The government also added the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group whose members participated in the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; The Base, another neo-Nazi group; and the Russian Imperial Movement, a Russian nationalist group with members linked to violent activity abroad.

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Senior government officials said they were not aware of any other jurisdiction that has listed the Proud Boys as a terrorist group. They said that they had been looking at the group for “a while” and that while the insurrection on the Capitol was not the “driving” factor for the group’s inclusion on the list, the event on January 6 produced a “lot of information that came into the public domain” and was added to the intelligence reports that informed the decision.

The Canadian government says ideologically motivated violent extremism is “driven by a range of grievances and ideas from across the traditional ideological spectrum” and centres on “an extremist’s willingness to incite, enable or mobilise to violence.”

It encompasses xenophobic violence; anti-authority violence; gender-driven violence, such as anti-LGBTQ violence or violent misogyny espoused by involuntary celibates, or “incels”; and other grievance-driven violence that is not clearly affiliated with an organised group but shaped by “echo chambers of online hate.”

The Proud Boys was formed in 2016 by Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, a Canadian. (He has since distanced itself from the group.) The far-right, male-only group of self-described “Western chauvinists” has a history of street violence, including against Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Canada said the group played a “pivotal role” in the attack on the Capitol.

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Analysts say the Proud Boys were emboldened when Trump, pressed during the first presidential debate to condemn the group, told members to “stand back and stand by.”

The group celebrated the remarks, which quickly became featured in memes. Several social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, have barred the Proud Boys, but members have found new homes on apps such as Telegram and Parler.

National security analysts have in recent years warned of the growing threat that right-wing extremist groups pose in Canada. They say they are more united than in the past and bolstered by the transnational alliances they’ve built with counterparts in the United States and Europe.

“We are more and more preoccupied by the number of ultra-right-wing extremists . . . white nationalism, ethno nationalism, white supremacists,” David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Services, told a Canadian Senate committee in 2019.

Several months later, Canada announced that the neo-Nazi groups Blood & Honor and Combat 18 would be the first ideologically motivated extremist groups to be included on its listing of terrorist entities.

Public Safety Canada reported in 2018 that the “principal terrorist threat” in the country continued to stem from “violent ideologies and terrorist groups, such as Daesh or al-Qaeda,” but it was also “concerned about threats posed by those who harbor right-wing extremist views.” (Daesh is another name for the Islamic State group.)

It cited several examples of right-wing extremist attacks in Canada, including the shooting of three Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officers in 2014 by a man motivated by anti-law-enforcement and anti-government beliefs and a 2017 shooting at a Quebec City mosque that killed six worshippers by a man who was “motivated, at least in part, by his self-admitted fear of Muslims.”

Neither of the men was charged with terrorism offences.

In 2020, a 17-year-old accused of fatally stabbing a woman at a Toronto massage parlor became the first Canadian charged with terrorism.

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Canadian lawmakers unanimously passed a motion in Parliament last week urging the federal government to “immediately” designate the Proud Boys as a terrorist entity, but the move was nonbinding and was met with a backlash from some anti-hate groups and national security analysts.

They said it was inappropriate for lawmakers to be weighing in on and potentially politicising what is supposed to be a legal process guided by evidence and intelligence.