Canada is facing an attribution problem when it comes to extremist violence. The person who pulls the trigger may not be the person who has the motive; in some recent cases, there may be no single motive at all. An emerging form of brokered violence involves local youth, encrypted communications, symbolic targets, recorded attacks, payment and multi-layered motives. Put simply, this is motive-fragmented violence: the motive may be split among the shooter, recruiter, payer, ideological ecosystem and sometimes a foreign or transnational criminal sponsor.The casesTake the Toronto-area synagogue shootings in March 2026. Although no one was injured, York Regional Police later said an 18-year-old male was charged in the shootings. The question is: Was this antisemitic attack bought and paid for, a copycat incident or an example of hybrid violence? Then came the U.S. consulate shooting on March 10, 2026. Toronto Police later arrested and charged 19-year-old Zara Jabbi. Police said the RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Team treated the incident as a national security issue while the motive remained undetermined.Law enforcement agencies in Toronto reportedly connected dozens of shootings, including some of the above incidents, to a “multi-layered” gun-for-hire network. The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom has reported a similar pattern involving teenagers and young adults recruited through Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp, paid to carry out attacks and sometimes asked to film the violence as proof. Simply put, shooters have become freelance contractors. The target’s ideology is entirely irrelevant to them. Their involvement is purely transactional, driven by organized crime, financial exchange or youth recruitment pipelines.Hybrid threatAuthorities in the United States also accuse an Iraqi national of supporting Kata’ib Hizballah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, known as the IRGC, including via an alleged involvement in attacks in Canada. Though unproven in court, these allegations highlight a hybrid threat: foreign entities using local gang violence as a proxy to carry out attacks.The recent U.S. indictment against Lawrence Bishnoi and Satinderjeet Singh, also known as Goldy Brar, in the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C. in 2023, could provide a glimpse of how one transnational group can wage violence in another country.The indictment accuses them of directing Nijjar’s killing. Public Safety Canada had already listed the Lawrence Bishnoi-led Bishnoi Gang as a terrorist entity in September 2025. This designation underscores the blurry boundary between crime and terror: a single group can simultaneously operate as an organized crime syndicate, a diaspora intimidation network, an extortion racket and a legally designated terrorist entity.Common hallmarksOutsourcing is key in this new crime trend. In Toronto, the reported use of teenagers and young adults, encrypted apps, payment and filming suggests a divide between the person committing the violence and those directing or benefiting from it. Symbolic targeting also plays a big role. Synagogues, consulates, Sikh temples and public institutions carry political or communal meaning, even when the shooter is paid. Although an investigation is ongoing, Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw has not ruled out a motive to “stoke fear in a particular ethnic community” in the recent shooting at the Salsa on St. Clair festival.Motive-layering is also a hallmark of the shooters-for-hire trend because an attack’s labelled motive often obscures how it was carried out. Whether a shooting is labelled as terrorism, gang violence or a hate crime, the underlying method is often identical: a young man is recruited online, paid a few thousand dollars to shoot at a building, and told to film it for proof — often with no idea who is actually paying him.This overlap matters because while motive explains why an attack happens, it doesn’t explain how. The same digital recruitment pipeline is being reused across entirely different categories of crime. As a result, the shooter is easily replaced, while the broker who arranged the hit often goes unnoticed by investigators.Most importantly, young people are becoming ensnared — youth vulnerability is also an important feature. Those lured into urban crime are mostly male, often very young and frequently recruited, sub-contracted and peripheral rather than ideological masterminds.In its 2025 operations and analysis report, CSIS warned that nearly one in 10 terrorism investigations includes at least one person under 18. The demographic trend is “young male, digitally reachable, operationally disposable, and often disconnected from the ultimate motive-holder.”Transnational networks of online nihilistic violent extremists that target children and teens on popular gaming and social media platforms provide useful insights. Public Safety Canada listed 764 as a terrorist entity, describing it as a decentralized online network rooted in nihilism and misanthropy that grooms and extorts youth into sexual violence, self-harm and, increasingly, offline violence. The pathway to violence is not always political, but it can still produce terrorism-like harm.Another feature of the guns-for-hire trend is category collapse: in the same 2025 report, CSIS also warned that violent extremism increasingly involves diverse and hybridized world views, making it harder to distinguish hate from extremism.Diasporas as targetsThe demographic profile of recent attackers defies simple categorization, moving far beyond binary frameworks like “white right-wing extremism” or “racialized crime.”Earlier ideologically motivated violent attacks in Canada often involved white male perpetrators radicalized through misogyny, xenophobia, Islamophobia or grievance-based extremism. But the 2026 gun-for-hire and extortion clusters seem different. Read more: Muslim family killed in terror attack in London, Ontario: Islamophobic violence surfaces once again in Canada Peel Police arrested 17 people in an alleged network that targeted South Asian business owners and community members across Canada and the U.S. This begs the question: Why do some transnational criminal networks use diaspora spaces as recruitment, intimidation and targeting environments?Several structural reasons matter: Co-ethnic targeting is efficient: criminals understand language, business practices, family ties and fear thresholds. Transnational intimidation travels through family and reputation networks, including relatives abroad, property disputes, remittance flows, caste or clan rivalries and reputational fears. Foreign interference and organized crime can overlap. CSIS says foreign states target ethnic, religious and cultural communities in Canada through coercion, proxies, illicit financing and transnational repression. Diaspora communities can be both victims and recruitment pools. The South Asian extortion cases reveal South Asian businesses as targets, not merely South Asian individuals as offenders. Young men from diaspora communities are often considered operationally disposable and potential low-cost violence providers by forces above them, often foreign entities. Harder to classifyCanada’s ongoing urban violence problem isn’t just about more guns, more hate or more extremism. It’s increasingly about a brokered violence market in which young people can be recruited, paid, coerced or gamified into attacks whose purpose is supplied by someone unknown to them. The shooter may be local, the grievance global. The incidents may not be connected, yet they expose a common problem: violence is easier to outsource, harder to attribute and even harder to classify within the old boundaries of crime, hate, terrorism and foreign interference.Kawser Ahmed has receives funding from Public Safety Canada for developing tools to counter extremism in Manitoba schools.