Public Security Minister Invoice Blair introduced as we speak that the federal authorities will designate 13 teams as terrorist entities, including some white nationalist and neo-Nazi teams to an inventory already populated with militant Islamist organizations.
The federal authorities will now classify the Proud Boys (a neo-fascist group with chapters in Canada and the U.S.), the Atomwaffen Division, AWD (a gaggle that requires acts of violence in opposition to racial, non secular and ethnic teams), and the Base (one other neo-Nazi group that advocates for violence to incite a race struggle), as terrorist entities beneath the Felony Code.
The federal government considers these three teams, together with one other new addition, the Russian Imperial Motion (a Russian paramilitary group with ties to neo-Nazi teams worldwide), as “ideologically motivated violent extremists.”
The Canadian Safety Intelligence Service (CSIS) defines the time period as extremism pushed by a spread of grievances and concepts from throughout the normal ideological spectrum.
“Irrespective of the ideological motivation, they’re all hateful, illiberal and, as we have seen, they are often extremely harmful,” Blair stated Wednesday, including that he hopes increasing the terrorist listing will ship a message to teams intent on sowing division and hate and inflicting hurt, that their actions won’t be tolerated by regulation enforcement.
“Their violent actions and rhetoric are fuelled by white supremacy, anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia and misogyny, and sadly, typically together of the entire above. On a number of completely different events we now have seen the tragic outcomes that such a extremism can convey to Canadian soil, Blair stated referencing the 2017 Quebec Metropolis mosque assault and the 2018 Toronto van assault.
A gaggle is added to the terrorist listing if Canada’s safety and intelligence businesses, after an “extraordinarily rigorous” probe, discover “affordable grounds to consider that an entity has knowingly participated in or facilitated a terrorist exercise,” the federal government stated in asserting the brand new designations.
It’s not essentially against the law to be a member of those teams, however designating a company as a terrorist entity can have severe legal and monetary penalties.
Banks can now freeze property and police can cost anybody who financially or materially helps such a gaggle.
Below part 83 of the Felony Code, it’s an indictable offence to “accumulate property,” “present or invite an individual to supply, or make out there property or monetary or different associated companies,” to a terrorist entity.
Sarah Teich, a senior fellow on the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and a counter-terrorism researcher, stated the designation is “an actual, significant concrete transfer” that sends a transparent sign Canada is taking right-wing extremism critically.
“It makes it a lot, a lot tougher for these teams to function in any significant method in Canada. Canadians can now not work together with them in any substantial method, and in the event that they do, they might face a legal offence,” she stated in an interview.
For instance, shopping for the group’s paraphernalia or paying membership dues may lead to a jail time period of as much as 10 years, she stated.
The Proud Boys was fashioned in 2016 by Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, a Canadian. The group of self-described “Western chauvinists” has a historical past of road violence, together with in opposition to Black Lives Matter demonstrators and Indigenous protesters.
Blair stated the Proud Boys “completely” pose an imminent safety menace to Canada.
“It’s deeply regarding. There’s been an escalation, not solely in rhetoric, however safety and planning,” he stated. “Countering this group has grow to be an essential precedence for the federal government of Canada.”
WATCH: Invoice Blair says the Proud Boys are amongst 13 new additions to Canada’s terrorist listing:
Canada is the primary nation to designate the all-male group as a terrorist entity akin to the Taliban, the Worldwide Sikh Youth Federation and dozens of different harmful teams.
Final month MPs voted unanimously to name on the federal government so as to add them to the phobia listing following the storming of Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.
Proud Boys have been beneath watch
A number of media stories have linked Proud Boys members to those that stormed Capitol Hill after a speech by then-U.S. president Donald Trump on Jan. 6. A self-described organizer for the Proud Boys has been arrested for collaborating within the siege.
A safety official, talking on background, stated the Proud Boys have been beneath evaluation for a while and the Jan. 6 assault “wasn’t the one issue and it wasn’t the driving issue” in designating the group as a terrorist entity.
“It is a group that we have been as a neighborhood for some time,” the official stated.
The official stated the Commons movement, pushed by NDP Chief Jagmeet Singh, was additionally not a motivating think about designating the Proud Boys as terrorists. There was “no political motivation in any respect,” the official stated, including Canada’s nationwide safety businesses alone decide which teams ought to be legally branded with this terrorist label.
Singh known as the terrorist designation “the appropriate factor to do,” and urged the federal government to go even additional and transfer to dismantle all white supremacist and excessive far-right teams that pose a menace to Canada’s safety.
“We have to construct a rustic the place everybody looks like they belong. These hateful teams don’t have any place in our nation,” he stated.
The Atomwaffen Division, which is thought in some circles because the Nationwide Socialist Order, has beforehand held coaching “hate camps,” the place members obtain weapons and hand-to-hand fight coaching. The group’s members have additionally carried out violent acts at public rallies, together with the August 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Va.
The Base, a largely U.S.-based group which advocates for the creation of a white ethno-state, has educated members on lone-wolf terror assaults, bomb-making, counter-surveillance and guerilla warfare, officers stated. Members of the group carried out assaults at a January 2020 rally in Virginia.
Requested why different teams, like Ku Klux Klan and the Three Percenters, an anti-government militia motion, weren’t added to the listing, an official stated they haven’t but met the federal government’s threshold for a terrorist designation.
Past the neo-Nazi teams, the federal government has expanded the listing of ISIS and al-Qaeda associates which might be thought-about terrorist teams, together with ISIS chapters in Bangladesh and East Asia. The federal government has additionally listed the Hizbul Mujahideen, a militant group that wishes to unite the Indian and Pakistan-administered components of Kashmir.
The total listing of 13 new terrorist entities:
- Atomwaffen Division
- The Base
- The Proud Boys
- Russian Imperial Motion
- Three Al-Qaeda associates: Jama’at Nusrat Al-Islam Wal-Muslimin, Entrance de Libération du Macina, and Ansar Dine
- 5 ISIS associates: Islamic State West Africa Province, Islamic State within the Higher Sahara, Islamic State in Libya, Islamic State East Asia, and Islamic State – Bangladesh
- Hizbul Mujahideen
