Quebec City's military-far right nexus

 

And the cultural institutions that enable it

This week, the RCMP announced that it had made the largest weapons seizure related to terrorism in the history of Canada. Four men, all connected to the Canadian Armed Forces, were charged for their roles in organizing an anti-government milita.

Their weapons were first seized in January 2024. We don’t yet know what happened in the 1.5 years that passed.

The four all lived in and around Quebec City.

In Quebec City, the military’s presence can be felt everywhere. From regularily seeing military vehicles to seeing uniformed soldiers in stores or hospital emergency rooms (I recently listened to the life story of one young soldier in the eye emergency department who didn’t speak enough French to visit emerge on his own). Between the citadel and CFB Valcartier, as an Anglophone, it’s hard to not bump up against the millitary over the course of daily life.

In 2022, a report into the far right and the Canadian military found that the number of soldiers who were radicalizing into full blown fascists was on the rise. Just last week, a military group chat was exposed where members shared racist, misogynistic and hateful posts.

This radicalization feeds into the far right ecosystem in this city, and anywhere that the military has an outsized presence.

Just down the highway from CFB Valcartier, about 20 KMs south, is the Islamic Cultural Centre. There, in 2017, a gun enthusiast entered the mosque and murdered six men while they prayed. From when he was a teenager, he planned to do a mass shooting. Two months earlier, he was in a Ste-Foy mall with his guns, ready to kill people. But he changed his mind, until Justin Trudeau welcomed Syrian refugees to Canada and he decided that he would target the mosque.

The shooter was not connected to the military, though he surely had gone, at least once, to the sporting goods store Latulippe. Everyone goes to Latulippe (it is one of my favourite stores). And while it’s impossible that the shooter was ever serviced by Raphaël Lagacé, one of the men arrested for terror charges, they were in the same kind of universe: gun-loving, young men who were from this outpost of a city, and raised amid a non-stop barrage of anti-Other hatred spewed by politicians and radio hosts and TV stations and the newspapers.  (more...)

Quebec City's military-far right nexus