Four people, including two active members of the Canadian Armed Forces, are facing charges after allegedly plotting to forcibly take possession of land in the Quebec City area.
Three of the suspects, allegedly motivated by “violent extremism,” were planning to create an anti-government militia, and “took concrete actions” to facilitate terrorist activity, the RCMP said Tuesday. Two 24-year-olds and a 25-year-old allegedly took part in military-style training using a variety of firearms and high-capacity magazines, police said.
“The three accused were planning to create (an) anti-government militia,” the Mounties said in a news release. “To achieve this, they took part in military-style training, as well as shooting, ambush, survival and navigation exercises.”
Marc-Aurèle Chabot, 24, and Raphaël Lagacé, 25, both of Quebec City, and Simon Angers-Audet, 24, of Neuville, Que., are charged with facilitating a terrorist activity. They are also facing additional charges relating to the alleged illegal storage of firearms, and possession of explosives and prohibited devices.
A fourth suspect, 33-year-old Matthew Forbes of Pont-Rouge, Que., has been charged with possessing firearms, prohibited devices and explosives, among other offences.
All four were arrested early Tuesday in Quebec City.
In an email, the Department of National Defence confirmed that two of the suspects are active members of the Armed Forces. “The Canadian Armed Forces is taking these allegations very seriously and has fully participated in the investigation led by the RCMP,” the department said.
The charge sheet says the acts are alleged to have taken place between June 2021 and January 2024 in Quebec City, Montreal, Rolphton, Ont., and Petawawa, Ont., and elsewhere in Quebec, Ontario and Canada.
The suspects were expected to appear in court on Tuesday afternoon. Police have not identified which suspects were active members of the Armed Forces.
Police say the investigation began in March 2023. Searches conducted in January 2024 in Quebec City led to the seizure of 16 explosive devices, about 11,000 rounds of ammunition and other weapons. The charge sheets say the suspects had in their possession weapons including grenades, night vision goggles, high-capacity magazines, and improperly stored firearms.
None of the allegations have been proven in court.
Recruitment through social media
RCMP Cpl. Erique Gasse, described the case as “ideologically motivated violent extremism.”
The suspects wanted to start an anti-government “community” north of Quebec City, and allegedly used a private Instagram account to recruit members and supporters, he said. RCMP distributed a photo from that Instagram account showing seven people in military-style uniforms brandishing firearms. Gasse did not say who was pictured.
“We know there were followers on that site,” he said. “They were trying to recruit people who had knowledge about guns and they were telling people where they were training in Quebec or in Ontario.”
When asked about the possibility of more arrests, Gasse said the investigation of the four suspects was complete but new probes could begin if more evidence comes to light.
“In no time the population was at risk, because we had some mechanism, if I can say so, to watch them,” Gasse said. “We know the population was not at risk whatsoever at any time.”
RCMP Staff Sgt. Camille Habel noted that participating in training exercises or viewing the accused group’s content is not, in itself, a criminal offence. “What it comes down to is who’s willing to use violence in order to support their cause, and that’s when it becomes terrorism,” she said.
Habel said terrorism investigations are long and complex, partly because they require police to prove that people’s alleged actions are motivated by ideology, beyond hate or criminal intent.
“That intent and that ideology is hard to prove,” she said in a phone interview, adding that sometimes RCMP need to forego laying terrorism-related charges in order to make a quick arrest on other grounds in the interest of public safety.
“In this case, we absolutely could prove the ideology, and what they were planning to do was a terrorist offence,” she said.
Habel said the suspects were allegedly motivated by anti-authority or anti-government sentiment, which she described as a belief system that can be influenced by a range of other ideologies as well as personal grievances.
“We’ll see quite often with people that are either anti-authority or anti-government is that they have many grievances with the government or whatever (authority) that’s around them and they want to change it,” she said. “And in order to change it, you need your own society where you will be able to enforce your own set of values.”
‘According to them, the state is the enemy of the people’
David Hofmann, an associate professor at the University of New Brunswick and researcher with the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, said it was just a matter of time before arrests of this nature would emerge.
He said these types of groups have been increasingly cropping up across the country over the past decade, but most tend to be in the early stages of radicalization — planning and gathering weapons and ammunition. The amount and types of weapons seized suggests the group arrested Tuesday had reached a higher level of “operational sophistication,” he added.
“If they’re gathering explosives, they’ve obviously moved to an operational stage that was dangerous and concerning,” Hofmann said.
Mathieu Colin, a University of Sherbrooke researcher who specializes in terrorism, extremism and radicalization, suggests these allegations don’t concern the Canadian Armed Forces at large, but that in Quebec, extremists groups are actively trying to recruit members of the military.
“They know how to handle guns, they know how to manage explosives, they know how to form and to train other people,” Colin said. “So it is valuable assets for these kinds of groups, actually. So I would say that what is happening right now in Quebec is part of a larger trend that we see right now in Canada.”
Colin adds it is also quite common for militias to want to seize land, as has been alleged against the accused.
“Where they can live and train and et cetera, because they want to oppose the states, because they want to delegitimize the states, because according to them, the state is the enemy of the people.”
–With files from Morgan Lowrie and Kyle Duggan, The Canadian Press, and Gareth Madoc-Jones, CityNews Montreal