Canadian domestic extremists are using the federal election to amplify “corrosive” narratives around democracy, immigration and conspiracy theories, a new report suggests.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found Canadian extremists are capitalizing on the deteriorating relationship between Canada and U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to draw people towards their movements.
The ISD is an international group of non-profit organizations, established in 2006, that works with governments and communities to counter extremism and polarization. The organization analyzed more than 160,000 social media posts from Canadian domestic extremism accounts between March 1 and April 12.
ISD takes a broad view of who counts as “domestic extremists,” including groups looking to push their agenda through both violent and non-violent methods. That definition captures ethnonationalists, white supremacists, anti-Muslim extremists and neo-Nazis, among other grievance-fuelled movements.
The report’s lead author, Steven Rai, told Global News that while the scan did not point to concrete plans for violence around the election or in its aftermath, there is still cause for concern.
“These extremists, they may not be calling for violence, it may not be a Jan. 6 type of situation … let’s go storm Parliament or whatever, but instead they’re taking these mainstream topics of conversation and manipulating them to basically gather support,” Rai said in an interview.
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“They say ‘the political status quo is not working, there’s all these problems, there’s these tariffs that are going to lead to all this economic misery,’ and then they’re basically choosing scapegoats on who to blame.”
Rai said he was surprised to find that the highest-volume topic for extremist posts over the period ISD examined was the friction between Canada and the United States under Trump.
“(Extremists) are not necessarily as plugged in to those sorts of mainstream political developments, so to see them react in such an outsized way to U.S.-Canada relations has been really interesting,” Rai said, who said he was surprised
The report stated that the groups reacted to major developments in the relationship – largely around Trump’s tariff war – with “a mixture of despair and optimism.”
“Some capitalized upon economic anxieties to push hardline positions on immigration,” the report read.
“However, others expressed excitement over their belief that these policies would be a precursor to America’s takeover of the Canadian federal government, which they view as immoral or corrupt.”
Immigration is a much more frequent topic of conversation for domestic extremist groups, but even that now has a nexus with the Trump administration.
Rai pointed to an incident in Hamilton, Ont., last November in which black-clad masked men demonstrated with a banner that read “mass deportations now” – an echo of what Trump at the time was promising to do, and what his immigration police are now attempting to carry out.
The ISD noted that a concerning number of extremist posts around immigration were “inflected with hateful rhetoric demonizing ethnic minorities in Canada,” including outright hate speech.
Conspiracy theories – another popular topic among extremist groups – were also observed in ISD’s scan, although not directed at any one particular party or leader. The ISD noted a post from a X user connecting both Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and Liberal Leader Mark Carney to a “Covid depopulation agenda,” and suggested Canadians would want to kill both men if they knew the truth.
Ironically, some posts accused Poilievre of cooperating with shadowy international forces at the expense of regular Canadians — something the Conservative leader has repeatedly suggested about his political opponents.
Rai said the most important thing Canadians can do to protect themselves from falling for these narratives is to be skeptical of anything they see on social media platforms.
“We’re really finding that extremist views, misinformation and disinformation are being spread primarily on social media where there’s not necessarily the vetting of that news or these views,” Rai said.
“Some platforms are woefully inadequate altogether at even having policies to combat things like misinformation or hate … So I think there’s really a need to kind of educate the public on treating with huge amounts of skepticism with any kind of claims they’re seeing on social media.”
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