Canada designates the Proud Boys as a terrorist entity
- par Thibaud Popelin
- dans Monde
- — Fév 4, 2021
They charge that Nordean was near the front of the crowd of rioters and then confronted the vastly outnumbered Capitol Police officers.
Asked whether the United States will follow Canada and designate Proud Boys as a terrorist entity, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the U.S. has a domestic extremism review underway.
US authorities have charged several members of the Proud Boys in connection with the Jan 6. attack in Washington.
The Cornwallis statue was later removed in 2018 and though there was no violence at the Proud Boys protest, several of the men who were serving military were reprimanded for their actions.
The move comes after the NDP proposed a motion to designate the organization as such.
"I understand why it feels good to call this organization a terrorist organization and why it might send the right signal but I think it also sends a false signal", he said.
Blair on Wednesday repeatedly denied any political influence in the decision to list the Proud Boys and three other right-wing extremist organizations, which officials have lumped under the catch-all term "ideologically motivated violent extremist groups".
The government calls the Proud Boys a neo-fascist organisation with semiautonomous chapters located in the United States, Canada, and internationally. According to the government, "members of the group espouse misogynistic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and/or white supremacist ideologies and associate with white supremacist groups".
Senior officials speaking on background ahead of Blair's announcement said authorities had been monitoring and collecting evidence about the Proud Boys and other right-wing extremist groups before the Capitol Hill attack on January 6.
"In the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, we have seen signals of escalation towards violence from a number of different groups including the Proud Boys".
The remaining listed entities are affiliates of Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria group, as well as the militant Kashmiri liberation group Hizbul Mujahideen.
"Canada will not tolerate ideological, religious or politically motivated acts of violence", Blair said.
"We've concerned about who might be caught up in that net, or down the road that [expanded legislation] could be exploited to include BIPOC or anti-racist groups that the state doesn't like", the group's executive director Evan Balgord told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview Wednesday.
Earlier on Wednesday, Reuters reported that the Justice Department is in the early stages of exploring whether it might be able to charge members of far-right groups involved in the storming of the Capitol under a federal law usually used against organised crime, according to two law enforcement sources.
In response to the federal suit, which is still pending in Alabama, the law center said McInnes has acknowledged an "overlap" between the Proud Boys and white nationalist groups. "Had Trump won the election, I'm confident the Liberals would not have gone after the Proud Boys", Wiseman said.
Canada placed two right-wing extremist groups, Blood & Honour, an worldwide neo-Nazi network, and its armed branch, Combat 18, on the list in 2019.
