Most Canadians trust the police to protect them against threats such as terrorist violence—to be vigilant, to investigate, and to put a stop to dangerous plots. Most Canadians probably do not suspect, however, that the police, some of them at any rate, may be the ones cooking up such plots: identifying innocent dupes, befriending them, and egging them on to commit violent crimes.

If that seems to you a provocative charge, then you need to watch Manufacturing the Threat, a documentary, and a very troubling one indeed, by Montréal filmmaker Amy Miller. Released in 2023, the film tells the story of two young Canadians, Amanda “Ana” Korody and John Nuttall (or simply “Omar” in this documentary), who were targeted and entrapped by undercover officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Korody and Nuttall were kids, married and living on the street in Surrey, British Columbia, in abject poverty, trying to find their way in the world. After deciding in 2011 to become Muslims, the pair were befriended by an undercover RCMP agent (named in the film only as “Mr. X”) who taught them how to pray and helped them out with gifts of money and groceries. They were also befriended by an agent from CSIS. “When one wasn’t there, the other one was,” Nuttall explains.

Vulnerable targets—perfect for police entrapment

Masquerading as friendly mentors, the agents exposed Korody and Nuttall to radical ideas and tactics, sometimes becoming manipulative and even bullying. Pointing to injustices against Muslims and stoking outrage in the young couple, they began to insist that Korody and Nuttall needed to take a stand and carry out a violent jihadist act.

The couple grew suspicious at times. As Nuttall remarks, “I suspected it could be police and it could’ve been a setup. So, how can I go to the authorities if they’re the ones planning this?” But they weren’t sure. They also worried that their contacts were members of a bonafide terrorist group, who might kill them if they got cold feet. At one point, their “mentors” ran a “Mister Big” operation, in which Korody and Nuttall were brought before a supposed higher-up and made to present and defend their idea for an operation. Fearful of the consequences of failure, they talked tough, trying to appear fully committed and “hardcore” enough to impress their contacts.

Eventually they came up with a plan to bomb the BC legislative building during the 2013 Canada Day celebrations, using a homemade device consisting of nails and C4 explosive glued inside a pressure cooker bowl. Korody and Nuttall didn’t want to kill anyone, though—only to damage the building.

The bomb never went off, but Korody and Nuttall were arrested and charged with terrorism offences. At first, the pair were simply relieved that their nightmare was finally over and that no people had been harmed. But their relief was short-lived. Although they were subsequently found guilty in a 2015 jury trial, the charges were put on hold the following year, when Justice Catherine Bruce, of the BC Supreme Court, ruled that the pair had been entrapped by the police. By that point, however, they had spent three years in jail.

“The world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more…”

Obviously Korody and Nuttall should not have allowed themselves to become embroiled in a bomb plot. More importantly, though, they would never have done so had they not been manipulated into it by federal agents. Justice Bruce did not mince words, calling the police conduct “egregious” and pointing a finger at the real culprits: “Simply put, the world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people who have neither the capacity nor sufficient motivation to do it themselves.”

A key strength of Manufacturing the Threat is its use of surveillance footage from the undercover operation, which Miller obtained from one of the defendants’ lawyers. There is something uniquely potent about these sequences. The drabness, the poor quality of the CCTV video and sound, the masked faces and voices of the agents, together with the sense of being a step removed from the situation on the screen, combine to produce a unique emotional affect.

In the surveillance footage, Korody and Nuttall’s vulnerability, their lostness, is conveyed powerfully. Although their faces appear pallid and flat, their fear and anguish shine through as they contemplate terrifying acts, sometimes talking tough to impress their supposed mentors, sometimes pushing back against them, and sometimes just plainly terrified. To watch the undercover officers practice their trade upon two innocents, step by step—lying, manipulating, saying anything to get what they want—is frankly enraging. It is a singularly unvarnished view of the police that is so awful and raw that it can only be described in extreme terms: dishonour, villainy, depravity.

Although the case against Korody and Nuttall thankfully fell apart, the legal system has shown itself more eager to protect the undercover police. In 2021, Korody and Nuttall filed a lawsuit against members of the RCMP investigation team, the federal prosecutors, and the governments of Canada and BC. Their suit hit a roadblock, however, in the form of a ban on publishing the identities or addresses of undercover police officers, without which the couple’s lawyers cannot serve the officers.

Protecting the guilty

In the end, the federal and provincial governments may well be forced into a payout. And although such a payout would be justified, the crimes that were committed will be paid for by Canadian taxpayers and not the undercover officers who hatched the scheme.

As for the unfortunate victims in this case, they didn’t receive much protection. Although the proceedings against them were stayed, they had to wait three years in jail for that to happen. Both are on medication and in treatment for PTSD.

For certain kinds of people, it’s hard to find justice in Canada. Inspired by the book Manufactured Threats by Québec author and activist Alexandre Popovic, Miller’s documentary situates Korody and Nuttall’s story within a long history of police profiling and provocation of suspect populations (Popovic also appears in the film as an interviewee).

The RCMP—a consistent history

Most Canadians today associate the RCMP with day-to-day crime fighting and prevention, especially in rural areas. The force’s predecessor, however—the North-West Mounted Police—was created in 1873 as a political police, without an ordinary crime-fighting role. Its principle purpose was to “maintain order” following the transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-West Territory from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Canadian government. In the context of the Canadian plains, however, “maintaining order” meant ethnic cleansing: dispossessing Indigenous peoples and removing them from their lands, and enforcing colonial and genocidal policies.

In 1920, the NWMP was rolled into the new Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Since those days, the RCMP has been involved in targeting and infiltrating Irish and Sikh communities, suppressing the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, infiltrating and undermining the Communist Party of Canada (if not, for the most part, Canadian Nazi or far-right organizations), infiltrating social movements such as unions and student organizations, and even infiltrating the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) organization in Québec and egging on its members to commit extreme acts.

In its role as a political police force, the RCMP—together with CSIS, created in 1984—have been remarkably consistent. Their main activities today include suppressing environmental movements and profiling them as “eco-terrorists,” and continuing the force’s historical purpose of infiltrating, controlling, and suppressing Indigenous communities and organizations on behalf of the nation’s elites and the government they control.

Manufacturing new threats, targeting Muslims

Since 9/11, Muslim individuals and communities have been manufactured as a specific threat and targeted by Canada’s security services. Worse, security legislation enacted post-9/11 has expanded the police’s powers and confidence to carry out such targeting, even as public oversight of the police and “security” agencies has been reduced to such a point that in some cases the police seem no longer to feel obliged even to obey the law themselves.

Of course, next to the kinds of violent terrorist activities carried out by far-right groups in Canada, any threat that might be posed by Muslim people or institutions is miniscule. In this regard, it is noteworthy that Korody and Nuttall’s undercover sponsors discouraged them from seeking spiritual guidance at a mosque. Had they immersed themselves in a genuine Muslim community, they might have found people who could help them deal with their problems and doubts, and warn them off from taking part in radical plots. That sort of thing doesn’t work for Canada’s undercover agencies, however: they want a menacing Islam, not a good influence.

Manufacturing the Threat builds a potent argument that the expansion of police powers and reduction in public oversight has made Canada a more dangerous place. “You’ve put all of these resources into counterterrorism,” says Steve Hewitt, an expert on Canadian security issues at the University of Birmingham, who is interviewed in the film. “But what happens if there aren’t a lot of terrorists out there? What if the threat is actually fairly small? What are these people going to do?”

We are quickly finding out the answer to that question. The reality is that Canadians don’t need CSIS, and maybe not the RCMP either. These organizations know this all too well, so they manufacture fake threats to convince us that we are vulnerable without them. The result is a war—not on terror but on us, the country’s citizens—using whatever pretexts are currently most convenient for the federal government and its patrons in the oil patch and other industries.

Miller’s debut feature, Myths for Profit: Canada’s Role in Industries of War and Peace (2009), explored Canada’s history as a “peacekeeping nation” and examining Canada’s military-industrial complex. She has produced several features since then, including The Carbon Rush (2012) about the true cost of carbon trading, who benefits, and who loses, and Gaza: Health Under Siege (2018), about the state of Gaza’s healthcare system under Israeli blockade.

Manufacturing the Threat is available for streaming on Apple TV, Bell, and Telus.

Ed Janzen is a visual artist, writer, and editor living and working in Montréal, as well as a member of the Canadian Dimension editorial board.