OTTAWA – Canada formally designated the Proud Boys as a terrorist group under their criminal law on Wednesday, a move that could lead to financial seizures and allow the police to treat any crimes committed as terrorist activity
Government officials said they believed Canada was the first nation to label the Proud Boys as a terrorist entity. Last month’s events in Washington, they added, contributed to the measure, which was already under consideration.
“Since 2018, we have seen an escalation, an escalation towards violence in this group,” Bill Blair, the minister of public security, said at a news conference, adding that the Proud Boys and 12 other groups added to the list on Wednesday they are “all hateful, intolerant and, as we have seen, can be highly dangerous. “
An official, who spoke on the condition of not being named, said that while the information collected after the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington was a “contributing factor, it certainly was not the driving force”.
Members of the Proud Boys, a far-right, all-male organization that praised the street fight as part of their founding idea, played a prominent role in the attack on the Capitol.
US federal prosecutors investigating the violence announced their first charges of conspiracy against the Proud Boys last week, accusing two members of coordinating their efforts to interfere with law enforcement officers protecting Congress during the final certification of the presidential election.
Since the attack, Jagmeet Singh, leader of the opposition New Democratic Party of Canada, has pressured Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to declare the Proud Boys a terrorist group. Officials said the listing was made independently of the politicians.
The Proud Boys was among 13 groups added to the government’s terrorism list, including three other far-right or neo-Nazi organizations. The other groups added to the list are affiliated with Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
The authorities emphasized that the assignments should not lead to arrests in the short term. “Just because you are listed does not mean that you will suddenly be accused of a crime,” said one.
But the official added that any crimes committed by members of the group can now be the subject of charges of terrorism under criminal law. These potential crimes include providing funds or other assistance to a terrorist group – such as buying paraphernalia or clothes from the Proud Boys, although displaying or using them publicly does not break the law.
Recruitment, travel and group-related training can now also lead to criminal prosecution. In addition, authorities have more power to remove their online posts, add their members to the no-fly list and deny entry to the border for non-Canadian group members.
Mr. Blair said the designation “will severely restrict” the group’s ability to use crowdfunding online in Canada or any other fundraising method.
Bank accounts belonging to the group, officials said, could be seized or frozen, although Blair, citing intelligence confidentiality, declined to say what assets the Proud Boys have in Canada. Individual member accounts will not be affected unless they are being used for operations by the group.
In its designation, the Canadian government said that members of the Proud Boys “defend misogynist, islamophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant and / or white supremacist ideologies and associate with white supremacy groups”.
The government has not indicated how many chapters of the Proud Boys are active in Canada. In 2017, five members of the Canadian Armed Forces were part of a Proud Boys group that interrupted an indigenous ceremony in Halifax, Nova Scotia on Canada Day. They were disciplined, but not accused by the military.
The Proud Boys was founded in 2016 by Gavin McInnes, who was born in England but was raised in Ottawa and helped to found the Vice media empire. Since then, Mr. McInnes has distanced himself from the Proud Boys and Vice.
In protests, Canadian members of the Proud Boys usually carry the red flag, a flag containing the Union Jack in a corner that was Canada’s official flag until he adopted his maple leaf flag in 1965.
Some Canadian media reported that the Proud Boys’ branch sites in several Canadian cities disappeared last month after the events in Washington. It appears that they were removed by the groups themselves, and not by the service providers.
Although Canada is a multicultural country and generally tolerant of a prime minister who promotes increased immigration, some far-right groups have gained limited strength in recent years, particularly in Quebec, where they have played with historic language and identity complaints to complain immigration.
There have also been some important cases of American anti-immigrant policies or extreme right-wing ideology influencing young people.
In 2017, Alexandre Bissonnette, a student from Quebec City, killed six people and wounded 19 in a mosque in Quebec. It was later learned that in the month before the massacre, he scanned the internet 819 times for Trump-related posts, reading his Twitter feed daily and discovering the former president’s travel ban to several Muslim-majority countries.
Bissonnette also surfed websites linked to white nationalist Richard Spencer, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine black Americans in a South Carolina church.
In Quebec, there were also pockets of intolerance, manifested in far-right groups like La Meute, or Wolfpack, a group whose members protested against Islam and immigration. However, they remained marginal.
Ontario saw two attacks launched by men who described themselves as “incels” or involuntary celibates, a term used online by men sexually frustrated with misogynistic views that sometimes lead to violence. In 2018, one of them hit pedestrians with a rented van, killing 10.
At the same time, the extreme right ideology has failed to gain national strength within the political system. In the 2019 federal election, a far-right populist party that competed with a warning platform on the dangers of immigration failed to win a single seat in Parliament.
In addition to the Proud Boys, the lesser-known white supremacist organizations that Canada pointed out on Wednesday as terrorist organizations include the Atomwaffen Division, the Base and the Russian Imperial Movement.
Base is a neo-Nazi organization whose founders sought to use violence to help establish a white homeland in the western United States. Through a series of covert operations, federal agents stopped what the FBI said were several attacks planned by the group in early 2020. There was some overlap in members of the Atomwaffen Division, another American neo-Nazi group that operates mainly in the United States.
The Imperial Russian Movement, a paramilitary white supremacy group based in St. Petersburg, Russia, was the first white supremacy group to be officially designated as a terrorist organization by the US State Department last year.
Last year, Canada included Blood & Honor, a neo-Nazi group based in Great Britain, and its affiliate Combat 18 on its list of terrorist groups.
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from New York and Dan Bilefsky Montreal.