Just over 24 hours later, a gunman walked into a Quebec City mosque during Sunday prayers and opened fire, killing six and injuring 19. The incident had an immediate effect on the handful of Quebec’s far-right groups. It became more difficult for these groups to hide behind the anti-immigration fig leaf, with much of the news media in Quebec City and elsewhere suggesting these radical fringe groups weren’t simply critical observers but part of the overall problem of anti-Muslim sentiment in the province.

Soldiers of Odin’s neo-Nazi roots in Finland were exposed, forcing the Quebec branch to defend itself from charges that it, too, had neo-Nazi sympathies. Its membership collapsed, and the remaining members have since largely ceased its nightly “foot patrols” in supposedly Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods. Today, groups like Pegida Quebec (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) are as likely to attack the self-described "antifa" movement targeting as they are issues of Muslim immigration.

But not La Meute. Though the group has had its share of leadership issues over the last several months, more than 6,300 people have joined the group since the mosque shooting, according to La Meute’s membership list.

BuzzFeed News spent several months monitoring La Meute’s secret Facebook group, and obtained a list of the Facebook group’s nearly 44,000 members — far larger than La Meute’s public page. As well, the secret group is demonstrably less guarded in its language and tone.

Its membership list boasts dozens of politicians, civil servants, and first responders — along with 228 active Canadian military members. Yet it is impossible to know whether all these people are bona fide devotees to La Meute’s cause. In fact, it appears that the group contains numerous people who have nothing to do with La Meute and never agreed to join the organization or its secret Facebook group.

In any case, among the Facebook group’s members are Jacques Gagné, a former police officer in a Quebec City suburb. On Oct. 14, La Meute spokesperson Sylvain Brouillette announced Gagné was the group’s “security chief." Also listed as a member: an active member of the Hells Angels who was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. (Neither Gagné nor the Hells Angels member responded to requests for comment.)

La Meute also has a carefully crafted public image, perhaps best displayed on its publicly accessible Facebook page, as a pro-West group whose main concern is illegal immigration and religious extremism of all types. Tended mostly by Sylvain Brouillette, who is also a member of La Meute’s nine-person council, the page features bromides to secularism and freedom of speech — along with the occasional inspirational quote from Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein.

La Meute’s hidden face, meanwhile, is quite the opposite. On its private Facebook group, members often devolve into conspiracy theories about Muslims, the alleged “Islamification” of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government and near-endless discussions about the use of pigs' heads, blood, and entrails to prevent the building of mosques and cemeteries in Quebec. Paradoxically, members often accuse Muslims themselves of vandalizing their own mosques and holy places with pork products to drum up sympathy for their causes.



As BuzzFeed News also found, La Meute’s Facebook membership list is full of people who have absolutely no idea that they are listed as members of the country’s largest anti-Muslim group. And yet, despite the wolf pack being smaller and far more radical than it lets on, the group is cloaked in an air of legitimacy not afforded other like-minded groups — and has likely influenced Quebec’s always fraught political discourse when it comes to Muslims and immigration.