Front Burner - BONUS: First ever charge against ‘incel’ terrorism

Episode Date: May 30, 2020

For the first time, police are treating an alleged incel-inspired killing as an act of terror. In February, a 17-year-old male was charged with murder and attempted murder in the broad daylight slaying of a woman at a North Toronto massage parlour. Last week, those charges were updated to terror charges. Today on Front Burner, former CSIS analyst Jessica Davis and University of Calgary law professor Michael Nesbitt on the significance of these new charges, what message they send, and what the potential consequences may be.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, it's Pia. So it's been a busy couple of weeks here in the news, lots going on, and that's on top of the ongoing pandemic. Last week, we made an episode that we didn't get to run when the news broke. That news was about the decision to lay incel-related terrorism charges in connection with the Toronto area killing.

We thought you might still want to hear that episode, so here it is as a Saturday bonus show. Hi, I'm Pia Chattopadhyay. The crime was tragic, but went largely unnoticed by the public when it happened back in late February. A broad daylight killing at a North Toronto massage parlour. One woman, 24-year-old Ashley Arzaga, was pronounced dead on the scene, and two others suffered stab wounds. At the time, a 17-year-old was charged with murder and attempted murder. But a number of days ago, those charges were updated to now be treated as acts of terrorism, incel terrorism.

Today, I'm talking to former CSIS analyst Jessica Davis and University of Calgary law professor Michael Nesbitt about what these new charges mean and their potential consequences. This is FrontBurner. Jessica and Michael, thank you for being here. Thank you for having us. Jessica and Michael, thank you for being here. Thank you for having us. Jessica, I described it a bit off the top there, and I know we're still early days in terms of the investigation, but what do we actually know about this crime at this point?

We don't know much about the crime other than really what you described. What we do know a little bit more about is the ideology behind the crime. So in terms of what actually happened, it does seem to be a stabbing attack. So, you know, if we're talking about what things look like from a terrorism perspective, that's very much in the wheelhouse of terrorist groups right now. It's a common tactic. The ideology, though, is the incel ideology, and that's something that's new and different. And it's one of the first times in Canadian history that we've seen a charge related to something that's not related to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. Part of the reason we also know so little, I assume, is like, for example, we don't know the accused's name, because he's a minor, he's 17 years old. So that's part of what

is making us not know at least who the accused is at this point, because we would know that if he was charged as an adult, right? That's exactly it. And so you said the word incel, police are connecting the accused to incels. For people who don't know what that is, it stands for involuntary celibates. We did a whole episode about this online subculture on FrontBurner last year, and I'm going to make sure we get that up on our Twitter feed. But Jessica, just give us a quick refresher on who these people are. So incels are a group of people, primarily men, that exist in group form online. So they communicate through online forums. And they really have as their core grievances, issues with feminism, with women having equal rights. They speak in terms of things like the incel uprising, the incel rebellion, and have a lot of grievances that

also relate to their perceived low social status. So while a lot of places will talk about this as being really driven by sex, and that is certainly a component, there are broader issues here within sort of the movement and their perceived lack of social status in the world. Fair to say women haters? Very fair to say. So they're known for their hatred of women, their extreme misogynist content, advocating violence against women. And there's also oftentimes a racial undertone to that as well, or overtone, really. So I call this an online subculture. And a lot of this stuff does live online. This is where they chat with one another, as many people who are involved in

various kinds of movements and or terrorist groups do communicate online. But we've seen some real life violence carried out by people who identifies as incels, right? Exactly. So we've seen somewhere around 50 people who have lost their lives in incel and incel-related attacks. Now, some researchers have drawn parallels all the way back to the Montreal massacre. Police have now confirmed 14 students dead, all women. Another dozen people were hurt, caught in a rampage that witnesses called a human hunt with the gunman yelling, I want women. More contemporary examples would be, you know, the Elliot Rodger attack. After two gun battles with police and a chase, it was all over. Seven people were dead,

including the gunman, seven others injured. Tonight, investigators are pouring over videos Rodger posted online. This one just a day before the shooting, in which he complains about being rejected by girls and warning that the time for revenge had come. Tomorrow is the day of retribution. Roger's family knew. And then also the Alec Manassian attack that occurred in Toronto back in 2018. This posting, apparently from Manassian, says the incel rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys. These are all individuals who identified strongly with the incel subculture and were closely tied to it. In other cases, we've seen people whose motive maybe is a little bit more questionable, but had ties or linkages into the community. So the definitions are a little bit

murky at this point, but we think that about 50 people have been killed as part of this violence, and not just women. Men have also been victims of this type of violence. Michael, have we ever seen a charge like this in Canada, a terrorism charge related to incels? No, we've seen almost 60 terrorism charges to date in Canada since our offenses came into effect after 9-11, so in December 2001. Of those, all but one have been ISIS or al-Qaeda related, and the other one was an individual who was financing the LTTE. From his point of view, the money was to help provide food and medicine to Tamils in Sri Lanka, caught in a vicious civil war with the government. RCMP investigators, though, found a car filled with pledge forms, receipts, CDs, and DVDs containing Tamil tiger propaganda,

proof some of the money raised would end up in the hands of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the LTTE, a group on Canada's list of banned terrorist organizations. Okay, so back up here a bit, Michael, and let's dig into the law in our country. What does a terrorism charge actually mean in Canada? What meets the bar for that charge to be laid? Yeah, it's a good and unfortunately complex question because we don't have a crime of terrorism. What we have is a number of different terrorism offenses. What they'll have to prove is that in addition to the crime, so the murder and attempted murder in this case, they will have to

prove that that crime was committed for a political purpose, that it had a particular effect. The effect is we're only talking about very serious violent crimes, so serious property damage, threats to life or killings in this case. And then you have to prove an ideological motive. And that's the one where I think a lot of legal commentators will be following closely, because we don't know exactly what the ideological motive means. We haven't defined it in our criminal court, and the court cases haven't said precisely what an ideological motive is and how it differs from that political purpose that I discussed, which is to send a message or bring about social change. So it's going to be interesting, but it also means that this case is going to be more difficult for

the prosecution to prove, right? Because we have all these added layers of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And a lot of them are frankly about the individual's thoughts and beliefs. Just help me understand that more, Jessica. Like, why do you see, or why do others, and clearly the prosecutors, prosecution and police, see incels as being linked to some kind of terrorism? So it's really about using violence to achieve some sort of objective and to terrorize people. to terrorize people. In the case of incel, that's really about protesting their lack of social status, about intimidating women, about killing women. And so the important thing here is that it's the move from really ideology to violence. So there's a lot of people who hold really extreme views about a lot of different things across this country and around the world. That's not really terrorism. We might not find those views helpful, but it's only when they really start to take action on that and move into that violent space that it becomes terrorism.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Okay, but here's where I'm at on this. When I think of terrorist groups, and I'm just a layperson journalist, so I don't pretend to have the legal expertise or the intelligence expertise. But when I think of terrorist groups, I think of, you know, ISIS, it has a structure, it has financing,

it has a clear political vision, as vile as that is, for what they want an Islamic state to look like. These guys viciously hate women. again does does does that meet our bar yeah and so i think the parallel that we can draw that can be helpful to help explain this as as terrorism is to move away from the idea of a group so if we think about it more like a movement then we can draw an interesting parallel with for instance the foreign fighter movement that was happening sort of 2013 to 2016 in this country, where individuals wanted to travel to join the Islamic State. They may have never met anyone who was actually in the Islamic State. They were talking to people online, they were sharing ideas, sharing ideology, and then they wanted to take action on

those ideas. And the same type of dynamic is happening here. There are people who are meeting online. They may never talk to one another in real life, but they're part of a broader movement that can be considered terrorism just because of some of the violence that it disposes, the intense hatred, and really a little bit of that end state. Again, we're kind of working in a vacuum here because so little information is known at this point.

But Michael, what would be the advantage to laying a terrorism charge? Maybe advantage is the wrong word, but I'm going to use it. Advantage to laying a terrorism charge, maybe advantage is the wrong word, but I'm going to use it. Advantage to laying a terrorism charge or charges versus a murder charge, which in Canada, if it's first or second degree, for an adult is life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 or 10 years, depending on what severity it is. And for youth, I believe it's 10 years in prison. So what's the advantage of a terrorism charge here? The individual isn't going to get a longer sentence because of these additional terrorism charges. So what, in effect, you're doing is you're laying charges that are going to be more difficult to prove, that are going to complicate the trial, that are going to slow things down, that are going to cost more.

And in the end, the individual is unlikely to have a sentence that's different than what it would be if you just went ahead with the murder and the attempted murder. Having said that, the law is just not about punishment, right? It's about denunciation. It's about the recognition that activities amount to wrongdoing, in this case terrorist wrongdoing, and so it has a communicative function. in this case, terrorist wrongdoing. And so it has a communicative function. Just to echo Mike's point, I think it's really important that we understand this charge as a signaling, a signaling from the RCMP and, you know, broader,

part of the broader Canadian government signaling that far and extreme right groups and INCEL, which sort of loosely fits into that space, can and are being considered as terrorist groups and movements. And to me, that's the really important thing about this charge. It's not about punishing the individual more. It's about signaling to the Canadian people that this is terrorism. So, Jessica, I want you to put your investigative intelligence services hat back on for a sec in the sense that, you know, again, layperson here asking a layperson question. But I think of murder as being investigated by police, but terrorism investigated by other authorities and intelligence services. So might this terrorism label in this case change how these online subcultures are

investigated going forward? Or are we already there? Yeah, we're already there. CES has put out its report and spoke quite explicitly about incel and gender-based violence in that report. But that's not the first time the government of Canada has talked about that. I think it was the 2018 terrorism threat report put out by Public Safety. They've specifically mentioned incel as well. So this is just a continuation of that trend. But you're absolutely right in the sense that calling something terrorism changes how it gets investigated. that calling something terrorism changes how it gets investigated.

So when it rises to the level of terrorism, that means that our national security agencies can get involved. That means that CISA's Canadian Security Intelligence Service can conduct intrusive surveillance, both physically and digitally. It can leverage a host of other capabilities across the country, like financial intelligence from FinTrack, communications from communication security establishment, and the RCMP can do similar things, have similar powers. So it really helps us get in front of what people may be planning to do. So I want to play you another perspective on this. This is Heidi Matthews, who is the

co-director of the Nathanson Center on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security at Osgoode Law School. The more kinds of activity get labeled terrorism, the more the state gets to control our lives in some sense, right? And that's something that, you know, liberals or people on the left have traditionally been very skeptical of and they've been skeptical of it with respect to terrorism because of the abuses that we saw in Canada but also in the United States and elsewhere in the wake of 9-11 right so we shouldn't be so quick to think that uh charging somebody with terrorism because they were motivated by incel ideology is a win for women when it increases a whole host of invasive state activity that we are critical of in other contexts. Jessica, I want to ask both of you, but Jessica, what do you make of the point she's making there? I understand the point that she's making, but I also don't see a lot of alternatives. So we have international obligations to criminalize terrorism. We've signed a number

of treaties to that effect. It is the best tool that we have in our toolkit to investigate this type of violence. I would agree that we've seen excesses. There have been changes to law that have not been rolled back since 9-11. A lot of very intrusive mechanisms have come into play that have been accepted by the Canadian public. We can have a long debate about whether or not that's something that we should have still in place. But I think fundamentally for me, this is about preventing violence, preventing terrorism. If we don't do this, I'm concerned that the police will not have the resources to really save lives, frankly. If you don't mind, I'd like to disentangle two conversations that I think are coming up. And unfortunately, they're coming up in the context of this case, where they haven't, or at least we who deal with this regularly, haven't seen

these conversations publicly to the same extent with past offenses. And so one of the conversations is, you know, should you be happy when terrorism charges are laid full stop? And there has always been debate about that, right? Because to some extent, terrorism brings in thought crimes, right? It's a crime. Plus, on top of that, you had a political idea and an ideological idea and so on. And so some people won't want terrorism offenses full stop, and then if we have them, we'll want them expanded. That's fine. That's a long debate we've had in Canada. It's a place when we brought the terrorism offenses in, in the first place. The flip side of that is we should have that discussion every time every single person is charged with terrorism,

and it shouldn't just be limited to happening when an incel individual is charged with terrorism. And that's where I get back to, as long as you take as a given, and maybe you shouldn't, but as long as you take as a given that we have terrorism offenses, it's really important that they're applied fairly and equally. And this is an instance where it looks like we are finally starting to apply them fairly and equally. And I think that's particularly important in the Canadian context, because as we said from the start, basically, our terrorism laws have applied to ISIS or al-Qaeda affiliated extremism, ISIS or al-Qaeda affiliated extremism, which looks like after a period of 20 years and almost 60 charges, like we're treating one community as potential growers of terrorism and not others. And then that's exacerbated when you see someone go into a mosque and kill six individuals with

right-wing ideology. Just after the start of evening prayers at the Grand Mosque, an armed masked man entered an open fire. Six people were killed, many more were injured. And I think we have to be honest about this. It's a white male with a far-right ideology, and we're not charging it. This crime allegedly speaks to a problem we have in society, and that's violence against women in Canada. Jessica, do you think this is going to have an impact on how we think about that very big issue in our country? I certainly hope so. So this has obviously sparked a lot of debates. I think one of the best things that can come out of this is for Canadians to understand the multitude of threats that emanate from the terrorism space, and one of them being violence against women.

The other interesting discussion, though, that's happening here is where we're drawing the line between incel violence and other forms of domestic violence and violence against women and femicide. Those lines are not always easy to draw. And I think that a renewed debate in this space is welcome, so that we can better address the frankly lacking tools and the lacking prioritization this issue has gotten over the last 20, 30 years longer, I'm sure. Thank you to both of you for helping me understand this more. All three of us and many others will be watching this all as it moves forward, and we'll see what comes of it as this moves through the legal system. Thank you. Thank you so much. That's all for this Saturday bonus episode. We'll talk to you again Monday.