A protester records a police line with their phone as police move in to clear downtown Ottawa near Parliament Hill of protesters after weeks of demonstrations on Saturday, Feb. 19, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin TangThe loosely knit collective that vocally opposed COVID-19 health measures has morphed into a movement waging a broader fight against "perceived government overreach," says a newly released assessment from Canada's spy agency.
The Canadian Press used the Access to Information Act to obtain the April 2023 CSIS brief, "Defining the 'Freedom' Movement," and related assessments of what the spy service calls ideologically motivated violent extremism. The change was also evident to those who saw and heard flag-waving protesters who lingered around the Parliament Buildings and gathered on highway overpasses.
CSIS is looking at the potential of such narratives to lead to disruption and violence, said Barbara Perry, director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism at Ontario Tech University. A movement does not have a formal or legitimate leader, but rather is guided by the people who join it in more or less spontaneous fashion, CSIS says.Perry said the move toward these looser, individual-based movements is "a worrying trend" in some respects because it's "much more difficult to identify which of those hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people" is going to commit an act of extreme violence.