Morgane Oger

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By Morgane Oger

On May 21, two Israeli Embassy employees were gunned down outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., shortly after attending an interfaith event.

According to the New York Times, U.S. federal authorities have determined that the attack was targeted terrorism. The suspect had a documented history of pro-Palestinian activism and had scheduled a post condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza to be published on social media within the hour of the attack.

This tragedy is not just an isolated incident. It is a textbook example of stochastic terrorism—a type of violence carried out by individuals radicalized by dehumanizing rhetoric and emotionally charged propaganda, often without any direct coordination. In this case, the alleged killer appears to have been ideologically motivated and self-activated, catalyzed by a climate of outrage and polarization.

The implications are not limited to the United States. Canada, too, is at growing risk.

In 2022, Ken Lee, a homeless man in Toronto, was stabbed to death by a group of teenage girls. Reports suggested they had consumed violent content online and may have been influenced by hateful narratives. In 2017, a Quebec City mosque was attacked by a gunman who murdered six Muslim men after immersing himself in far-right propaganda. In recent years, trans Canadians like Julie Berman have been killed amid a surge in anti-trans rhetoric and conspiracies. These tragedies reflect a broader social failure to recognize and address the mechanisms through which hate is cultivated and weaponized.

Despite these warning signs, Canada’s legal tools for disrupting the spread of radicalizing content remain limited.

In early 2024, the federal government introduced Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, to better address the growing threat. The bill proposed a Digital Safety Commission and Ombudsperson to regulate digital platforms. It introduced a duty of care requiring platforms to mitigate exposure to harmful content—including hate speech, cyberbullying, child sexual exploitation, non-consensual image sharing, and incitement to violence or terrorism. It also strengthened penalties for hate propaganda in the Criminal Code and proposed the return of hate speech provisions to the Canadian Human Rights Act.

But the bill never became law. Parliament was prorogued on January 6, 2025, and Bill C-63 died on the Order Paper. While the government moved forward with parts of the bill dealing specifically with child pornography, the broader regulatory framework has not been revived in the current session.

This silence is dangerous. As the Washington attack shows, radicalization no longer requires formal networks or organizational planning. It thrives in a vacuum of accountability, nourished by social media algorithms and sustained by a permissive environment in which hate speech is treated as political opinion.

Canada must act.

A modern online harms law should respect Charter rights, ensure transparency, and include strong safeguards for civil liberties. But it must also be effective in holding platforms accountable when their ecosystems promote hate, violence, and radicalization. We need to recognize that stochastic terrorism is not a future threat—it is here, and people are dying as a result.

The murder of two Israeli Embassy employees in Washington is a warning. Canada cannot wait for its next tragedy to take this threat seriously. Parliament must reintroduce and improve the Online Harms Act before more lives are lost to ideologically motivated violence that begins—not with orders—but with permission.

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Morgane Oger is a human rights advocate, technology executive, and founder of the Morgane Oger Foundation. She is a recipient of the Meritorious Service Medal and was the complainant in the landmark Canadian human rights case Oger v. Whatcott.