The Decibel - Canadian soldiers charged in anti-government militia plot

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

On July 8, Quebec RCMP arrested four men connected to the Canadian Armed Forces. They are accused of trying to create an extremist militia and planning to forcibly take a plot of land north of Quebec City. Two of the four men are active members of the military, three have been charged with terrorism facilitation. The case adds to the growing concerns of extremism in Canada’s military, just weeks after Ottawa committed to the biggest increase in military spending since the Second World War.Today, Globe staff reporter Colin Freeze joins the show. He will share what we know about the men charged, their significant connections to the Armed Forces and how this case could impact how terrorism is legally defined in Canada. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Last week, charges were laid in what's been described as a landmark terrorism case. The Quebec RCMP arrested four men, including two active members of the Canadian Armed Forces. Three of the men have been charged with terrorism facilitation. They're accused of trying to create an extremist militia and planning to forcibly take a plot of land north of Quebec City. None of the allegations have been tested in court. Law enforcement announced these charges just weeks

after Ottawa committed to the biggest increase in military spending since the Second World War. Today, Colin Freese is here. He's a staff reporter with The Globe covering crime, justice and security issues. Colin's been following the case, and he'll tell us about the men, their connections to the military, and how this case could impact the way we define terrorism in Canada. I'm Irene Gallia, guest hosting The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Hello Colin, thanks for joining us.

Glad to be here. So four men were charged on July 8th, 24 year old Marc-Aurel Chabot of Quebec City, 24 year old Simon-Anger Audet of Nouvelle, Quebec and 25-year-old Raphaël Lagasse, also of Quebec City, and Corporal Matthew Forbes, 33-years-old of Pont-Rouge, Quebec. What do we know about them at this time? The first three you mentioned are the individuals accused of the alleged terrorist facilitation conspiracy.

We know that Chabot is a serving soldier at CFB Valcartier. He enrolled, I guess, as a reservist in June 2019 and was transferred into regular forces. Angéli Audette was enrolled in the Canadian Army as a reservist in June 2019 and was released in 2022. Whereas I think Raphael Lagasse is said to be a civilian instructor with the Royal Canadian Air Cadet Squadron. And then he served in that role between 2021 and 2024. The fourth suspect you mentioned is Corporal Forbes. He is alleged to have broken the Defense Production Act several times over by acquiring or otherwise

obtaining certain night vision goggles and laser scopes that are not available to the civilian public. He is not accused of terrorism offenses. My colleague, Choo Tan Ha, led the reporting on his ties to an enterprise that sold civilian versions of night vision goggles and this sort of equipment, although he no longer works with him and hasn't for some time So that's a thumbnail sketch of the four accused. So police laid a number of charges Can you just run us through what they're being accused of here? Right? The most important charge is the terrorist facilitation conspiracy Up until this point. I know of no serving members of the

Canadian Armed Forces who've been charged with a terrorism conspiracy in conjunction with other members of the armed forces. That is itself alarming and maybe not where we thought the Anti-Terrorism Act was going to be applied to when Parliament passed that 25 years ago. The idea that there would be a militia element forming from within the Canadian Armed Forces in a conspiracy to take land is in itself a surprising and stunning development. At the same time, terrorism facilitation is the kind of charge you lay when a conspiracy may not be very far along. It doesn't mean that there's an actual plot that has developed or that anybody was close to taking lives or something was about to go boom.

It's one of the earlier charges you can lay when the conspiracy sort of goes from being in somebody's imagination to taking material steps towards the realization of that conspiracy that is being alleged. So what we don't know in relation to that is how far along this plot was, or even what ideological motivations were behind it. We do know there were some, we don't know what they were because authorities aren't telling us. Apart from that, there's various firearms charges, explosives act charges, and defense production act charges. These are relatively standard charges about people who are handing things and not acquiring these materials lawfully, or in the case of the Defense Production Act charges getting military grade equipment and obtaining that acquiring that trading that in ways that are unlawful because we only want

our military to have the best tactical equipment out there and civilians are not supposed to have it. Right so last January police seized 16 explosive devices, 83 firearms, 11,000 rounds of ammunition and military grade equipment. Do we know where they got all this stuff? Well, the military has sort of put out a statement today saying none of the bullets, none of the firearms, none of the explosive devices, which I take to be mostly smoke grenades, none of that came from the Canadian Armed Forces. So the obvious question is, so where did it come from? And authorities are not answering that question. Although the RCMP did say last week that military equipment was seized in those January 2024 raids. So that leaves us with the military grade night

visual goggles and military grade laser scoping equipment, which would, you know, you could think in any gunfight at night, this would be enormously valuable. So those controlled equipments are also alleged to be somehow part of this alleged conspiracy, but really we're at the early stages of criminal case and much remains to be revealed in court. Right. So the Canadian Armed Forces is saying that the guns, the ammunition, that didn't come from them, but we don't know about some of the other equipment. What else is the Canadian Armed Forces saying

right now about the charges? Well, saying really as little as possible, and I put the defense minister in there too. I mean, I think on the face of things, the allegations are alarming. Members of a serving military of our country are accused in criminal court of assembling an arsenal, including some equipment, not necessarily weapons,

but some equipment that was military grade and which could have been used in a conspiracy to forcibly try to take land. The military is saying that none of these guys had unescorted access to military bases in recent months, which means that probably since shortly after the January 2024 raids, while they were not stripped of rank, they had their movements severely restricted within the military.

So it's been a very long and patient investigation based on appearances to date. Do we know how this group came under suspicion in the first place? No, very little has been said about why these alleged conspirators would have come under suspicion. I would suggest though, if you're doing any sort of recruitment on Instagram, your operational security is not great, even if you're in a closed social media group and RCMP did post an image of an Instagram group, a private group where there was where there was apparently relevant to this plot as it evolved. The chart sheets also say that elements of this conspiracy

trace back to 2021, and it's 2025 now. So I imagine in recent months, there's been a lot of talk between police and prosecutors about what kind of charges do you lay and can you support a terrorism charge in this context? And they got there, but it took them a long time to lay that charge and whether the judge or jury supports it remains to be seen. Given that this group might have been recruiting, possibly using this Instagram profile, is there a sense that more than four

people were involved? Well, I often think about this picture the RCMP moved of seven people in fatigues with guns drawn in a quarry doing some sort of exercise, you know, four does not equal seven. And we don't even know if the seven people pictured are conspirators themselves. So were these active participants? Did they know what they were being drawn into? We've seen terrorism conspiracies in the past where some people were just sort of arrested in as the bycatch of somebody else's scheme. And I think here prosecutors decided to maybe limit the charges rather than charge a wider group and sort of put forward cases against four people that it felt to be viable.

Do we have any sense of what these men were allegedly hoping to do if they got this land in Quebec? We don't. And I think this is the essence of the case that we'll hear about shortly in court. But again, they wanted to, you know, take by force a plot of land in Quebec City, near Quebec City, rather. I don't think we're talking about the city center. I think we're talking about the environs. And we don't know much more than that. We don't even know what ideology would have motivated them. All the police are saying it's a real hodgepodge of various causes these guys believed in, which were motivating them to want to take eight patch of land by force. But whether it was a farmer's field or a forest or a village, we don't know. And again, it would be nice to know more

about what sort of belief system these soldiers would have motivated these accused to do what they're alleged to have done. But again, that hasn't been articulated yet either. Right, that might come out in the court proceedings. I imagine it will. I've watched court proceedings before in terrorism cases, and often it can be months, if not years,

before anybody's in position to publicly discuss the full array of the evidence. So there's a lot of people that will want to fill the vacuum of information one way or another, but I think the only people who can speak credibly to that are the prosecutors who are preparing to mount a case in court against the accused. Has something like this happened in Canada before? Well, I've been covering terrorism cases in Canada at the Globe and Mail since the Anti-Terrorism Act was passed in 2001. I would say that this is unique in terms of serving Canadian forces members, plural being charged with a terrorist conspiracy. That's never happened before under our criminal laws. There have, however, I think cases of Canadian forces,

members being charged in the United States with an extremist conspiracy. In terms of somebody assembling an arsenal of this size in Canada to forcibly take land, haven't seen that one before. So I think those two elements never happened before to my knowledge. We'll be right back. So Colin, these charges were laid last week, but we know that police conducted raids a year and a half ago in January, 2024. During this time, two of the accused remained active in the military. What have they been doing since then and why did it take so long for charges to be laid? Right. We don't know why during 18 months

of investigation why no Canadian forces members were stripped of their rank if they were part of a terrorism conspiracy. But RCMP Staff Sergeant Camille Hebel of the National Security Team did say that at all times public safety and security was insured, which would suggest to me that the serving ones and possibly the ones that were at military affiliations were closely monitored for most of the last year and a half. The ones still in the military didn't have unescorted access to military bases. For example, the military has said that they wouldn't have had access to weapons that a soldier who wasn't under a cloud of suspicion would have had. So it is this very patient investigation that's played out and we know that prosecutors have said in court that there are 100 judicial authorizations were signed, which means that

judges signed off on dozens and dozens of search warrants and production orders that were asked for by police who were putting together this case. So it is certainly one of the longest and slowest burning terrorism cases in Canadian history. If you sort of believe that the conspiracy started in 2021 and that there was some sort of recruitment or social media activities asking other people in, well, maybe authorities wanted to watch where that went before they lay a charge. You know, in terrorism cases, you don't wanna go too early and you don't wanna go too late.

But in this case, if the arsenal was seized midway through the four-year investigation, give or take, then authorities could have had a lot of time to go back through phone, internet and houses and sort of gather the evidence if the threat was neutralized and the rest might have been prosecutorial evidence gathering to support the most serious charge they could lay in court, which is the terrorism conspiracy. What is the current legal definition of terrorism in Canada? Terrorism is fundamentally the use of violence to affect change for political, ideological or religious motives. The whole reason the Terrorism Act was passed in 2001,

you know, four terrorists with box carters had hijacked airplanes and commandeered the the cockpits and smashed those airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in the Pentagon, killing 3,000 people. So after that was a fundamental reconsideration of what our laws need to do. And what our parliament decided is like, look, most criminal laws are reactive. Somebody punches somebody in the face, you charge them with assault for what just happened. Terrorism laws by nature are supposed to be left of the violence, right? So before the boom happens, you want to have your police in a position to thwart conspiracies before they reach fruition. The Al-Qaeda and ISIS threat never went away. In fact, there's live prosecutions to that effect in Montreal and Vancouver. And I

think these were done in that sort of classic religious motivation for terrorism way. So those kinds of cases have never gone away. But the terrorism legal definition is somewhat in flux right now and it's not clear to me whether the definitions of terrorism that are probably passed into law are going to be useful going forward as people radicalize into dozens of different causes on the internet. You know, we've in recent years seen members of misogynist extremist groups charged with terrorism in Canada years seen members of misogynist extremist groups charged with terrorism in Canada and convicted of terrorism. We've seen white supremacists charged and convicted of terrorism. We've seen some neo-Nazi cases developed too. I was also in a courtroom in Kitchener, Waterloo this spring where a guy stabbed a gender studies professor and

the prosecutors argued that was terrorism because this guy was sort of part of a mindset where he didn't like gender studies and what it stood for. But the judge did not convict of terrorism in that case saying that his ideology was too diffuse. A broken plate is not a mosaic is the judge's word saying like he drew from too many wells and he was not coherent. So there's a real question before our courts as to whether a terrorist conspiracy has to be a coherent one and whether the ideology that motivates it has to be cohesive. So you're saying that in the past, we largely saw terrorism charges in cases involving religious extremism, but in the last five years or so, that's shifted to include those driven by other ideologies. How is this case being considered?

Yeah, I would say that if you look at the evolution of the Anti-Terrorism Act and the cases that have been brought to criminal courts in Canada, it's rolled out in phases. The first 20 years, almost exclusively Al-Qaeda and Islamic State suspects, with rare exception, it was applied to religious extremists. Last five years, the charges have gone where the violence has evolved into. And what we're seeing is self-radicalizing extremists of a variety of ideological stripes, some of them deeply misogynistic, some of them white supremacists, some of them neo-Nazis.

We have seen prosecutors lay terrorism charges along these lines against non-religious motivated actors. And now here comes this new allegation against the Canadian forces centered conspiracy about wanting to forcibly seize land with the militia mentality taking hold. So whether this is an outgrowth of the second phase I'm talking about or a whole new thing entirely, I'm wondering in my own mind, is this terrorism 2.0 in Canada or terrorism 3.0?

Where we're back to sort of group dynamic prosecutions against extremists who are not religiously motivated and whether we will see more prosecutions along these lines. So if the Crown is successful in trying this as terrorism, are you saying it would set a new legal precedent? It might well set a new legal precedent. If convictions are registered in this case, then once again, the Anti-Terrorism Act, the parameters of it will have expanded to include a group of suspects that were never prosecuted before. And I think that in itself is noteworthy. Last week, reporters asked defense minister David McGinty about these

charges and he called the case disturbing. But he said, and I quote, the question of extremism is something that's throughout Canadian society. And he also said that he was not quote, in a position to divine what the situation is across the entire Canadian Armed Forces. What do you make of his comments, Colin? I think what he said was a fancy way of saying

bad apples spoil the bunch, but if your bad apples are working for Asobis or McDonald's, who cares? But if they have access to night vision goggles or smoke grenades or assault rifles or bullets or magazines and they know how to wield it, that is a much more disturbing development. So, you know, there has been long before this case came along discussions within government of whether there could be extremists taking root within the Canadian military. And we're

not talking about the whole military. We're not even talking about 1%. But even a few dozen people who are, you know, maybe extremist actors are fundamentally disturbing. I think what we want, particularly at a time when we're preparing to invest billions and billions of more dollars into the military to sate US President Donald Trump's demands for Canada have a more self-sustaining military.

What we want to make sure is we have the mechanisms and the tools and the know-how to root out any extremist elements before they ensconce themselves within the military itself. Just lastly here, Colin, there have been two court hearings since the charges were laid last week, including on Monday. Are these men currently detained and where does the case go from here?

So the three accused who are charged with the terrorism and the conspiracy are detained pending a bail hearing at the end of July. And the way those things usually go is somebody may seek a publication ban on the evidence that's said in a bail hearing. So this will be a discussion about whether these men are safe to be at large in the community with the very serious allegations that are facing them. A fourth accused, Matthew Forbes, a serving soldier has been released on bail. He is the one who faces the Defense Production Act charges

of unlawfully acquiring and maybe trading in a military grade equipment such as night vision goggles. He has been granted bail. So he does not appear to be the central suspect, I would suggest. The other three very much would appear to be part of the terrorism facilitation conspiracy that's being alleged, according to prosecutors. So I think that's the case, the faster the case, they'll be most worth closely watching.

All right. Thank you so much for joining us, Colin. Thank you. That was Colin Friesese, The Globe's staff reporter covering crime and justice. That's it for today. I'm Irene Gallia. Kevin Sexton edited and mixed to

this episode. Our producers are Madeleine White, Nicole Stein and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer and Angela Pacenza is our executive editor. Thank you for listening.