CSIS Stopped Monitoring Right-Wing Extremism Ahead of Mosque Massacre
Less than a year before Alexandre Bissonnette walked into a Quebec City mosque and took six lives in cold blood, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) stopped monitoring right-wing extremism. As pointed out in a recent Toronto Star story , an annual Security Intelligence Review Committee (a CSIS watchdog group) report states that CSIS ceased investigating right-wing extremism as they determined it wasn’t a “national security threat.” Instead, the national security agency decided the far right was best addressed by local policing. CSIS ended its investigation of right-wing extremism in March 2016, according to the report. It described activities of right-wing extremists as close to "lawful protest, advocacy, and dissent” and did not meet “the threshold of a CSIS investigation.” This turn of events doesn’t come as a shock to Ryan Scrivens, a scholar at Concordia University who co-authored an exhaustive report on the state of right-wing extr