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In Quebec City, Military Culture Collides with Far-Right Extremism
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Published 6:30, MARCH 16, 2026
Much of downtown Quebec City is a battlefield, the site of military clashes from 1759 to 1760 that pulled what would become Canada away from French control and into British hands.
Military installations are everywhere, from the nineteenth-century citadel—home to the still-active 2nd Battalion of the storied Royal 22e Regiment—to the cannons that my children play on as if they were plastic playground equipment. Construction unearths a cannon ball from 1759. Construction reportedly unearths a common grave where soldiers were buried at the site of the old hospital in Saint-Roch.
When Prime Minister Mark Carney gave his first speech to Canadians this year at the citadel, he had the military front of mind. “In this new era,” he said, “Canadian leadership will be defined not just by the strength of our values but also by the value of our strength. We are undertaking the largest buildup in our military and security capabilities since the Second World War.”
Values. The title of Carney’s own book. A word that is also intimately linked to Quebec’s identitarian movements. From the Quebec values charter, introduced in 2013 ostensibly to cement the province as home to a secular society, to activists who claim that Muslim values clash with Quebec culture, this question of values underpins much of how white ethno-nationalist movements have grown their popularity over the past decades.
Non-Quebecers might be surprised to hear that Quebec City is notorious for its unique right-wing ecosystem. Many politicians and media outlets regularly spout Islamophobic rhetoric. Researcher Maxim Fortin, who charted the evolution of Quebec City’s far right in a 2020 article for the independent quarterly À babord!, points to Quebecor-owned media like TVA and Le Journal de Québec as being “the main spokesperson for Quebec’s identitarian anxiety related to immigration.” The radiosphere is particularly caustic, with stations such as Radio X feeding movements against bike lanes and public transit and stoking hatred for Muslims.
Despite Quebec City’s military presence and its far-right ecosystem, it’s rare that the two are discussed together. But in July 2025, these worlds collided when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced that it had arrested four men for allegedly being involved in organizing an ideologically extremist anti-government militia to seize land. All of the accused were from the Quebec City area, and two of them, Marc-Aurèle Chabot and Matthew Forbes, were active members of the Canadian Armed Forces and had been stationed nearby, at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier.
Chabot was a corporal with the Royal 22e Regiment and was trying to establish a paramilitary group called Hide n Stalk. In 2024, the police seized his arms cache and found munitions that had allegedly been taken from the armed forces. A photo released by the RCMP shows some of the eighty-three firearms, 11,000 rounds of ammunition, and other weapons that authorities seized. One of the men arrested, Raphaël Lagacé, was a gun activist who posted multiple times on Facebook that he opposed federal anti-gun legislation Bill C-21.
The RCMP linked the four men to “ideologically motivated violent extremism” (IMVE), a catch-all term. After the arrests, three of them were charged with facilitating terrorist activity, while the fourth was charged with weapons offences. According to a report published by the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, these are the first terrorism charges ever laid against active members of the CAF.
I haven’t yet come across published research that links far-right activity to a community with proximity to military bases, or vice versa. But living in Quebec City, I see the impact that a culture of guns, military discipline, and military aesthetic have here. I’ve never lived in a place with such a strong military presence before, nor have I lived anywhere with such an organized far right. The influence of both over Quebec City’s cultural and social environment is clear.
In 2021, a report from Public Safety Canada identified that IMVE was on the rise, with Canadians participating in more than 6,000 online IMVE platforms. The report defines IMVE as reflecting “anti-authority, xenophobic, gender-driven, and other types of violent extremist views,” and notes that the violent manifestation of it in Canada has been embodied by the anti-governmental attack waged by Justin Bourque in New Brunswick in 2014, Alek Minassian’s incel attack in Toronto in 2018, and Alexandre Bissonnette’s mass shooting at the Islamic Cultural Centre in the Quebec City suburb of Sainte-Foy in 2017.
In 2020, two members of the Canadian Rangers made headlines, one for being active in hate forums and the other for crashing his car into the gates of the prime minister’s residence. Also in 2020, former reservist Patrik Mathews was arrested in Delaware after being identified as a member of the Base, an extremist group, and fleeing Canada. Multiple CAF members were investigated for ties to the 2022 so-called Freedom Convoy, including two members of Canada’s most elite force, JTF 2. In June 2025, journalist David Pugliese reported on images he found in a Facebook group—that had been operating for at least fourteen years—in which CAF members shared racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, and antisemitic messages.
In announcing the four arrests last summer, the RCMP released a grainy photo showing seven people, all dressed in fatigues, pointing their guns at a target, inside of a quarry. The RCMP did not release the identities of the other three people in the photo.
Court documents show that the RCMP had surveilled around seventeen members of a group doing weapons training in a hunting area in May 2023. RCMP surveillance continued that summer; another photo showed fifteen individuals who appear to be participating in the Hide n Stalk training group.
Police documents released in January identified that a fifth member of the group became an informant and shared intelligence with the RCMP about the group’s plans. According to reporting in La Presse, the informant had served in the military from 2009 to 2021 and participated in four trainings with the group. Their evidence showed that group members exchanged misogynistic and antisemitic comments and jokes.
In an interview with Le Devoir, Chabot’s father said the men were just having fun, getting together to camp—implying that their behaviour is normal.
QUEBEC’S NORMAL is far from reassuring. In the past two decades, Islamophobia has gone from the fringe to the mainstream. Starting in 2007, debates around what was an appropriate amount of religious acceptance and tolerance—often referred to in short form as reasonable accommodations—created common cause among racists and feminists who viewed Islam as a religion that oppresses women, says Khaoula Zoghlami, assistant professor in the department of communications and information at Université Laval. In this way, Islamophobia converged across the political spectrum.
Since then, there have been numerous examples of women who wear the hijab or niqab being demonized, backlash against the availability of halal meat (both the Parti Québécois and the Coalition Avenir Québec have raised concerns about halal meat, with the PQ even questioning whether it is sanitary) and Muslims praying in the street. In 2024, there was controversy around a public school where teachers, many of whom were of North African origin, were found to have created a toxic environment for students; these concerns were spun into accusations that those teachers were Islamists.
In 2019, under the CAQ government, Islamophobia became codified through Bill 21, which excluded many Muslim women and others who wear religious symbols from certain public sector jobs. The more recent Bill 9, tabled in 2025 and not yet passed, seeks to expand the exclusions to more workplaces. Such legislation, combined with the ongoing culture war, has emboldened outlets like Radio X to push racist narratives even harder, says Zoghlami.
These tensions also helped fuel organized white-supremacist movements, writes Fortin. In 2016, a group called Atalante, which grew out of the hate-rock band Légitime Violence, began performing acts of charity like handing out bags of food to people who were unhoused, while plastering the city with stickers and posters depicting men looking heroic, with the message “Defend your race, join us.” The week before the shooting at the Quebec City mosque, Atalante reportedly put up white-nationalist posters in post-secondary campuses across the city.
Starting around 2015, La Meute, Soldiers of Odin, and Storm Alliance took their place in the city alongside Atalante, though none was as extreme. La Meute was founded by Patrick Beaudry and Éric Venne, both CAF veterans. According to reporting in La Presse, Beaudry was an elite parachutist in Yugoslavia and a contractor in Afghanistan in 2011. La Meute obsessed about the supposed threat of Islam taking over Quebec’s government and society, framing followers of the faith as enemies of so-called Quebec values.
Between 2015 and June 2019, according to Fortin’s reporting, Quebec’s far right organized at least 116 public events, from rallies and banner drops to food distribution and a religious service; Atalante alone organized eighty-four of them. At the same time, a 2019 report from La Ligue des droits et libertés du Quebec (Quebec’s human rights league) showed that crimes based on ethnicity rose by 65.5 percent and on religion by 64.6 percent from 2014 to 2017.
The hatred came to a head when, on January 29, 2017, Bissonnette walked into the Islamic Cultural Centre and gunned down a roomful of people in prayer. Six men were killed and nineteen injured.
Bissonnette’s case might seem like an outlier: acting as a lone wolf, he didn’t belong to any formal far-right group and didn’t serve in the military. But his sentencing investigation found that he was a gun enthusiast who dreamed of carrying out a mass murder when he was a teenager. He was radicalized online, mostly by American outlets and personalities like Ben Shapiro, and consulted Islamophobic and anti-feminist websites. He told investigators that he was particularly stressed to see an increase in Muslim students at his school, Université Laval.
In an interview with a court-appointed psychologist, he revealed that he’d driven to a local mall with two loaded firearms and, while in the underground parking lot, considered killing himself or going into the mall and shooting others. He didn’t follow through at the time, though he was convinced that security cameras had captured him loading his weapons and that police would soon thereafter confiscate his guns. Months after the aborted mall attempt, Bissonnette saw a tweet from then prime minister Justin Trudeau, in which he promised “those fleeing persecution, terror & war” that Canadians would welcome them, regardless of their faith. This appeared to prompt Bissonnette to target his neighbourhood mosque.
For about a year, the shooting seemed to embolden right-wing groups. In 2017, as La Meute was organizing larger and larger rallies, Beaudry acknowledged to La Presse that he knew joining La Meute was against ethics codes in the armed forces. While La Meute was active on the streets, the group’s online presence was its most powerful engine.
In August 2017, Mohamed Labidi, then president of the Islamic Cultural Centre, had his car torched while it sat outside his home. Police told Le Journal de Montréal that the attack “had the character of a hate crime,” though Radio-Canada reported that one man was convicted of arson and sentenced to twelve months in prison.
“After the Quebec City mosque attack, we had the hope that it would have the effect of an electroshock, to say, ‘Look at the risk of hateful speech, of the fabrication of Muslims as dangerous, look at what this could lead to,’” says Zoghlami. “But what happened was the exact opposite. There was an acceleration and normalization of this hateful speech. Certain theories that were once conspiratorial, that came from the extreme right . . . have actually become common sense.”
Infighting and inertia led to the collapse of La Meute by 2019, around the time that other similar groups also dissolved. The COVID-19 pandemic brought in a different era of far-right organizing, which was centred around eschewing public health recommendations. The relationship between public health protests and the far right ramped up around the Freedom Convoy in 2022, but the hierarchical groups of the mid-2010s didn’t return to the scene.
Instead, they’ve given way to Nouvelle Alliance, a new far-right movement of young people that explicitly draws on military iconography and advocates for defending Quebec sovereignty through combat. The ethnonationalist group’s rallies include a colour guard and drum. To commemorate the death of Quebec’s first democratic revolutionaries, Les Patriotes, Nouvelle Alliance organized a military-style remembrance ceremony, complete with wreaths, in 2025. And this February, the RCMP announced they had arrested a teenager in Quebec City for recruiting for the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division.
Far-right media continue to shape Quebec society. In 2021, Radio X personality Éric Duhaime became the leader of the Quebec Conservatives, a party that he revived when he left his media job. While he has so far failed to win a seat, the polls put him closer and closer to getting elected.
The rise in fascist organizing deeply concerns Zoghlami. “Today, the masculinist movement is much more vocal in its antifeminism. It’s much more visible, more audacious, and with much more strength. They are talking about things that would have been impossible to say a decade ago; today, it’s accepted. Mainstream politics in the province are generally right wing, and so we have to ask: What even is the extreme right? The line is blurring between the two.”
THE CAF HAVE A history of extremism among their ranks. In 1993, members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment operating in Somalia shot two civilians, killing one. The victims, both Somali men, were shot in the back as they tried to flee Canadian soldiers who’d entrapped them. Twelve days later, members of the regiment tortured sixteen-year-old Shidane Abukar Arone to death. What became known as the Somalia Affair led the Canadian Airborne Regiment to be disbanded in 1995. That year, Canada launched the Somalia Inquiry, which aimed to identify what went wrong along the chain of command and assess the military’s internal culture.
The federal government ended the inquiry before its members could cross-examine all senior officers, and many of the officers and bureaucrats that the members did examine gave testimony that the final report described as evasive and deceptive. But in its final, though incomplete, report, the inquiry identified connections to extremist groups as being a problem that the military had not adequately addressed.
The inquiry heard, for example, that a search of the regiment’s quarters in Somalia found thirty-four Confederate flags. Reports at the time suggested many of the personnel were committed and active white supremacists.
Also within the regiment, which was based at CFB Petawawa in Ontario, a former corporal gave paramilitary training to members of the Heritage Front. The prominent neo-Nazi group operated throughout the 1990s, brought high-profile racist speakers to Canada, and mobilized around white supremacy. The group’s leader, Wolfgang Droege, reportedly told the CBC that some two dozen members of the Heritage Front were in the CAF. At CFB Petawawa, some soldiers had even gotten tattoos representing a group called the White Aryan Resistance.
Some of the inquiry’s conclusions focused on the need for the military to be more prepared to weed out extremist ideology among its soldiers. It recommended that superiors monitor soldiers’ connections to racist groups and that guidelines be developed to ensure that no CAF member would be allowed to join or participate in an extremist group. It also recommended anti-racism training to help leadership identify “signs of racism and involvement with hate groups.”
According to New York Times reporting from 1993, the government took the position that banning soldiers from these groups would be a violation of their Charter rights. But after the arrest of Patrik Mathews in January 2020, the CAF promised to address extremism in the military.
That March, Pugliese reported that the CAF had made little progress in the nearly three decades since the Somalia Affair. Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, he also pointed to the crossover between the military and the civilian far right, citing a 2018 military police report which noted that “current and former military members find that their skills are valued by these groups” and that “they provide structure to these organizations, therefore affording them the ability to gain positions of leadership.”
In 2019, the government created the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, an independent body comprised of government appointees. In 2021, these appointees similarly found that the relationship between members of the armed forces and far-right groups goes both ways: “The presence of white supremacy within the Canadian military has been well documented. White supremacist groups actively seek individuals with prior military training and experience, or conversely, encourage individuals to enlist in order to gain access to specialized training, tactics and equipment.”
In 2022, the Minister of National Defence Advisory Panel on Systemic Racism and Discrimination released their own report, which found that sexism has pushed away women recruits and systemic racism has kept racialized people underrepresented in the CAF, and the prevalence of sexual misconduct is “repulsing” to many potential new recruits. They concluded that the cultural problems within the military amounted to a national security risk.
This concern isn’t limited to Canada. According to reporting in Politico, this January alone, nine members of a German elite paratrooper unit were dismissed and fifty-five were investigated for right-wing extremist activity. The German military has seen some 400 to 500 such cases annually over the past few years, says Yannick Veilleux-Lepage, associate professor and expert in extremism and the military at the Royal Military College.
Unlike the German military, the CAF doesn’t publish data about its members that would help capture the prevalence of extremist views. Veilleux-Lepage says researchers have to rely on media reports, freedom of information requests, and data from other militaries, including Germany’s, to piece together a picture. Even if it turns out the proportion of far-right extremists in the armed forces is relatively low compared to the general population, the risk is potentially much higher, says Veilleux-Lepage: military members have access to weapons and training that most civilians do not, and they could therefore do greater damage.
This risk may become even more important as Carney plans to triple military spending in Canada over the next decade and boost the number of citizen soldiers in a supplementary reserve from 4,400 to 300,000. Carney has also promised to increase Canada’s military spending to 5 percent of its gross domestic product, to meet the arbitrary target pushed by United States president Donald Trump and accepted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, while defunding public services to pay for it. To put that into perspective, Canada spends 3.9 percent of its GDP on all elementary and secondary school funding, according to Statistics Canada data from 2023.
If IMVE organizing within and outside of the military is on the rise, how can the CAF ensure that this spending boost does not go toward far-right elements within the military? A spokesperson responded that “there are already rigorous security and screening procedures in place for everyone who joins the CAF, and these measures assist with identifying and preventing risks.”
When I reached out to the Department of National Defence to ask whether it was looking into connections between the military and far-right civilians, a spokesperson replied, “There are external experts who specialize in these types of socio-cultural dynamics, who would be better suited to speak on this.”
The post In Quebec City, Military Culture Collides with Far-Right Extremism first appeared on The Walrus.
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