Bomb Destroys Military Recruitment Center in Quebec on Canada Day

The bomb threat was phoned in around 2:45 a.m. and soon afterward an explosion blew out windows and splintered furniture at a Canadian Forces recruitment office.

The office in question sits on the ground floor of a hotel in downtown Trois-Rivières, about 150 kilometres east of Montreal; no one was injured, although one neighbour described the clamour as so intense “I thought my brick wall had fallen down.”

The provincial Sureté du Quebec has taken charge of the investigation and more than two dozen detectives spent Friday scouring the scene, closing off the city’s downtown with a security cordon and conducting forensic tests in nearby phone booths.
[fall down brick wall... of society!]

An obscure anti-globalization and anti-war group calling itself Résistance internationaliste claimed responsibility, saying it had planted a “non-improvised device” – police were close-mouthed as to the nature of the bomb.

The collective, of which little is known, was previously linked to the bombing of an oil-industry spokesman’s car in 2006 and the explosion of a Hydro-Quebec electrical tower in 2004.

In a document sent to various media outlets, the group alternately denounces “corporate oligarchy,” the petroleum industry, Canada’s “military colonialism” and the occupation of Afghanistan. It says its aim is to ensure that the political and economic powers “cannot pursue with impunity their indoctrination efforts to justify their imperial adventures.”

It also rails at length against the army and says “this operation … is our resistance to the army’s brainwashing and intensive solicitation of a youth confronted by the emptiness of a demeaning society. We cannot give the state a monopoly on violence.”

The attack echoes those carried out in the 1960s and early 1970s by the Front de libération du Quebec, a separatist splinter group that once targeted an army recruitment centre, killing a night watchman.

That the explosion was preceded by at least one warning – the communiqué said there were two – and took place at an hour when the bomber or bombers knew the office would be deserted are not without significance, according to anti-terrorism experts.

Some suggest it could be one individual’s handiwork, or that of a small group of radicals, and that their choice of target has less to do with an anti-military message than it might first appear.

“It’s no more than attacking an icon of government, it seems like a target of opportunity more than anything,” said Wayne Boone, an expert on risk management and security policy at Carleton University.

Coming as it did on the heels of the G20 summit in Toronto, where a small band of violent protesters smashed windows and torched police cars, and Canada Day – not an especially popular holiday among nationalist fringe elements – the attack points to a flare-up among anarchist groups, Prof. Boone said.

The emerging trend in Europe is a rapprochement between violent anti-government groups and militant environmentalists and animal-rights activists, and the sprawling denunciations contained in the communiqué hint at a similar anarchist bent with Résistance internationaliste.

“I don’t see a strong political message out of this,” Prof. Boone said. “Just as I didn’t see a strong political message out of G20 – four police cruisers set on fire and smashed windows do not a movement make.”

David Harris, an Ottawa-based lawyer and security consultant (and former member of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service), said the attack may be part of an emerging trend in this country as well. There have been as many as a dozen attacks of varying intensity – a bank was firebombed in Ottawa recently – in the past five or six years.

“My impression – and it is impressionistic – is that we’re seeing this sort of thing very much in development,” he said, adding what separates Friday’s attack is that it was aimed at the military.

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