The Ben Mulroney Show - RCMP shut down Quebec militia

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Yannick Veilleux-Lepage   — author of How Terror Evolves: The Emergence and Spread of Terrorist Techniques If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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here in Canada. But yesterday in the middle of the day, I think a lot of us were shocked, dismayed and worried about the news that a few members of the Canadian Armed Forces are among four charged in a case of radicalization, extremism, and potential terrorist attacks. We don't know everything yet, but based on the information in the charges, it looks like four people based in Quebec, two of whom are members of the Canadian Armed Forces, were looking to create some sort of right-wing militia with ill intent for Canada writ large. And there's a lot of concern about this and what this means. And so let's talk about it a little bit.

Here is, there's a security intelligence expert named Mubin Sheikh, Canadian former security intelligence and counterterrorism operative. He was a one-time jihadist, and he saw the error of his ways and has been on the right side of wrong for a while now. Here's what he had to say about if these guys hadn't been stopped, what were they capable of? Unfortunately, I mean, neo-Nazi groups have been, you know, working to infiltrate the armed forces of Western countries for decades, actually. And we've thankfully, we've had a very small number of people that have unfortunately taken that bait. But in this case although few

very few in number It's it's real they they are three of them. Anyway, we're active are active members of the forces I mean they they found like 83 firearms 16 explosive devices 11,000 rounds of ammunition night vision goggles other military gear thousands of rounds of ammunition, night vision goggles, other military gear. So in this case, the military service should be an aggravating factor in it. We're not talking about a bunch of hapless kids talking smack online. These are guys that had some real capabilities to do some real damage. Yeah, this is, this is really interesting.

And there's a number of ways we can go with this conversation. At first blush, what I, what I, my first instinct, my first thought was, thank goodness, the RCMP were able to catch these guys before they were able to do what Mr. Shake just suggested. It's gonna be a lot of guns, a lot of arms and a lot of plans, right? But these weren't lone, like these were not guys who are operating in the ether or living off the grid that would have been hard to find. They were operating within the chain of command, two of them at least, very visible,

interacting with other people within the armed forces. And so because of that, to me, it seems like if you're gonna catch anyone, you should catch these guys. I'm very glad that happened. There are people out there who are, I don't think the best actors, who look to these right-wing extremists and tie them directly to right

and center-right politicians in this country. I think everybody has independent free will and they can do what they want. And there are there are hundreds of thousands of millions, there were millions of people who voted for Pierre Poliev, none of them decided to take up arms. And so these guys do not represent supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada somehow the genesis of these people who pervert whatever cause they're looking to espouse. But there are people out there who are doing that. They're beating the drum on social media.

And they're almost like checking boxes and counting how many people are there. And I think that's a very important thing to do to prevent that. And I think that's a very important thing to do to espouse. But there are people out there who are doing that. They're beating the drum on social media. And they're almost like checking boxes and counting how many bad guys are on one side versus how many bad guys are on the other side

of the political spectrum, as if that somehow makes their guy in the political realm better or worse. And I don't subscribe to that. That being said, I think most people would think that the biggest issue in Canada would be religiously motivated extremism. That's apparently not the case.

So first of all, since 2004, there have been a total of 61 terrorist attacks in Canada. That to me is a surprising number. That's an average of about three a year. And there has been a trend both in the number of attacks and the number of people killed that have increased over time. So we're not getting more peaceful in Canada.

We are getting more violent. There are more attacks and those attacks are yielding more death. An average of two deaths a year since 2004 and obviously that number is trending upwards. So this is something we have to pay more attention to. I am very glad that the RCMP stepped in and I hope this signals that we are taking this

more seriously. I have said on this show, on a number of files that on the things that we should take seriously in Canada, we do not. I have said on this show on a number of files that on the things that we should take seriously in Canada, we do not. This flies in the face of what I've said. So I do hope that on this issue of domestic terrorism, we are taking things seriously.

Now, to break this down for you, there are based on what's called a, well, there's a framework, the Nesbitt West, Amara Singham framework, and I'm not quite sure what that is, but there are a number of ways to look at extremism. There is politically motivated extremism, there's ideologically motivated extremism, religious and mixed.

So the political would be, you know, Quebec separatists, the FLQ crisis of the seventies. Sick calistanis are another one. On the ideological side, this is anti-abortion violence, in cell violence. On the religious side, you've got jihadis, but you also have, you know, militant pro-Christian groups. I'm going to, I'll paint both sides of the spectrum with that brush. And then you've got the mixed motivated. And these are

some attacks are driven by a combined motives of political, religious, and ideological. An example that would be the 2004 Montreal school fire bombing over the Hamas killings. The majority of the attacks in Canada have been ideologically motivated and oftentimes it is right wing or incel. Now I don't know, I don't know the raw numbers. We will never know the raw numbers of how many groups are being surveilled, how many groups have been red flagged and of those groups that have been red flagged and are being watched, just short of being arrested because they haven't crossed, they haven't breached that threshold into illegal activity or something worth an arrest.

I don't know how many people fall into right wing extremism. I don't know how many fall into left wing-wing extremism. I don't know how many fall into left-wing extremism. But the ones that have been caught or the ones that have done damage, most of them in Canada have been of the right-wing variety. In terms of the religiously motivated extremism, that's about 18% of the attacks. And that's grown slowly post 2014. And of the politically motivated, it is present,

but far less dominant than the overwhelming majority, which is ideologically motivated. And so when we look at all this, the key takeaways are that Canada does remain a safe nation. Relative to other countries, we are a safe nation. Very low odds of being involved in a terrorist attack. And we have to recognize that it is the ideologically motivated events

that are the dominant threat in terms of their frequency. I have to wonder how much of this comes from the polarization that we experience due to in large part, or at least in my opinion in large part, to social media like this. I very much enjoy a casual respectful back and forth on Twitter. Most of the people who try to engage with me just want to fight and they they wanna hurl insults. That's a very far cry from going from that to radicalization, but it's a step in that direction.

And so I don't know how we solve for this. I think the only way to solve for it is for a commendation to go to the RCMP to say, hey, this does not stand in our country. If you do that, we are going to throw the frigging book at you. So that is my hope. And really a thank you to the RCMP for their hard work in stopping and thwarting these terrorists

before they were able to do anything. When we come back, we're going to continue this conversation with Yannick Veilleux-LePage, an expert on this very issue. Don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulroney Show. Welcome back. with Yannick Veilleux-LePage, an expert on this very issue. Don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulroney Show. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney Show. And obviously some of the biggest news that we are covering today

is the discovery that the RCMP thwarted an attempt by certain members of the military to form, I guess, their own right-wing militia. And here to discuss that, and a lot more, is a terrorism expert who's done extensive research on far-right extremism. He's also the author of How Terror Revolves, the Emergence and Spread of Terrorist Techniques. Please welcome to the show Yannick Veilleux-LePage. Yannick, thank you so much for joining us on the Ben Mulroney show. Thank you for having me. So if you can, level set for us. What do we know about this group of people who were dead set on doing some pretty bad

stuff? So details are still quite scarce at this point. But yesterday it was announced that over the last year and a half or so there's been an ongoing investigation on four individuals. Two of them are current and serving members of the CAF. One is a veteran and the other one had, was the civilian instructors for cadets. These four individuals are accused of planning or of attempting to create a militia with plans of seizing a portion of territory, which isn't quite defined in the indictment for ideological reason.

It appears that this is related to a white nationalist, far-right extremist, ethno-nationalist type of ideology. And the indictments are also quite interesting because there's several firearm offenses, but also it seems to hint that some of the material that was confiscated by the RCMP might've been stolen material from the Canadian Armed Forces. Wow, this is just not something I'm used to hearing

about this country. And yet, I guess if you drill down into the numbers, you can really separate potential terrorists in this country into different buckets. You can have the religiously motivated and you have the ideologically motivated. And my guess would have been that the religiously motivated would have been the more prominent, the more prevalent, the ones that we have to keep more of an eye on. But I'm sensing that the numbers would indicate something different. Yeah, I mean, in the last 10 years or so, there has been, I would say, a lot more understanding and awareness by security sectors of the risk that is posed in Canada, what's called IMV,

so ideologically motivated violent extremists, which I think is a bit of a misnomer. It's one of the cases where I think the Americans might have a better terminology, which they call REMVI, which is racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists. And this is where we talk about, you know, the far right extremists, the white supremacists, the neo-Nazis, some part of kind of violent misogyny ideology they all fit in that bucket. And what we're seeing more and more is the willingness by individuals

who are associated with these beliefs to engage in acts of political violence to bring about their societal project. You know, a lot of us are looking at this and saying, oh my goodness, the fact that you could have someone, I don't know, whose views are so corrupted, who had sworn an allegiance to defend this country could then be turned into something different,

to me is quite shocking. But then I think about it even more and I realize, no, these are people who are in an organization who You know whose behavior is monitored and if they go a stray of that Then they might get red-flagged are members of the military under a higher level of scrutiny Because of that commitment that they've made to Canada Is that why they might have been red flagged faster than,

you know, that guy who lives out in the woods? Yeah, I think it's important to put these arrests into perspective and understand that there's nearly 65,000 regular armed forces member in Canada. There's about 22,000 reserved members. The absolute vast majority of them serve with duty, with respect, with integrity. And this is really a small, small, small fraction of the CAF. And it's not a problem that is unique to Canada. We've seen similar cases in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Spain,

in the UK, in the US. Unfortunately, when these cases come to light, they really undermine some of the core values of these institutions and they're quite repetitionally damaging. So what we've seen is in the last decade or so, many Western militaries have set forward new processes in order to detect and counter extremism within the ranks. And these happen at various stage. Ideally, you try to stop individuals who have these ideas from joining the forces.

individuals who have these ideas from joining the forces. Unfortunately, we know that on chat forums, on Telegram, people are generally instructed that if you have these ideas, make sure you hide them during the vetting process, otherwise you won't be let in. The other thing that can happen is individuals can become radicalized during their service. We've seen this in Quebec, for example, with the far-right group, La Merte, who was founded by two individuals upon their return from deployment in Afghanistan, and they really identified their tour of duty as being the catalyst for creating these far-right groups. So that poses other problems, right? When somebody becomes radicalized while they're already within the rank,

and that needs to be treated differently. But it's an extremely complex issue. And I would say, luckily, it's an issue that is not solely Canadian, we have partners that are dealing with this, and we can learn from them, particularly the Germans are doing an extremely good job at dealing with this problem within their ranks. I think we can learn from that. Well, yeah, listen, you don't want group think

in your military, you know, you want individuals to make up a collective. So, and in those, in that group of individuals, you're gonna have people with different perspectives. But I wonder, you know, we have processes, we have protocols, we have red flags. What would rise to the level of a red flag that would trigger the police to look into them?

That would be different from just say, people being disgruntled and chatting normally on a chat form. Yeah, I think in this particular case, there was clear evidence of criminality. And that's where it would have gone from you know an internal investigation on something like hateful conduct or speech that is seen as contrary to the values of the CAF to a case that would be

referred to to the RCMP InSET teams. But I think it's also important that we we think about when we talk about extremism within the force This is really the extreme case, right? This is individuals who are using their trainings in order to prepare acts of political violence and are also potentially using stolen resources to do so but we need to also kind of recognize that, you know, on a much, on the other spectrum, you know, racist comments, misogynist comments, similar to what we've seen just a couple weeks ago on another CAF Facebook group, it's part of the same phenomenon, and these are dealt

differently. So I think it's kind of interesting because we're really seeing right now the same phenomenon but two different extremes of it playing out in the media. Lastly, and we only have a few seconds left, but is there a concern that what we've uncovered here is the tip of the iceberg or are we confident that the people that have been arrested and identified, that's it. That's the group that we had to go after. So I think in, I think the investigators here, the police prosecutors are doing a terrific job. They've definitely taken four individuals that appear to to have, you know, quite ill devisers and taking them off the street. I think it would be dangerous to be complacent in this issue, right? I think it would be dangerous to be complacent in this issue, right? Just very quickly, in 1995, after Oklahoma City, there was a great deal of research on

this notion of insider threat that came out. And then after 2001, we stopped talking about this issue. The issue didn't go away. Our priorities just changed. And now it's resurfacing. It's resurfaced after January 6, and it's resurfacing. And I think it's going to continue these conversations. So I think it's important that we recognize that this threat has always existed. But there are mechanisms to deal with it and to

deal with it in quite appropriate fashions. Yannick, thank you very much for your insights on this ever evolving story. We appreciate it. Thank you for having me I gotta say I am refreshed that in with something this serious We are taking the threat as seriously as it deserves It's a far cry from some of the things that we've seen in the past So my hat goes off to the RCMP and to our security forces for taking this threat seriously. Nissan Rogue is Motor Trend's number one compact SUV for the third year in a row. Why? Exceptional capability, value and safety that beat all others to become Motor Trend's number one compact SUV.

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