ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of extremist violence in Canada, past and present, alongside an examination of the social impacts of this violence and the documented harms stemming from Canada’s traditional overreliance on reactive, enforcement-based counterterrorism approaches. In a broader context of polarisation, and an increasingly complex threat landscape, the national security apparatus in Canada was expanded, starting in 2015, to include a host of intervention-based activities that fall under the banner of preventing and countering violent extremism (hereafter P/CVE). Canada’s approach to P/CVE, which is organised and facilitated at the federal level by the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence and specified in the National Strategy on Countering Radicalisation to Violence, benefitted from important lessons learned in other nations, which are discussed in the context of select multi-agency approaches to intervention programming currently operating in Canada. Indeed, Canada’s approach involves prioritising the development of resilience-based programming that emerges from context-specific local needs; the country’s enormous size and regional variation preclude a one-size-fits-all approach to ‘doing P/CVE’. This variation underscores the importance of establishing an evidence-based ethos that involves rigorous early (and subsequent) evaluation to bolster P/CVE programming at an early stage of implementation, thereby positioning it for success over the longer-term.
