It's hard to address online radicalization, experts say, but the solution starts with education.

A manifesto left by the armed suspect who opened fire at a hotel on Monday and killed a Montreal police officer doesn’t explicitly mention ‘incel,’ but experts say the content is consistent with the ideology that’s rooted in extreme hatred of women.

Incel, which refers to “involuntary celibate,” has adherents online who are mostly heterosexual men who believe they are unfairly denied romantic and sexual relationships.

“There’s not one ideology. There are different versions of it,” said Stephanie Carvin, an associate professor of international relations at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa.

“But the connecting thread is that society is unjust because some men are able to have loving relationships and others are (not).”

Carvin, a former national security analyst with the government, adds that incel is a recognized form of extremist violence and terrorism in Canada.

“The courts now recognize incel violence as terrorism,” she said, noting the case of Alek Minassian, who drove his van onto a crowded Toronto sidewalk in 2018, killing 10 people and injuring more than a dozen others.

He confessed that he was inspired by the incel movement and had sought to spark an uprising. 

Incels believe the perceived unfairness is fixed by either removing themselves completely from society or — as was the case with the alleged gunman in Côte-des-Neiges this week — calling for revolutionary violence against the system to create a world system that they deem more just toward men, Carvin said.

“We’ve seen that to a certain extent (with) Marc Lépine in 1989, before we knew what this gender-based violence looked like or understood it properly,” she said, referring to the massacre of 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique.

The alleged gunman on Monday, who was killed when police returned fire, was identified by the Quebec coroner on Tuesday as Seth Scott Hatfield, 25, of Lethbridge, Alta.

Carvin said she read the manifesto that has circulated and is attributed to Hatfield. She noted that it is incoherent, mashing together different ideologies and grievances. It’s “not far right, it’s not far left,” she said.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) recently reported on a tendency for extremists to go online “picking and choosing different grievances” and extremist ideas to frame a world view, Carvin said.

It’s sometimes called “salad bar extremism,” she said, “because you’re picking and choosing from different kinds of extremism and extremist views in ways that are often incoherent.”

The grievances in the manifesto are everything from police helping to maintain the system to capitalism to pornography to cosmetic surgery, Carvin said. But the ultimate goal is kicking women out of the workforce, giving them less options, enforcing monogamy and trying to reduce degeneracy, she said.

Dave Poitras, strategic and scientific director of Montreal-based Villes sans violence, formerly known as the Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, noted that the incel movement is not mentioned by name in the manifesto, which he read as well. But it’s rife with the terminology specific to the movement and rooted in the biological determinism that the incel movement promotes, he said.

Incels believe a minority of men possess certain “masculine” traits attractive to women, such as a muscular physique, while the majority are at a disadvantage. Incels categorize men and women into hierarchies based on physical traits, Poitras said.

Incel is “one movement among others in this constellation of the anti-feminist movement,” he said, adding that anti-feminism emerged in the 1970s as the movement for equal rights was on the rise.

There are radical religious movements, conservative movements and, since the advent of social media in the 2000s, “masculinist” movements. It’s known as the “manopshere” online, and it includes many groups that identify with the anti-feminist movement, Poitras said. Within that, you have the incels.

“What concerns me is the exposure of youth to misogynist content online,” he said, adding that it’s on the rise. “This is content that can create the conditions for adherence to this type of extremist ideology that in a minority of cases can lead to forms of violence.”

Poitras’s anti-radicalization centre, which opened in 2015, has spent the past two years studying online misogyny with funding from the federal government.

Using web scraping, researchers have analyzed 21,000 hours of content on more than 50 YouTube channels and podcasts in Canada between 2020 and 2025, Poitras said. About three per cent of the 21,000 hours contain verbal violence based on gender, he said, including conspiracy theories that feminism is a western plot to replace the authority of men with the authority of women, that women should stay at home and that the trans community is part of a conspiracy to reduce the birthrate in the west.

The danger when youth are bombarded with these repeated messages is that it trivializes the hate speech and even legitimizes it, Poitras said.

The centre created more specific categories to track hate speech in 2023, he said. Since then, the centre has found that 10 to 20 per cent of calls it receives concern an element of violence based on gender and sexual orientation, Poitras said.

A large part of the answer is prevention and education, he said.

Villes sans violence produces webinars to inform the public on how to recognize radical movements. The centre also goes into schools to debunk myths and raise awareness, Poitras said. The centre also has a help line, and it assists individuals who are concerned about hate speech and radicalization of a loved one to give them strategies on how to speak with them and maintain contact.

Carvin agrees on the importance of identification and education, saying it’s very difficult to block or counter what’s online.

“It’s about increasing access to mental health resources, (funding) the counter-radicalization centres that are out there and trying to identify these individuals who may be going down the wrong path,” she said.

The investigation into the shooting on Monday will similarly need to draw lessons, Carvin said.

“An important part of this investigation is going to be how did this person come to hold these views?” she said.

“Was he talking to anyone else? Are there other people in his network that may also be inspired to act violently or at least to spread that ideology?”

The next step, she said, is “taking those lessons and trying to figure out how we adapt our public health programs to this in the future.”