The US authorities have charged several members of the Proud Boys in connection with the January 6 attack in Washington. Ottawa added 12 other groups to its list of terrorist entities — three neo-Nazi groups, eight organisations described as affiliates to al-Qaeda and Daesh (Islamic State), as well as Hizbul Mujahideen, a Kashmiri group. Blair said Canadian intelligence agencies had been working for months, and in some cases, years to gather evidence needed to list the groups.

“Canada will not tolerate ideological, religious or politically motivated acts of violence,” said Blair.

Founded in 2016, the Proud Boys began as an organisation protesting political correctness and perceived constraints on masculinity in the United States and Canada, and grew into a group that embraced street fighting.

Former US president Donald Trump, asked last September whether he would denounce white supremacists and militia groups, called on the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”.

The listing will likely have “a bit of a polarising response” on Proud Boys members, said Jessica Davis, a former senior intelligence analyst with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service spy agency.

“For some individuals this may have a dampening effect…However, there are probably some hard-core members who will be further radicalised by this,” said Davis, president of Insight Threat Intelligence.

It was tough to say how many Proud Boys members there were in Canada, said Evan Balgord, executive director of the Anti-Hate Network of Canada.

“Before the announcement there were about eight chapters,” he said by phone, adding: “I would expect they’re pretty much done for here … under that name, they’re done.”

The group itself does not hold major financial assets, as far as Balgord knows.

The move underscored constitutional concerns about a Canadian government’s ability to designate a group as a terrorist entity, said Leah West, a national security professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University and former lawyer with the Canadian Justice Department.

Designations are impossible to challenge beforehand and difficult to address afterward, especially given lawyers may be reluctant to provide counsel to members of a terrorist group, she said by phone. Reuters