Daniel Robson is a Canadian independent journalist specializing in digital extremism, national security, and counterterrorismOn 8 July 2025, RCMP teams swept two flats and a garage near Québec City and arrested four men — two of them active-duty soldiers — in the largest weapons haul ever made in a Canadian terrorism inquiry: 83 firearms, 16 improvised explosive devices and roughly 11 000 rounds of ammunition.Former CSIS analyst Jessica Davis called the seizure “the largest cache of equipment and weapons and explosive devices that have ever been found in a terrorist incident, by a long shot, in Canada”, a warning that ideologically motivated violent extremism is breaching institutions once thought secure.Court files say the suspects had already scoped rural property and used a private Instagram page to screen recruits before shifting to encrypted chats. Ottawa’s first serious bid to police such closed forums — Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act — died when Parliament was prorogued on 6 January 2025, stripping prosecutors of bespoke powers to compel platform co-operation..Even the flagship gun-control package misfires. Bill C-21, which received Royal Assent on 15 December 2023, codified the national handgun freeze and stiffened smuggling penalties, yet not a single clause stopped prohibited rifles, high-capacity magazines or bomb parts from slipping across the border into a suburban garage.That same border is now a geopolitical fault-line. On 10 July 2025 President Donald Trump vowed to impose a 35 per cent tariff on Canadian imports next month, saying Ottawa “refuses to stop fentanyl and criminals” from crossing south. RCMP affidavits in the Québec file suggest weapons travelled the opposite direction — highlighting a blind spot in joint border intelligence.Canada has already seen how offshore partners can spot extremists in uniform. In 2021 Morocco’s domestic intelligence agency, DGST, tipped off the FBI that U.S. Army private Cole Bridges was sharing tactical manuals with someone he believed was ISIS; Bridges was arrested before he could attack the 9/11 Memorial and is now serving 14 years. The episode proves that even outside the Five Eyes, specialised HUMINT can unmask radicalised soldiers continents away.The information pipeline also flows north. In 2020 RCMP intelligence helped U.S. agents arrest former Manitoba reservist Patrik Mathews, thwarting a neo-Nazi plot at a Virginia gun rally; Mathews is serving nine years in U.S. federal prison. Yet four summers later, two serving CAF members were allegedly building an arsenal at home — proof that insider radicalisation is a moving target..Ottawa is not starting from scratch. Section 17 of the CSIS Act lets the Service “cooperate with” any foreign agency when the Minister judges it in Canada’s interest, and the 2019 Security of Canada Information Disclosure Act encourages information-sharing across government to counter threats. CSIS’s 2024 public report lists “expanding foreign partnerships” as crucial to tackling ideologically motivated violent extremism.Still, statutes are only gateways; policymakers must decide how wide to open them. After Québec, the case for a formalised Global Insider-Threat Task Force is compelling: a real-time firearms-intelligence cell linking RCMP, CBSA and U.S. Homeland Security (modelled on Shiprider); targeted watch-list and biometrics exchanges with services that have proven track records against jihadist and accelerationist networks — Morocco’s DGST, Jordan’s GID and Europol among them; warrant-based access to encrypted extremist channels to revive the judicial tools lost with Bill C-63; and a Criminal Code amendment raising the maximum penalty for terrorist propaganda from 10 to 20 years — in line with the Crown’s current request for 14 years in the Patrick MacDonald (“Dark Foreigner”) case.The July bust shows what happens when domestic legislation outruns international intelligence links: a private Instagram page mutates into an underground armoury before the law even blinks. Canada’s next layer of defence must therefore be a mesh of partnerships — Western and non-Western, military and civilian — tight enough to catch the insider threat before it reloads.Daniel Robson is a Canadian independent journalist specializing in digital extremism, national security, and counterterrorism.about.me/danielrobsonx.com/DanielRobs77090
