An exploration of right-wing extremist incidents in Atlantic Canada

Abstract

The study of Canadian right-wing extremism from a security context is in its infancy, with only a handful of empirical and theoretical studies emerging on the topic within the last decade. With the increase of right-wing extremism violence in Canada such as the 2014 Moncton shooting and the 2017 Quebec City mosque attack, there is a pressing need to better understand the breadth, depth, and extent of Canadian right-wing extremism. The current paper presents the preliminary findings from a larger cross-Canadian research project on right-wing extremism and focuses exclusively on Atlantic Canada (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland & Labrador, and Prince Edward Island). A comprehensive scoping of opensource documents of right-wing extremist incidents in Atlantic Canada from January 2000 to December 2019 and their related attributes were compiled into a dataset, and then used to explore the distribution, breadth, type, and extent of right-wing extremist activity in the Maritime provinces. Given the focus of previous research upon urban aspects of Canadian right-wing extremism, and that Atlantic Canada is more rural in comparison to the rest of Canada, the breakdown of occurrences of different types of rightwing extremist activities based upon rurality are also examined.