Front Burner - The Canadian army's long history of extremism

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Last month, RCMP charged four people for their alleged involvement in a plot to forcibly take land north of Quebec city in what Mounties called an incident of "ideologically motivated violent extremism". Three of the men were denied bail last week.The accused, they charged, had planned to create an anti-government militia, but even more startling: two of the four people charged by RCMP are active members of the Canadian Armed Forces.While it's the first time an active member of the Canadian Armed Forces has faced terrorism-related charges, extremism in the military isn't new.Jonathan Montpetit, a senior Investigative Journalist with CBC News, chronicles the Forces' uneven track record on extremism, and how deeply this issue has infiltrated the ranks over the years.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Allie Jains, in for Jamie Plesson. Last month, the RCMP charged four people for their alleged involvement in a plot to forcibly take land north of Quebec City. Mounties called it ideologically motivated violent extremism. The accused they charge had planned. to create anti-government militia, taking part in military-style training, things like shooting, ambush, survival, and navigation drills. The men had stockpiled weapons, explosives, firearms, night vision goggles, 11,000 rounds of ammunition and other military equipment. What experts have said is the largest cache of weapons ever seized in any terrorism-related incident in Canadian history.

But even more startling, two of the four people charged by the RCMP are active members of the Canadian Armed Forces. Marco Relle Chabot, who's held for facilitating terrorist activity, and Corporal Matthew Forbes, held on a slew of weapons offenses. Last week, Chabot was denied bail. Forbes was granted conditional bail. While it's the first time an active member of the Canadian Armed Forces has faced terrorism-related charges, extremism in the military is nothing new. My colleague, a long-time friend of the show, Jonathan Montpeti, is here, and he's going to take us through the forces' uneven track record on extremism, and just how deeply it's infiltrated the ranks. Hi, John. Wonderful to talk to you. Hey, Ali, so good to be here.

So I want to talk to you a little bit more in depth about just how deep extremism goes in the Canadian Armed Forces. But first, I'm hoping we can just touch on the latest about this case in Quebec. When this story broke, we didn't really have much in the way of details. What more have we learned? So there's only so much that we can report because since the arrests, the court proceedings have been covered by a publication ban, which will likely remain in place up until the trial. But since the arrest, there is, however, been a fair bit of reporting by some of our colleagues here at CBC

and another media outlets in Quebec that kind of give us a better time. timeline of events that led up to the arrests. So we know the RCMP believes the suspects began their alleged plot as early as the summer of 2021. And now it's like the RCMP investigation didn't begin until 2023. We get in January, 2004, as part of the investigation, a big seizure of weapons. So all those weapons that you mentioned off the top alley, those were all seized back in January 2004. Police also alleging that they took part in scouting operations. Now, there is another photo

released by the RCMP as part of this investigation. It is a screenshot of an Instagram account. The RCMP saying at this point that the accused, one of them anyway, allegedly created this account to try to recruit members into this militia. The father of one of the suspects spoke to my colleague, Jela Bernstein. Philip Odé says his son and friends were just training to be better in the army, not to form a militia. He says his son, Simon Angierre, O'Day, wouldn't hurt a fly. And he mentioned that around that time, around 2024,

he felt like the house was under surveillance. Odez says he and his son knew they were being listened to, but it was still a shock when police busted through his door to arrest his son. So that like a full year and a half goes by before the RCMP actually proceeds with the arrests. And so as you kind of broke down, so three of the suspects faced terrorism charges, facilitating terrorism,

and then the other suspects only faces weapons charges. And that, he was granted bail, and the other three suspects will remain detained until the trial. Okay. I mean, you've been reporting on extremism for years now.

Like I said, something obviously notable about this case is that we haven't seen terrorism-related charges for an active member of the Canadian military before. But beyond that, what else struck you about the RCMP's description of this case? So I think they used two terms in their public comments about the case that I think are quite revealing. So the first term, ideologically motivated violent extremism.

So this is like a fairly recent term that law enforcement and intelligence agencies only started using, I would say like around 2019, 2020, at least in Canada. And they started using it kind of when it became clear that they had, been perhaps overly focus on religious extremism, so like Islamist-inspired violence, and they hadn't really been paying enough attention to what most of us would call right-wing extremism. The term, you know, is meant to describe recent trends in extremism research, whereby extremists seem to be combining different beliefs and grievances, kind of like in a grab-bag

mixture completely of their own making. So, like, whereas in the past, you know, extremists would kind of join a group and that group would have a defined ideology. It would have maybe a manifesto, a platform, stuff that it was seeking to accomplish. Now the ideology is less coherent. So that's, I think, like, one really important term that the RCMP used. I think the other one was that they described this plot as being by it. anti-government militia. More specifically, that they suspect they were, this militia was planning to take control of a plot of land by force. My colleagues here in CBC Montreal asked, ask the

RCMP, oh, so do you mean sovereign citizens? And the RCMP was very explicit. No, we don't mean sovereign citizens. And that kind of made experts think what they're actually probably dealing with is a type of accelerationism. And basically the goal of accelerationist groups are to kind of hasten the collapse of society to bring about some climactic event that will allow them to implement a new society be along racial lines or religious lines. We don't mean, we don't know exactly that part of what the RCMP suspects, but all signs do indicate that they do believe this is a type of accelerationism. So, as we've already been talking about cases of far-right extremism in the military are nothing new, the things that have become public, at least, have been happening for at least 30 years.

The first really big reckoning was during the Somalia affair in 1993. So just some context for our listeners, Somalia was in the middle of a famine and a civil war, and the Canadian Airborne Regiment was dispatched there on a U.N. backed peacekeeping mission. But there were several disturbing violent incidents that came to light, including the hours-long torture and killing of a 16-year-old Somali teenager named Shadane Arone. Private David Brocklebank, acquitted of charges in the death of Shadaynorone, the 16-year-old Somali who was killed while in Canadian custody. What's this operation called?

This operation here? Operation Snatched. Exactly. Operation Snash. Okay. In the background, a silent private Kyle Brown, now serving a five-year term for a Roan's death. The paratroopers involved took photos of the abuse. There were journalistic investigations, allegations of a cover-up.

Ultimately, the Kretchen government launched an inquiry. And so talk to me about what those investigations revealed, about the regiment itself. as time went on. So there were kind of like almost like a slow burn of revelations, both during the inquiry phase and just before. Videos surfaced of both what was happening in Somalia with the Airborne Regiment and initiation rights, initiation rights that showed a quite explicit racist behavior. And then during the inquiry itself, among the conclusions that the inquiry came to, was that

There was a history of kind of white supremacist, extremist behavior within the regiment, including they would commonly raise the Confederate flag on their base. And in Pettawawa, the swastika was displayed within the unit's headquarters, that the inquiry revealed that there were known white supremacists within the unit. Corporal Matt McKay, a self-confessed white supremacist who said he'd quit the neo-Nazi movement, at least two years before this video was taken. Corporal McKay, what do you think about the tour? I think it sucks, man.

We ain't come up yet. So, you know, it kind of was, I think, really the first public acknowledgement that there was kind of a more deep-seated problem of racism within the Canadian military. There was a lot of public outcry over this case. You know, a lot of talk from the military that they were taking this seriously. There was this well-publicized day where business as usual was completely paused so that CAF staff could scour these file cabinets and manila folders for any records that mentioned this affair. We found a few things I say Samoyana.

We don't expect to find anything in particular here. In the end, this is what it seemed to boil down to for all those who had to spend their day flipping through files. A lot of people look on this as kind of our way of... finally fighting back, if you wish, all these allegations that have been made on, on, you know, possible cover-ups or whatever that D&D might be doing. But I'm curious if that was accurate. Like, overall, you know, how transparent and cooperative were they? Like, how much accountability did they take?

So going back and reading the accounts of what happened during the inquiry, and I'm really struck by how tense the relations were between. the military and the commissioners who were who were leading the inquiry and there were oftentimes very confrontational testimonies you know whereby very senior officers of the military were testifying before the inquiry and then the commissioners were we're really grilling them and so there there really was a sense that the military wasn't being forthcoming in its testimony about what happened in Somalia what happened just before Somalia And in fact, among the things of the inquiry found, where that, you know, senior officers had lied to the inquiry, that the top military brass had altered documents before they were released publicly.

like if you talk about what the legacy of the Somalia scandal, the Somalia affair, the legacy was at least within the military and people involved in oversight of the military like at the Department of National Defense was that the military needed more professional conduct, that its officers weren't being properly trained. And so even though the inquiry itself did uncover this presence of extremism, that wasn't really the major. takeaway for the military when it came to institutional reforms. The big reforms out of Somalia were things like all officers need a university degree. We need to update our professional standards of conduct. It wasn't really we have a racism problem. It was more we have a leadership problem. Guess who just bundled their home and auto with Desjardin insurance?

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Off duty at the time, the Canadian forces members were relieved of their duties pending an investigation. Now, after a firm warning not to breach the Armed Forces Code of Conduct again, they are back. With the exception of one individual who has since left the Canadian Armed Forces, the four serving members are being returned to their operational units and regular duties. There was one reservist, Patrick Matthews, who was revealed to be a member of the neo-Nazi group of the base. He was released from service. He's now serving nine years in the U.S. for his role in a plot to start a race war. Matthews from Bosesure, Manitoba, had already pled guilty to four weapons charges related to his role in the white supremacist neo-Nazi group called The Base, which had planned to use their weapons to disrupt a gun rights rally in January of 2020.

In your reporting, you also mentioned this Islamophobic group in Quebec, Lamut, which has had a really significant following. And can you tell me a bit about that? Yeah, so I guess I tend to see Lamut as one of the first major alt-right group. and not just Quebec, but I think in Canada itself. And so, you know, this is back in 2015 prior to the 2016 American presidential election. And, you know, at this moment in time, the notion of a far-right discourse becoming normalized was still quite foreign to us, I think, just generally. But I think what happened, one of the things that happened in Quebec is you had this kind of long-waring debate in Quebec

over secularism that was already being used by more extremist elements in the province to kind of get across their points. And so then in 2015, you have Justin Trudeau announcing Canada is going to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees. And Lamet was formed by a group of veterans of the Canadian military, veterans of the Afghanistan mission in particular, who thought this was untenable. This was going to represent a huge threat to Quebec culture. And it really is, I think, one of the first far-right groups in Canada to attract a sizable membership. Now, the figures we have for the mid, they're based on a Facebook page, members of a Facebook page. So, you know, take that with a grain of salt. But nevertheless, this is a group that for a period of time did

managed to organize fairly sizable demonstrations of between 500,000 people, protesting immigration policies, kind of adopting a lot of the far-right positions that have become a lot more familiar to us. And so in this period, one thing that emerged was it was not only that Limit was not only being run by former members of the Canadian military, but according to reporting by another colleague of mine, Katisinae, there were upwards of 75 active members of the Canadian military who were taking part in the Facebook group. And so that, I think, is again, illustrative of the appeal that the far rate was having at the time that it was able to draw in people from different parts of society. I mean, what was the military's response to finding 75 active members

in this Facebook group? Like, that's not an insignificant number of people. So publicly their response was basically to an issue a warning to any serving member of the military saying being a member of this group was incompatible with the values of the Canadian military. And that continued membership could imperil their career that could risk disciplinary action. What we do know from access to information documents that I've seen recently is that very few, perhaps only a small fraction of that seven. actually did face any kind of disciplinary action. Now, whether that was because they all heeded the warning and left the group or because the military simply wasn't interested in pursuing disciplinary action, we don't know.

But we do know that basically very few individuals face any kind of repercussions for their involvement with the mood. stand out and we look at sort of broadly at this point, far-right nationalism, far-right extremism in the Canadian military. Do we have any sense of the scale of the issue now? So we have military numbers from kind of different studies that the military has done. So one number that the Department of National Offense has made public is that between 2013 and 2018, there were 51 members of the military who were identified as either being members or having taken part in a hate group or having been involved in some kind of hate incident, racist incident, incident of discrimination. And then more recently when I was doing reporting

on the story, the military kind of shared updated numbers. So they said that between 2020 and now that there have been 120 reports of military members promoting or displaying or displaying hate. And that's including 20 so far this year alone. We don't know how many of these incidents are founded. New data obtained by CBC News shows a resurgence of hateful conduct last year. The Defense Department figures reveal that since the military cracked down on hateful conduct in 2020, the number of incidents dropped year after year. then spiked again in 2024. Take out the magazine.

Most of the claims are of intimidation, threats, and involvement in hate propaganda. Just like to go back a step, when you're talking about the scope of the problem in the military, I think one of the things that researchers have tried to do and have struggled to come up with an answer, either positive or negative, is to ask, are there more incidents of hatred, more incidents of hate group membership in the military than there are in the general population. And simply a lot of researchers feel that they don't have enough evidence to be able to make that determination. And as a kind of a subset of that line of inquiry, you know, a lot of research point out, well, like, look, the military is part of society. It is a reflection of society.

So whatever is happening in society is also going to happen in the military. So if it's society large, you see an increase in far-right activity, which we have. You're also likely to see an increase of far-right activity in the military. The problem, though, I think, which leads people to be somewhat concerned, is that the military, while it's a subset of society, isn't a perfectly representative subset of society. Upwards of 70% of the Canadian military are white males. And so you have this high concentration of white males in the Canadian military. And when it comes to ideologically motivated extremism, we know from research that it takes. tends to be committed by white males.

And so there's kind of a demographic overlap that would explain why it would be possible that we would see more incidents of hate group membership or hate incidents in the military than we see it's society at large. So I want to talk some more about what the military's reaction has been to all of this in the past few years. So in 2020, the chief of defense staff, Jonathan Vance, pushed for a study of the problem, which cost $750,000. Around the same time, there was also a panel

to study hate and discrimination within the forces that was commissioned by the federal government. And, you know, it's worth pointing out that during this time, this was really when

the military was under this, you know, having this reckoning about sexual misconduct and under a lot more scrutiny about how it was handling those cases. So can you just

briefly tell me some of the big things that these investigations uncovered, but also the kind of difficult faculties that researchers doing these investigations came up against when they were trying to get answers from the military. So, yeah, so you mentioned that that study, that $750,000 study that was launched, I believe, 2020, 2021, thereabouts. The researcher who conducted that study were frustrated by what they felt was a lack of cooperation from the military.

So at the outset, they felt like Vance, General Vance, was interested in kind of trying to understand the scope of the problem. But then as time went on, and the researchers kind of wanted to push ahead with their study, they wanted access to military bases in order to interview people. That authorization never came. And so, you know, one of the researchers posted on social media recently that they felt it was not a true effort. The military wasn't really committed to really try to understand the scope of this problem. And I think that context that you mentioned, Ali, is like it's really important. You know, this is coming out of a period where the military's reputation was suffering because of the sexual misconduct allegations, which ultimately reached General Vance. Retired General Jonathan Vance has become the first senior officer charged in relation to the military misconduct.

conduct crisis. In court documents, military police allege Vance did willfully attempt to obstruct the course of justice in a judicial proceeding. And it stems back to this. Did General Vance ever instruct you to lie about your relationship? Yes, it's recorded. And the CFNIS has all of the recordings of him. And also these series of cases of extremists who are being identified as members of the military. So you have that one study that doesn't really, you know, get much traction. At the same time, the federal government is also taking steps to respond to public pressure around racism in the military, around concerns about racism in the military. The federal government convenes an expert panel to investigate this issue. And that panel ends up

releasing a port in 2022 that finds that membership in extremist groups is growing in the military and that the military is inefficient when it comes to detecting who these members. are. Around the same time, the military ombudsman releases a study that looked at long-running efforts in the military to diversify itself and saying, like, no, you guys are falling short of your diversity goals. And, you know, already your diversity goals to begin with were probably too low. A few years later, a researcher out of University of Alberta, a guy by the name Andy Knight, he finds that extremists are acknowledging that they're joining the military in in order to kind of gain skills in order to pursue their extremist goals.

He said he learned, he went into the military to learn how to kill brown and black people. And that was to me very disturbing. You kind of have, you know, three well-documented studies that are really suggesting that there is a systematic problem here that needs to be addressed and that the military for whatever reason seems to be unwilling to commit to, that these problems seem to be recurring. Since you put out this report recently, you've heard from some former and current military members more about this. What did they tell you? So, yeah, I heard from a range of both veterans and active military members.

And the one, I think, one of the interesting common threads of a lot of people who reached out to me was a sense of frustration. You know, I think these are people who were frustrated that the military hadn't done more to address this issue. They felt like cases of extremism or even suspected extremism with the military, it tarnishes their service. And they're very proud of their service in the military. And I heard from also, you know, active members of the military who feel like, you know, Even with recent steps that the military has taken, whether it's commissioning studies, creating an office of professional conduct,

creating a new tracking system, despite these public efforts to say, like, look, we're taking this seriously. Within the ranks, there is still a disconnect. There is still not the sense that this is truly a priority for the military. You know, it strikes me that these most recent issues we're talking about, I mean, something that we haven't talked about today, but we were talking a few weeks ago with David Pugliazzi from the Ottawa citizen about a Facebook group in Ottawa of CAF members that had a lot of racist, misogynistic, homophobic posts in it. But, you know, these kind of issues are coming out at a time when the prime minister is injecting billing. millions of dollars of funding into defense spending.

As the demands on our Canadian armed forces have increased their resources and their salaries have not kept pace. To try and recruit and retain more members, Prime Minister Mark Carney's boosting pay based on rank, the most junior members will benefit the most with a 20% raise. Canada has not seen something like this, this millennium. It hasn't seen it since the late 1990s. Our colleague, Murray Brewster, interviewed the military's top commander, Lieutenant General Michael Wright, about this alleged militia plot that we were talking about in Quebec. And he had some pretty strong words about it. He said,

makes me angry, makes me livid. Something I probably shouldn't say on CBC, but pisses me off, is that the important work that the Canadian Army needs to do to modernize, our eye is being taken off that, a focus is being taken off that, so we can deal with completely unacceptable and inappropriate behavior. He also said that these incidents erode the military's cohesion, credibility, ability to attract new recruits. As we're going through important work to modernize the Canadian Army, when there's generational investment being made into the Canadian Armed Forces writ large,

that we still have to deal with this type of inappropriate and unacceptable behavior. You know, talk to me when you're looking at all of this, this, like, what do you think is at stake here for the armed forces? Like, what do you think it means for them to be getting this major injection of funding at a moment when we're seeing that, I mean, it doesn't look anyway like they really seem to have some of these pretty fundamental issues under control? I think what's at stake here is whether or not the Canadian Armed Forces are going to be representative of Canadian society, whether or not the makeup of the forces will be at least somewhat proportional, reflective of the diversity of Canadian

society or whether the forces will be and perhaps remain a boys club. And I think the challenge right now that the Canadian forces is facing is the perception among the public at large that its efforts to diversify itself have not been successful, that it is not serious about rooting out extremism. And if that's the perception of the public, it will hurt recruitment. It will hurt people's desires to be part of the armed forces. And if that's the perception, if people don't want to join the armed forces at a moment when the federal government has made clear it wants to strengthen the armed forces, that it wants to, it wants the armed forces to play a more prominent role in Canadian society. Then there's, then there's a major conflict between the goals of government and the desires of the public and, and, and the military's own ability to meet, uh, the mission that it's been, that has been given by the government, you know, and I, and I think it, it also speaks to this, this kind of political moment where diversity initiatives are being heavily screwed.

And diversity initiatives are being heavily politicized. And so the Canadian military has given itself this mandate to diversify itself. And I think as opponents of the government and as opponents of diversity initiatives raise their voices, I think a lot of us are going to be watching whether or not the military commits to this desire to diversify itself to be a more inclusive workplace or whether it stays the way that's always been. And it kind of keeps the culture that has been in place. But holding true to that culture, of course, in the eyes of many experts say, well, that's. You know, that culture is also what has enabled extremists to operate in the military without really any fear of repercussion. All right. Well, we'll have to watch where this goes.

John has ever, thank you so much. Thank you, Alie. All right, that is all for today. I'm All right, that is all for listening to Frontburner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.ca.ca.coms.