imagine that an Aboriginal group decides to carry out a “citizen arrest” of a police force. Would the news be treated as a little summer political news routine?
To ask the question, is to answer it. The trivialization of the threats posed by the extreme right in Canada has already been denounced for several years by experts in the field. And of course, this rise in hatred not only affects public figures, but ordinary people as well. Between 2019 and 2021, police-reported hate crimes increased by 72%, according to Statistics Canada compilations. Again, imagine a 72% increase in any other type of crime in Canada over a two-year period. Everyone would talk about it.
Often, when the threat comes from the extreme right, the police and media analysis focuses on “isolated incidents”, “lone wolves”. The movement is therefore there, in front of us, and it is growing. But we still struggle to see it as a movement. Each complaint of threat of death or rape, for example, will be treated separately – if it is even treated.
We are most often careful not to look into the networks to which the individual who pours out his hatred belongs. To stop trivializing the phenomenon, we should finally understand that, even when we are dealing with a man alone behind his keyboard, this man belongs to a very specific social context.