Why the Minassian verdict won’t answer one key question
If we want to know what led to Yonge St. van attack, we’ll need a public inquiry, experts say
Before the trial began, the facts seemed clear.
Alek Minassian was an “incel” who repeatedly, in a Facebook message and to police, said he wanted to spark an uprising when he rented a van and accelerated onto a Yonge Street sidewalk in April 2018, deliberately running down unsuspecting pedestrians, killing 10 and injuring 16.
His trial has revealed a murkier picture.
In interviews with psychiatrists, Minassian said he didn’t really identify as an incel (a misogynist online community of men who call themselves “involuntary celibates, and blame women and feminism for denying them sex) and claimed the explanation he gave in a nearly four-hour police interview was mostly manufactured in order to make him as famous as possible, both to the general public and in what he called “fringe groups” online.
Minassian cited other motives, too: feeling socially isolated and hopeless; a longtime obsession with school shooters and mass killers, including Elliot Rodger, a hero to some incels; the influence of misogynist online forums; and anxiety about starting a new job.
In his testimony, defence expert Dr. Alexander Westphal concluded the mass killing would not have happened if Minassian hadn’t been saturated in hateful, violent online content.
The question of Minassian’s criminal responsibility will be decided Wednesday, in a decision streamed live on YouTube. His defence lawyers argued his autism spectrum disorder made him unable to know what he did was morally wrong; the Crown that he clearly has the ability to make moral choices.
No matter the verdict, one main question will remain unanswered: could this have been prevented and how do we stop this from happening again?
It’s what some people — including those harmed by Minassian and researchers who study violent extremism — have wanted to know all along.
A criminal trial might produce a wealth of information about a defendant and how an attack came to happen, but unlike an inquest or public inquiry the focus is not on identifying how the case might have been avoided.
“The focus of a criminal proceedings is really very much about the legal responsibility of a particular act that happened in the past,” said Kirsten Mercer, a lawyer at Goldblatt Partners who led the development of Ontario’s Sexual Violence and Harassment Action Plan. “It’s not really about prevention, it’s not about all the other things that might have gone wrong.”
Researchers who study incels, online radicalization and violent extremism say there are merits to both a close look at Minassian’s specific case, and also at incels more broadly.
“It is very worthwhile to have some form of public inquiry because there are always lessons that can be learned,” said Jessica Davis, a former CSIS senior intelligence analyst and president of Insight Threat Intelligence. “There may be places where our law enforcement and security agencies could improve. But without identifying those it is difficult for them to actually do that.”
Such an inquiry could delve into exactly how Minassian was spending his time online, who he was interacting with, and for how long.
Based on the information presented during the trial, the extent of Minassian’s relationship with the incel community and ideology is not clear, nor how his autism spectrum disorder, mental health and other experiences of isolation and alienation he described should be taken into account, said Amarnath Amarasingam, a professor at Queen’s University specializing in terrorism and radicalization.
Are there aspects of the incel community — deeply self-hating, and including many people who self-identify as having autism spectrum disorder — that affected him? What were his reasons for carrying out the attack when he did?
“The million-dollar question in radicalization research is that final jump” to violence, Amarasingam said.
Figuring out how mental health may or may not factor into the process of online radicalization, particularly for “lone wolf” attacks, is something terrorism researchers are struggling with, he said, and there can be a temptation to make overly simplistic assumptions about motivation when looking at an attacker’s past.
“You want to have an understanding of the individual, do a full interview, know their medical history, understand their ideology, understand their world view, understand their upbringing and early childhood experiences,” Amarasingam said.
“But you also want to ask why these kinds of messages are resonating with some of these young people. Why did he find the incel world view particularly useful for analyzing his own situation?”
It is hard to gauge how many self-described incels are located in Canada — in a recent survey of 272 self-identified incels, 30 per cent said they live in North America.
In addition to Minassian and the pending case of a Toronto youth charged with terrorist activity for the allegedly incel-motivated murder of 24-yearold Noelle Arzaga in 2020, there have been at least other three serious cases in Canada with a link to incels.
In Edmonton, Sheldon Bentley was sentenced to four years for manslaughter after stomping a man to death in 2016, blaming incel-related anger.
In Sudbury in 2019, Alexander Stavropoulos, 25, pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted murder for stabbing a 35-yearold woman multiple times and injuring her baby. He described himself to police as an incel and claimed to be inspired by Minassian.
On the computer of Faisal Hussain, who opened fire on the Danforth in July 2018, killing two people and injuring 13, police found the manifesto of Elliot Rodger — also found on Minassian’s computer — and stories about Minassian’s attack months before.
It’s unclear how many more criminal cases in Canada in recent years can be linked to incels, particularly where the charges are minor — the federal department of justice or the provincial ministry of the attorney general said they don’t track offences that way, nor does Statistics Canada. At least one case, also in Ontario and revealed through pretrial motions in Minassian’s case, involved a young man charged with uttering threats.
An analyst with Moonshot CVE, an organization focused on preventing violent extremism, said understanding the full range of incel-related harm, beyond the most extreme incidents, is an important part of understanding the threat posed by the group, particularly to women.
In incel forums, people advocate rape, violence against sex workers, stalking, harassment, extortion and ways to sexually humiliate and degrade women, she said.
Then there is the risk faced by female family members of incels. The Moonshot analyst, who is an expert on incels and spoke to the Star on the condition she not be named to protect her safety, said some incels discuss their female siblings who are dating with extreme rage and hostility.
“I think it’s important to understand how that violence erupts in those extreme cases,” she said. “But I think what’s more important, what will have a greater effect, is for us to have a wider discussion as a society about our ideas about sex and relationships, how we are communicating those to all our children but specifically to young men.”
Moonshot CVE has been given a grant by Public Safety Canada to study incels and their final report is expected this spring. As part of the study they have spoken to a wide range of experts across fields, including mental health and suicidal ideation, perpetrator-focused domestic violence initiatives, educators who teach students about healthy relationships and disinformation.
In order to really talk about prevention there needs to be a “holistic approach,” she said.
Looking at the issues in the Canadian context is valuable not only because of the incellinked killings here, but because of the way the incel communities discuss Canada as an oppressive place for men in part because of political statements like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s commitment to gender parity in cabinet, she said.
The Moonshot analyst also notes that Minassian is not the only Canadian who is now part of the “canon” of mass killers celebrated by incels. Also in that group is the Montreal man who murdered 14 women and wounded 10 women and four men at the École Polytechnique de Montréal in 1989, three years before Minassian was born.
There needs to be a reckoning with how seriously we take violence against women, she said. She has repeatedly encountered questions about why incels should be considered a terrorism or extremism issue rather than a social issue — something that, at least in Canada, changed in 2020 with the incel movement now designated a terrorist group.
“There is sort of a lack of interest or lack of acceptance of this being a form of extremism ... in a similar way to the way violent far-right was approached and how long it took for white supremacy, white nationalism to be considered a form of extremism,” she said. “And we are seeing the effects of that today.”
The most likely way prevention might be discussed in a public proceeding following Minassian’s criminal trial would be an inquest.
No decision has yet been made as to whether an inquest will be called, according to the Office of the Chief Coroner, and they are often not announced until the conclusion of the criminal process. An inquest can be called, where not mandatory, if the coroner decides that it is desirable for the public to have an open and full hearing of the circumstance of a death and the coroner believes a jury could make useful recommendations to prevent further deaths, according to the coroner’s office.
An inquest can examine a number of deaths that occur in similar circumstances, but they are limited to the specific facts of those cases, said Mercer, not commenting specifically on the Minassian case. Where there are pervasive social issues to be examined that go beyond that narrow focus, other options include a government-ordered public inquiry.
In the wake of nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer’s confession to murdering eight seniors and attempting to kill six more in long-term care, an inquiry was struck into resident safety in long-term care. While public inquiries are ordered by the government, the Ontario Human Rights Commission can launch their own where there is a specific issue of discrimination.
Independent reviews can also be ordered by the province and other institutions like the Toronto Police Services Board, which ordered an investigation into how Toronto police handle missing persons cases, particularly involving LGBTQ and marginalized people, after serial killer Bruce MacArthur was able to kill eight men over seven years. However, unlike a public inquiry, reviews don’t have the power to compel witnesses and documents and may not be fully public, which can raise concerns about transparency, ac- countability and limits on the ability of the proceeding to inform the public.
Calling a public inquiry — which is expensive and can take a long time — is dependant on political will, Mercer said, and the recommendations produced are not binding. And while one on hand they can produce compelling reasons to change policies — and sometimes do — the reports might also simply sit on a shelf.
“The work that comes after is just as important as anything else,” she said.
The value of a public inquiry is that it can bring in a broader diversity in perspectives from communities, front-line workers and experts, she said, and the scope can be as wide or narrow as needed. “We know that crimes have context. If all we ever do is focus on the thing that actually happened, the one person, and look away from all of the other social forces driving conduct then it’s going to be whack-a-mole. We are only ever going to be dealing with problems as they manifest,” she said.
Amira Elghawaby, a human rights advocate, suggests inquests or public inquiries should be mandatory for mass killings, like the Quebec City mosque massacre and the Yonge Street van attack. Elghawaby recently called for a public inquiry in the Quebec City killing, just as there was a commission ordered following the Christchurch mosque attack in New Zealand, that would address the political and social context in which Alexandre Bissonette planned and carried out the murders.
She feels the same way about the Yonge Street attack. Having an automatic process lifts a huge burden on communities having to plead for a public process that will take their voices into account and eliminates political considerations, she said, pointing to the public outcry that led to the announcement of the Mass Casualty Commission to probe the April 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia.
“There is a power in having an inquiry or an inquest because it demonstrates the urgency of the issue,” she said. It not only is an opportunity to gather facts and gain a better understanding of what happened, it can allow for a public reckoning with systemic and institutional failures — and ultimately, change, she said. “We shouldn’t have to wait until a massacre has occurred to do that kind of work. If we come to that point we are already too late. But at least we can prevent the next one,” she said.”
In a recent survey of 272 self-identified incels, 30 per cent said they live in North America