Is Fiction Stranger than Truth?

‘Four Arrested in Alleged Extremist Terror Plot’ was the headline on the front-page in the Wednesday July 9, 2025 edition of The Gazette, the Montreal English-language newspaper of record.  As I read through the story, I experienced a sense of déja vu. The events being recounted bore a strong resemblance to the plot of one of my novels, ‘Shul for Scandal’.

In the article in the newspaper four men organized a para-military group with the objective of seizing by force a piece of land north of Quebec City. The article did not state what the ultimate goal of the organization was, but it quoted a criminologist, Barbara Perry, director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology saying that the details pointed to a far-right ideology. She was quoted as saying, “They were ready to do some damage.” Two of the organizers were in the Canadian Forces, and every member was a gun enthusiast.

A photo in the article could have been used as an illustration in my book. It was taken by the RCMP and shows a cache of weapons in a warehouse setting with dividers made of chain-link fence. In my novel such an enclosure would have been adjacent to the firing range set up for members of the fictional organization, The Loyalist Society. Both the real group and my fictional one were actively recruiting members.

When I was writing ‘Shul for Scandal’ and came up with the notion of creating The Loyalist Society as a literary device for some of my characters to vent their rage at the established order of things here in Quebec and Canada, I wondered if I was going too far in proposing that such an event could occur. As it turns out, I possibly didn’t go far enough. Andy Riga of ‘The Gazette’ writes that far-right extremism has taken root in Canada. Some link its success to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the use of algorithms to reinforce and repeat extreme political views on social media. This leaves you with the impression that a majority holds that point of view. Riga attributes many current events, such as the COVID pandemic, to the current success of right-wing organizations. My novel is set in Montreal and takes place during the pandemic. Every time I read through it, I recall the dark limitations and concerns that we all lived under during that medical emergency. Although I didn’t understand the link between the pandemic and violence at the time that I wrote the book, I now find that the relationship between those two events is obvious.

Although I am patting myself on the back for having written about a situation that I felt was clever but imaginary yet seems to have recently occurred in real life, I did omit one important aspect of the real story: the relationship between men and military training. When you think about who looks to serve in the Canadian Forces, one can’t ignore the attraction that playing with guns and armaments must hold for some enlistees. The power that one can wield with a weapon, power that can be used for nefarious purposes, could hold a fascination for some. Barbara Perry observes that this case is a wake-up call for the military and for the country as a whole.

If I were to rewrite my novel in the light of what happened in the news, I would have given the members of ‘The Loyalist Society’ more military experience and more familiarity with firearms. The men in my novel were frustrated and were in the process of undertaking weapons training, but they were complete strangers to arms at the beginning of the novel. It would have made the novel more realistic had they had a military background, but in my experience, military service is a rarity in Canada.

 In Montreal, I know no one who has served in the military. I know exactly one person who owns a gun. They use it for hunting. I own a condo in Florida, however, and a number of my neighbors there have revealed that they own guns. Each and every time I have learned that someone owns guns, I am surprised. I don’t have a stereotype in my imagination for a likely gun owner. What does my unfamiliarity with arms say about me? More importantly, what does my squeamishness around guns say about Canadian gun culture?

Is gun ownership a class thing here in the Great North? Who serves in the Canadian military? Without consulting any statistics, I can venture to say that middle-class Jewish men do not seem to be enlisting in the Canadian Forces. In Canada, many of us abhor the gun culture of the United States. We cringe at the reports of mass shootings south of the border. At the same time, we have to be aware that Canada needs more than a few good men to defend the country. I certainly would not want to see Canada adopt the gun culture of its neighbor to the south, yet we cannot relegate the defense of our country to a group of  men who enlist for the purpose of acquiring skills using armaments because of their fascination for violence.

Attribute this to my stated squeamishness about guns, but I would not consider myself in any way qualified to propose a solution to this dilemma. In thinking about our situation, I reflected on countries like Switzerland and Israel. They both have obligatory military service. In Switzerland, only men are drafted, but in Israel, men and women are obliged to serve. Given the increased need for military defense for Canada in these times of Trumpian imperatives, this episode of military terrorism on our home turf is the canary in the coal mine telling us that our military culture has to change.