Half a century of terrifying Canada: Before jihadists, other extremists carried out hundreds of attacks

A good reminder that violent extremism is more common, and with more varied motives (e.g., various religions, Quebec separatism), than the current focus on Islam-inspired extremism:

The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia shot a Turkish diplomat in Ottawa in 1982. Neo-Nazi skinheads beat a man to death with baseball bats in Montreal in 1992, believing he was gay. A Vancouver doctor who performed abortions was shot in his kitchen in 1994.

These are some of the attacks catalogued in a first-of-its-kind database of Canadian terrorism launched at Carleton University last week. Available online to researchers, policy makers and the public, the inventory was created to promote a more scientific understanding of Canada’s experience with terrorism.

Described by its creators as “the largest collection of incidents involving terrorism or violent extremism in Canada that’s ever been compiled,” it will be analyzed for years to come, but it already has something to say about the past half-century of Canadian terror: there has been a lot of it committed by a lot of different groups.

“Canada has had much more terrorism than most Canadians are familiar with,” says project leader James O. Ellis, a research affiliate at the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, based at the University of British Columbia.

“I think I’ve also been surprised at the diversity from which violence has come.”

The 1,815 incidents, which caused 450 deaths, were carried out by religious groups, ethnic groups, separatists, leftists, rightists, supremacists, environmentalists and anarchists. Ellis said the “cosmopolitan, diversified demography of Canada is reflected in the variety of violence that’s occurred here.”

The Canadian Incident Database, online at extremism.ca, was put together in a year-and-a-half by a team from UBC, Simon Fraser University, Carleton University, the University of Waterloo and the Université de Montreal, with funding from Public Safety Canada and Defence Research and Development Canada.

Half a century of terrifying Canada: Before jihadists, other extremists carried out hundreds of attacks

Database link (which unfortunately does not allow searching by motivation/reason):

extremism.ca