Domestic extremism ‘here to stay’ in Canada, Trudeau’s security advisor says

Jody Thomas, Trudeau’s national security advisor, said the 'Freedom Convoy' meant to overthrow the federal government and warranted emergency measures.

Canadians have lived in a “splendid, naïve sort of superiority” that domestic extremism is not an issue in the country, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security advisor says.

Not only is that “simply not true,” Jody Thomas told an Ottawa security conference Thursday, the issue is also “here, and it is here to stay.”

“We have a lot to unpack in this country in terms of understanding what’s going on and its impact on democracy, our institutions and our society,” Thomas said during a panel of the Ottawa Conference on Security and Defence.

“This is a problem that is not going away,” Thomas said, and it will require “significant” effort to “try and understand and resolve.”

Thomas, who moved from the Department of National Defence to the National Security and Intelligence Advisor role in January, was responding to questions about the government’s use of emergency powers to address the convoy protests that paralyzed Ottawa and blockaded border crossings in February.

Even if international border crossings — and the billions in cross-border trade that depends on them — were not blocked, Thomas said she believed the Ottawa protest was significant enough to warrant the use of the Emergencies Act.

While styled as a protest against mandatory vaccinations for cross-border truckers, protest organizers’ overriding goal — stated publicly — was to force democratically elected governments to remove all COVID-19 public health measures or be replaced.

“The people who organized -that protest, and there were several factions there, there’s no doubt (they) came to overthrow the government,” Thomas said.