Canada's first prosecution of white nationalist terrorism
Interview with CBC's The Current
Last week, I was on CBC’s The Current speaking with Matt Galloway about Canada’s first case of prosecuted white nationalist terrorism. This case is important because it demonstrates that the police and prosecutors have a viable strategy for investigating and prosecuting this type of offence as terrorism. They can now use that strategy to tackle harder cases, like pre-emptive cases. I’ve copied the transcript of the interview below, and you can also listen to it here:
If you’d like to read a bit of background on the case, you can read our analysis here:
JESSICA DAVIS: Good morning, Matt.
MG: When you read or perhaps listen to that judge's decision yesterday, what went through your mind?
JESSICA DAVIS: My initial reaction was one of extreme relief. It's one of those, when we look at this case, it is a textbook case of terrorism. And I think many of us, you know, terrorism experts looked at this and said, well, we really hope that the judge finds this because to find otherwise would really question or raise a lot of questions about our terrorism legislation, our judicial system, etc. So, the relief was palpable, I think, from people who are watching this kind of thing.
MG: What does that mean? A textbook case of terrorism? Because to Dr. Sukhera's point, in past, that has not been a luxury afforded to Muslim communities. They saw it as a textbook case, a slam dunk, but weren't sure that that would be seen within a court of law, for example, because of past cases.
JESSICA DAVIS: Yeah. And I think that concerns about bias in our judicial system, in our police force are justified. There's a lot of cases in the past that could have constituted a terrorism offence, particularly, I think about the Quebec Mosque shooting that were not charged as a terrorism offence. That we didn't see any conversation around terrorism other than some public statements at the time. So, in this case, if you take an unbiased look at the Criminal Code definition of terrorism, this case is textbook. It was driven by a desire to create fear in a particular community. It was driven by a very clear, if sometimes muddled ideology, but a very clearly ideological position. And those are two key components of terrorism offences in this country. So, looking at this from an unbiased perspective, this absolutely had to meet the definition of terrorism.
MG: Is your sense that that definition is being applied more broadly now? Last fall, a young man was successfully prosecuted for terrorism in a misogynist attack in a spa. We've also seen terror charges laid recently against people accused of being involved in neo-Nazi groups. So, are prosecutors and police taking those ideologies more seriously than in past and more seriously in the context of terrorism than in past?
JESSICA DAVIS: I think we're definitely seeing a change in how terrorism is perceived amongst law enforcement, security services and prosecutors in this country, and it's a welcome change. I mentioned a minute ago the Quebec Mosque shooting. You know, that is the kind of thing that should have been charged as terrorism.
MG: Why wasn't it as you understand it?
JESSICA DAVIS: There's a lot of complexities around, you know, what charges get brought. So, it's difficult to say specifically, but I think at the time that that occurred, police and our security services in general were reluctant to see what we now call ideologically motivated violent extremism as a form of terrorism. There was a bit of a denial that this kind of activity could rise to the level of terrorism. That is changed really significantly in the last, I'd say, four or five years with the charges that you mentioned. And I think part of that is that in our law enforcement security services, there have always been people who saw this kind of violence as terrorism and were arguing that this definitely fit the definition of terrorism and should be treated as such. But there was also some bias. I think if we can be really honest about it in that community that was reluctant to see, frankly, white people perpetrating terrorism.
MG: A member of the Afzaal family said after this ruling that he believed this decision would offer, and perhaps this speaks to what you were just saying, would offer safety in future to other communities, not just Muslim communities, but Black and Jewish communities as well. What do you think?
JESSICA DAVIS: I think this case is so important. And the incel case that you mentioned a minute ago is so important because it demonstrates that police have now successful investigative strategies for dealing with this kind of terrorism, and that those strategies can lead to successful prosecutions. Without successful strategies like that, police can become, you know, rightly reluctant to pursue these kinds of charges. So, this sets a very important precedence investigativelly and legally.
MG: It was interesting in reading the judge's ruling yesterday, something leapt out at me. I just want to read it to you. "It is too simplistic to draw a straight line of causation between the offender's actions and what he read on the internet, but the offender drew much of his rage from internet sources, which he repeatedly accessed in the days and moments leading up to this attack. The tentacles of hate can reach a broad audience when they are merely a click away." What do we do about that?
JESSICA DAVIS: Well, I disagree with one piece in that statement, which is that the ideas are driving the hate. I think instead, it's better to think about it as the hate was finding an outlet in the ideas. And this puts the problem in a different perspective. A lot of our ideologically motivated violent extremists are driven by hate, anger, fear, social isolation. They're finding outlet in extremist content. There's a couple of options that we have for this. One of them is to try to take down all extremist content, but I probably don't need to explain how difficult that would be and how implausible that is as an actual strategy. We can try to limit it. We can try to restrict access to things like terrorist manifestos, which I think is a good idea. But seeing this as the solution is not, is not a solution to the terrorism and extremism problem. We can also significantly expand surveillance to try to proactively identify people who might go on to commit violence. But the number of people who are consuming this kind of content is in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and only a very, very small number of them will go on to commit an act of terrorism. So again, that's not a great solution either. We can also accept a particular level of terrorism, but that's not a satisfying solution for anybody who's lost a loved family member or a community member in a terrorist attack, and not one that I would advocate for either. Which leaves us with the much harder and longer-term solution, which is to build a society and a system that addresses or begins to address some of these underlying causes of hate and fear. And that is a very long-term prospect.
MG: It speaks back to what Tabinda Bukharii said, that this hate didn't exist in a vacuum. It thrived in the whispers and the prejudices and the normalized fear of the other. I mean, that can be online, but that can be, as they say, in real life as well.
JESSICA DAVIS: Yes. And I think that that was a really important and salient point when we think about people who are radicalizing and potentially mobilizing violence. We're all, most of us know people who have some form of extremist ideas, often driven by fear or concern. Fear of loss, you know, the sense that their position in society is being threatened. And we all need to accept that that's something that we need to be aware of and try to work to reduce the social isolation of those people and try to bring them back into the fold. Because it's the whispers that really drive the extremism.
MG: In the meantime, your belief, just finally, is that--I said that this is a test case. That this case, having passed that test will change how law enforcement deals with incidents like this in future.
JESSICA DAVIS: I think the changes already occurred. I think what we saw was proof of their new approach to this kind of thing. I think the real test, though, will come with cases that are less clear cut. Where there's less overwhelming evidence of the terrorist motivation, and when they're actually in the pre-emption stage. When they've stopped someone ahead of time. And there's no clear event that we can point to at the end.
MG: Jessica, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much.
JESSICA DAVIS: Thanks, Matt.
MG: Jessica Davis is president of Insight Threat Intelligence and a former CSIS analyst.