Canadian Military Members Arrested on Anti-Government Terrorism Charges
On July 8, 2025, the RCMP announced that it had charged four individuals with offences relating to forcibly seizing land as part of an anti-government terrorist plot. The land the group was interested in wasn’t a government facility; instead, it was land that they could use to build a “new society”. Three individuals were charged with terrorism offences, and a host of weapons charges have also been laid in this case. Two of the men charged are active members of the military, while another one is a retired military member, and the fourth is a former civilian instructor with the Royal Canadian Air Cadets. They were also using Instagram to recruit new members. The group was active as far back as 2021, while the RCMP investigation began in March 2023. In January 2024, the RCMP conducted a raid and seized the group’s weapons, explosive devices, and other material. Not all the people involved in the group have been arrested or charged.
This case is both unprecedented and unsurprising.
Photo provided by the RCMP, and provided to CBC news.
A few things stand out to me about this case. The first, of course, is that some of these men are serving military members. While military members are no strangers to extremism, and there have been a number of arrests in other countries of retired and active duty military, this is the first time in Canada that we have seen terrorism charges against serving military members. Patrik Mathews, a former reservist and neo-Nazi and accelerationist, fled Canada and was ultimately charged (and pled guilty) to offences in the United States. (A few other former military members involved in extremism include Corey Hurren and Steven Chand.)
The second thing that stands out is the sheer number of weapons, explosive devices, and rounds of ammunition that were seized in the case. We’re talking 11,000 rounds of ammunition, 16 explosive devices, 83 firearms, 130 magazines, night vision goggles, and other military equipment. This is by far the largest cache of weapons and devices ever seized as part of a terrorism incident in Canada. It’s probably in the top 2% of terrorist-related seizures in Europe and even the US.¹
Finally, this case is anomalous from other cases in Canada because it involves a group. The vast majority of our terrorism cases have involved lone actors (or dyads). Lone actors tend to be harder to detect (they tend to let their intentions out far less than groups), and there are fewer leads for investigators to pick up.
These charges are part of the ongoing trend of rising ideologically-motivated violent extremism in Canada. Over the last 18 years, 77% of terrorist attacks have been perpetrated by anti-government, anti-authority, racist, anti-Muslim extremists.
Two cases that illustrate this, specifically in the context of anti-authority extremism, are the Justin Bourque shooting in New Brunswick in 2014 and the 2023 Saanich Bank robbery.
Just as troubling, however, is that only about 20% of arrests have been for ideologically-motivated violent extremism. Instead, arrests (a common method of disrupting terrorist activity) have focused on religiously-motivated (i.e. Al Qaeda, ISIL) terrorists. There’s a disparity here between what the RCMP has been able to disrupt and what the threat in Canada is.
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I’ve also been asked a number of times if the military is taking this issue seriously. To answer this, I’ll point to an illuminating Bluesky thread from my friend and colleague Leah West. Leah was part of a research project (Led by Barbara Perry and David Hoffman) studying right-wing extremism in the Canadian Armed Forces. The project was initiated by the CAF, and all the researchers got ethics clearance from their universities to engage in human subject research (i.e. interviews).² Despite this, the CAF never gave approval for the researchers to conduct interviews or work on bases. Leah states:
“Vance and the CAF wanted to be able to point to be doing something about the problem of IMVE in the ranks without really having to uncover the scope and depth of the issue, or at least have independent researchers confirm it.”
That’s pretty damning evidence that the CAF is not taking this issue seriously. And while I understand the inclination to “clean house” quietly, the issue of extremism in the CAF has gone unaddressed for too long.
Notes
¹ I welcome anyone who would like to prove me wrong. (Or right. If you have data on this, let me know, and I’d love to feature this research in my newsletter!)
² For anyone not steeped in academia, this is very common. Anytime you want to do interviews or engage human subjects in research, you have to get ethics clearance. I had to do it for my dissertation as well, even though there was a very low risk to anyone involved in my research.
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