By Michele St-Amant, David Jones, Michael King, & John McCoy

There have been significant changes in the three years since the Organization for the Prevention of Violence (OPV) published its first report about hate-motivated violence, extremism and terrorism in Alberta, Building Awareness, Seeking Solutions. The Covid-19 pandemic, protests against public health measures, tense elections in the United States, and the backlash to racial justice movements, among other events, have had broad social repercussions. Some of which have changed the composition and scale of the threat of extremism and terrorism – which has become more diffuse and comprised of a broader set of grievances and ideologies.

This report is organized using the nomenclature developed by the Government of Canada to categorize different forms of extremist ideologies. As such, the findings related to ideologically motivated violent extremism and religiously motivated violent extremism are summarized first.i Next, we summarize our findings about conspiracy theories and hate incidents, including crimes, within Alberta and across Canada.

Alberta: Organization for the Prevention of Violence, 2022. 115p.

By Justin Everett Cobain Tetrault

Right-wing nationalist movements have gained traction in Westernized countries such as France, Greece, Hungary, Austria, the United States, and Germany, where political figures or groups have mobilized nationalist ideas and right-wing populist sentiment to gain governmental power and/or influence public policy (Mudde 2014, BBC News 2019, Perry & Scrivens 2018: 177). Contrary to Canada’s benevolent international reputation, Canadians have demonstrated increasingly exclusionary politics in the last decade. Anti-Islam rhetoric, for instance, has substantial legitimacy in popular discourse and Canadians are increasingly skeptical of the country’s federal multiculturalism policy (Angus Reid 2017, Braun 2018, Andrew-Gee 2015; Angus Reid 2010, Canseco 2019, Todd 2017). Academics, journalists, and public figures assert that Canada is experiencing “similar trends” to Western Europe’s wave of right-wing populism, pointing to the “growing threat” posed by Canadian far-right groups, also referred to as “rightwing extremists”, “hate groups”, and sometimes the “alt-right” (Perry & Scrivens 2018: 177, Boutilier 2018, Mastracci 2017, McKenna 2019, Habib 2019). Upon closer scrutiny, dominant scholarly and popular discourse tends to reduce this discussion to a problem of white nationalist ideology and the public safety risks posed by these groups, such as terrorism, hate crime, threats and intimidation, and hate speech. Experts struggle to explain how right-wing and far-right groups operate as a social movement seeking mainstream legitimacy in Canada, and the dominant fixation on “extremism” in the form of white nationalism and criminality sometimes obfuscates significant trends in right-wing organizing. Using Canada’s yellow vests movement as a case study, this project identifies and critiques three broader trends in scholarship on right-wing and far-right social movements.

Edmonton: University of Alberta, 2021. 203p.