Article content continued

But some have pointed to signs of nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment in the social media activities of Alexandre Bissonnette, 27, the former Université Laval student charged with six counts of murder and five of attempted murder.

Police said the suspect was unknown to them prior to his arrest on Sunday night, when he called 911 to turn himself in. It remains unclear how he was able to orchestrate the attack without ever coming to the attention of authorities.

“I’ve found that there tends to be less serious attention paid to the right wing,” said Daniel Gallant, a former white supremacist who left the hate movement and is currently a social worker and law student in British Columbia.

Now focused on preventing youths from joining extremist groups, Gallant said the reluctance to apply the tools of terrorism to the far right is a problem. “With this inconsistent view of what terrorism is, we end up with all these gaps.”

He said a simple look at Canada’s history showed the far right has been violent. He also believes it is on the rise, partly as a result of the populist political debate taking place in the United States and Europe. “I think that we need to pay attention,” he said.

Hate groups were once a key concern of CSIS, which infiltrated the racist Heritage Front, causing its collapse in the 1990s. Since then, followers of al-Qaida-type ideology have become Canada’s main terrorism focus.

The most recent CSIS annual report, covering the 2013-2014 fiscal year, said right-wing extremists were “fragmented and primarily pose a threat to public order and not to national security.”