Four men, including two active members of the Canadian military, have been arrested and charged with planning to forcibly seize land near Quebec City in what the police described on Tuesday as an act of “ideologically motivated violent extremism.”
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said three of the men “took concrete actions to facilitate terrorist activity” and face terrorism charges. The authorities said they had seized a large stockpile of guns, explosives and ammunition from the group. Most, if not all, of those arms were stolen from military bases, the police said.
The fourth man faces a number of firearms and explosives charges.
The men charged with terrorism offenses were identified as Marc-Aurèle Chabot, 24, and Raphaël Lagacé, 25, both of Quebec City, and Simon Angers-Audet, 24, of Neuville, Quebec. Matthew Forbes, 33, of Pont-Rouge, Quebec, was charged with the explosives and weapons offenses.
They were all arrested on Tuesday morning.
While neither the police nor the Canadian Armed Forces would identify which of the suspects are active military members, the men are both stationed at a large military base northwest of Quebec City
In the statement, the police said that the men facing the terrorism charges had been “planning to create anti-government militia.”
Photos released by the Mounties show seven people wearing what appear to be Canadian military fatigues and brandishing or firing weapons during what the police described as “military-style training, as well as shooting, ambush, survival and navigation exercises.”
The group dates to 2021, when one of the men started a private Instagram group to recruit people to join an antigovernment uprising, said Staff Sgt. Camille Habel of the Mounties.
It was not a particularly sophisticated endeavor. The photos posted by the police on Tuesday, for example, came from the group’s social media account.
By 2023, the group had come under surveillance by the special national security team where Sergeant Habel is assigned. It includes members of Canadian intelligence service, prosecutors and law enforcement agencies.
“In terrorism charges, we need to prove there’s ideology,” Sergeant Habel said. “With these guys, that part — anti-government, anti-authority, building your own anti-government militia — that was pretty clear.”
She declined, however, to detail the men’s grievances. She also said that while other people participated in the group online and at camps, there was no evidence that they had broken any laws.
“It’s not a criminal offense to be on the Instagram or to follow them or any of that, as long as you’re not willing to use violence,” Sergeant Habel said. “There’s no evidence to show that they were willing to take it to the next level.”
In raids leading up to Tuesday’s arrests. the police in January 2024 seized 16 explosive devices, 83 firearms, about 11,000 rounds of ammunition, about 130 magazines, four pairs of night-vision goggles and other military equipment, the authorities said.
The material was recovered from homes, and had not been cached at military bases, Sergeant Habel said. Court documents cited by several Canadian news outlets suggest that some of the weapons and explosives had been stolen from a large base at Petawawa, Ontario.
Citing Canadian evidentiary rules, Sergeant Habel declined to identify the location of the land the group allegedly planned to seize or describe what it planned to do with it. She said there was no evidence of other terrorist plots by its members.
The Canadian Armed Forces also declined to identify which of its members had been arrested or disclose their status.
This is not the first time members of the Canadian armed forces have been linked with extremist groups, though a co-author of a recent study on right-wing extremism in the military, Amarnath Amarasingam of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, said that there was no good research on the extent of the problem.
Professor Amarasingam said that people with extremist views and an interest in using violence to advance them often join the military as a form of training. Others become radicalized when they are in the military or after they leave active service.
“There’s a lot of propaganda that basically says you can join the military, gain weapons experience and then get ready for the eventual race war or anti-government revolution that’s about to happen,” Professor Amarasingam said.
This group, he said, seemed to have taken things exceptionally far.
“It’s the largest weapons cache I’ve seen in a while in most of these groups,” he said.
Professor Amarasingam said that a desire to control land is a common theme among right-wing extremists in many parts of the world.
“All far-right movements basically have at their core this utopian vision of: We will take over this land and we will create a whites-only kind of society,” he said.
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times based in Ottawa. He covers politics, culture and the people of Canada and has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at [email protected].
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