A Toronto program for radicalized youth noticed a big shift this year: not only a rise in the number of participants, but the participants themselves getting younger and younger.
In its “busiest year” since opening more than five years ago, the Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) program, housed in community mental health centre Yorktown Family Services, saw more than 100 referrals in 2025.
And the average age dropped to 18 from 22, with some participants referred as young as 11.
David O'Brien, Yorktown’s Director of Mental Health, says the alarming trends point to the "mainstreaming" of extremism.
“Youth are aware of radicalization more than we think,” O’Brien said in a phone interview with Humber Et Cetera. “It’s not this dark underground thing anymore.”
ETA opened its doors in 2020, in response to growing hate crime during the pandemic. Through a multi-pronged strategy incorporating outreach, case management, psychotherapy and peer support, the program offers what O’Brien has called a “non-criminalized approach to help people disengage with hate.”
Most participants are referred by the RCMP or local police after being identified as associated with an online extremist network under investigation.
While they're not often calling for targeted violence, O’Brien says the rhetoric of ETA participants has become increasingly nationalist and anti-immigrant, and “extraordinarily” anti-Semitic.
But despite sharing many of the same values as white supremacists, half of ETA participants are not white, O’Brien said.
“On the surface, it looks like white supremacy, but then when you kind of interview people, it's more authoritarianism. It's a more misogynistic and powerful… leading by power and force versus democratic values,” he said.
“And it’s an epidemic, actually, at this point.”
Other experts and officials across Canada are ringing the same alarm bells. Last week, New Brunswick issued its first terrorism peace bond after a youth was arrested on offences related to extremism.
The province’s RCMP warned Friday the case represents a “broader trend” of youth radicalization that’s also been revealed through recent youth terrorism cases in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Alberta and Ontario.
An RCMP briefing released in May said the national rate of terrorism offences jumped 488 per cent the previous year, to 83 from 14.
“The RCMP is observing disturbing new radicalization pathways online that are contributing to substantial youth engagement with violent extremist ideologies,” the briefing said.
And nearly one in 10 terrorism investigations by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service now involve at least one youth, most of whom have been radicalized through online communities, according to a speech by the service’s director in November.
O’Brien said ETA is seeing the same pattern, with participants being recruited via mainstream social media like Facebook and TikTok.
Sometimes the recruiters are lone actors, he said, but often they’re part of a transnational “online ecosystem.”
One network drawing special attention recently is 764, known for targeting young recruits through popular gaming apps like Minecraft. As detailed in a harrowing Fifth Estate investigation last year, children as young as 11 or 12 can end up caught in a cycle of online manipulation, eventually being pressured into harming themselves or others.
Indeed, many ETA participants report having been blackmailed. O’Brien said it’s “really common” for recruiters to demand personal information or bank cards as a form of coerced loyalty.
He said these communities look for people with vulnerabilities they can exploit, luring troubled youth through the promise of identity and belonging.
Participants tell them it’s filling a void, and they're conscious of that fact. Often these youth don’t know who they are, how to fit in, where they belong, O’Brien said.
He said these communities look for people with vulnerabilities they can exploit, luring troubled youth through the promise of identity and belonging.
He said most ETA participants don’t know who they are, how to fit in, or where they belong. They tell caseworkers that it’s filling a void for them, and they’re conscious of that, O'Brien said.
Even though the strategy and tactics are always evolving, that part never changes.
