Hon. Marco E. L. Mendicino, P.C., M.P., Minister of Public Safety: I want to thank you, senator, for that question. Like you, I am deeply concerned about the rise of far-right extremism, a movement and a phenomenon that is based on ideologically extreme motivations. We have seen it take many different shapes including in the illegal blockades a little more than a year ago.

To be clear, what we are talking about is a very small but hardened subset of the individuals who participated in that — to use the words we’ve now heard publicly reported from the cell at Coutts — to “go down” for their cause. We all need to be very much sober about what that threat is.

At the same time, the government has taken concrete action, listing entities like the Proud Boys, which is a notorious White supremacist group based largely out of the United States. We need to continue to be vigilant in giving the tools to our establishment so that they can look at the intelligence and analyze it, but do it in the right way. This is what we’re doing on the accountability and the enforcement side.

The other thing the government needs to do, though, is to engage with Canadians to look at the root causes of these movements and address them through strategies of dialogue that address disinformation and make sure we are reducing those risks as we go forward. That’s work we’re doing with the G7, Five Eyes and others.