A recent investigation by the Canadian news outlet Global News identified roughly 450 individuals with various roles inside Hamas who have ties to Canada. Among them is Usama Ali, a dual Canadian-Lebanese citizen who has allegedly sat on Hamas’s powerful Shura Council since 2019—the body that appoints leadership and determines the group’s strategic direction. Ali, sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury, is also reported to head Hamas’s Turkey-based Investment Office, overseeing an estimated $500 million in assets through construction and real estate holdings.
Canada stands out as being furthest down the road to Islamist infiltration and consolidation.
In another incident, three men were arrested last December in Toronto for hate-motivated extremism targeting women and members of the Jewish community. One arrestee, 26-year-old Waleed Khan, also faces terrorism charges linked to ISIS. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Khan allegedly conspired with “persons known and unknown” in Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario to commit murder—language that strongly suggests the presence of a broader extremist network.
These developments affirm what counterterrorism experts have warned for years: Canada has become a permissive operating environment for Islamist extremists. For decades, U.S. intelligence agencies have quietly regarded Canada as a country whose weak national security posture, outdated anti-money laundering and terror financing regulations, porous immigration controls, and obsession with identity politics have made it an attractive sanctuary for Islamists.
A 2011 Macdonald-Laurier Institute study of Muslim public opinion in Canada found that only a small minority of respondents unequivocally rejected Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. Even more alarming, 35 percent failed to fully reject al-Qaeda.
Since then, the rise of ISIS, online radicalization, and years of unchecked immigration have transformed dormant sympathies into an active national security crisis that became manifest after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel.
That crisis is visible across Canadian educational institutions. The Toronto Metropolitan University funded a paper arguing that policymakers rely on “white logic,” and hence Canada’s designation of Islamist groups as terrorist organizations is fundamentally flawed because of “systemic Islamophobia” and racism. Islamist teachers in a Montreal school were caught religiously indoctrinating their students. Ontario’s secondary school curriculum downplays jihad as a purely “spiritual struggle,” stripping it of its relevance to global terrorism. Across campuses and school boards, “anti-Palestinian racism” (APR) has become the preferred ideological weapon for Islamist activists to stifle dissent and undermine established policies on Israel and antisemitism.
The Data Doesn’t Lie
Canada’s intelligence agencies paint a far darker picture than elected politicians care to acknowledge. Last year, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) warned it was “increasingly concerned” about ISIS-inspired attacks. The spy agency also stated that nearly one in ten terrorism investigations now involves a minor under 18. Between April 2023 and March 2024, the RCMP reported a 488 percent surge in terrorism-related charges, much of it driven by ISIS-linked activity.
During the so-called “summer of terror” in 2024, five Islamist terrorism arrests occurred in just six weeks. One involved a Pakistani national attempting to enter the United States from Quebec “with the stated goal of slaughtering, in the name of ISIS, as many Jewish people as possible.”
A Muslim Brotherhood Stronghold
In 2015, Marc Lebuis of Point de Bascule, a blog that tracks Islamist activity in Canada, testified in the Canadian parliament that individuals linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, urged Canadian Muslims to secure influential positions within law enforcement and the justice system to prevent legislations that run contrary to sharia law.
This is textbook Muslim Brotherhood strategy. Its doctrine of “civilizational jihad” prioritizes infiltration over violence, using democratic freedoms to hollow out democracy itself. Schools, charities, and advocacy groups become instruments of ideological subversion, cloaked in the language of equity, rights, and inclusion.
The success of this strategy is already evident.
A 2025 report by the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, has deeply embedded itself within Canadian civil society, academia, and government. Canada, it claimed, has become “a hub for Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations exerting significant influence”—many of which have received millions in taxpayer funds despite verified ties to extremist entities, including Hamas.
A separate 2024 Middle East Forum report identified at least C$42 million in Canadian taxpayer funds disbursed to five major Brotherhood-aligned non-profits between 2018 and 2022.
Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former senior British diplomat who served in multiple Middle Eastern capitals and is currently a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and heads its Muslim Brotherhood research division, warns, “Amongst comparable Western countries like the U.K., France, and Australia, Canada stands out as being furthest down the road to Islamist infiltration and consolidation.”
He adds that the problem is rooted in “naive politics, weak security and intelligence, reckless visa policy over decades, and the Anglo-French division that rewards the strategic wedge-driving that the Muslim Brotherhood is so skilled at.” Fitton-Brown continues:
Whilst Britain, for example, is teetering on the brink of adopting damaging policies related to the fake phenomenon of “Islamophobia,” there is at least a recognition amongst UK politicians of the hazards that lie in this area. The Canadian mainstream seems ready to blunder into it, with even greater absurdities like “anti-Palestinian racism,” apparently unaware that this will stifle legitimate free speech and political debate.”
A Paradise for Dirty Money
As early as 1998, then-CSIS director Ward Elcock warned parliamentarians that Canada risked becoming “an unofficial state sponsor of terrorism” through inaction. His warning has proved prophetic.
Canada is now widely regarded as one of the easiest jurisdictions in the world for laundering money. The Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada estimates that between $45 billion and $113 billion is laundered through the country annually. In 2008, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration alerted the RCMP to Hezbollah’s billion-dollar narcoterrorism operations across Canada. Hamas and Hezbollah have long exploited underground currency exchanges and Canadian nationals to launder money to fund violence abroad and to propagate Islamist ideology in the country.
The U.S. Justice Department’s historic $3 billion fine against Canada’s TD Bank in 2024—the largest fine ever imposed under the Bank Secrecy Act—was a blunt warning about the systemic failures in Canada’s financial oversight. As Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Wally Adeyemo put it, “From fentanyl and narcotics trafficking, to terrorist financing and human trafficking, TD Bank’s chronic failures provided fertile ground for illicit activity to penetrate our financial system.”
America’s Northern Liability
Canada’s self-inflicted Islamist problem is rapidly becoming Washington’s problem. The two countries share the world’s longest undefended border, and Canadian citizens enjoy visa-free access to the United States. An ISIS or Hamas sympathizer carrying a Canadian passport can cross into Detroit or Buffalo easier than any drug shipment from Latin America.
Hence, Washington must treat Canada’s entrenched Islamist networks with the same urgency it applies to drugs and illegal migration, because they all threaten North American security from within. Islamism risks becoming Canada’s deadliest export. And unless it is confronted decisively, it will not stop at the border.
