There may indeed have been a terrorist conspiracy that involved what the RCMP assistant commissioner Mike McDonell yesterday referred to as "training areas," where militants tramped about in big boots, cooked on outdoor barbecues, built bombs and used a wooden door for target practice.
That's the implication from the evidence shown to reporters yesterday: five pairs of boots in camouflage drab, six flashlights, one set of walkie-talkies, one voltmeter, one knife, eight D-cell batteries, a cellphone, a circuit board, a computer hard drive, one barbecue grill, one set of tongs suitable for turning hot dogs, a wooden door with 21 marks on it and a 9-mm handgun.
Or it is possible that the only thing that these bits of evidence prove is that a group of young men went somewhere where they tramped around in big boots, cooked on barbecues, played soldier and generally acted like jerks which young men are occasionally wont to do.
The three tonnes of ammonium nitrate allegedly purchased was, as McDonell said, three times the amount used in the Oklahoma terror bombing of 1995.
But, as he also said, farmers routinely buy three tonnes of ammonium nitrate "every day." They use it for fertilizer, not bombs.
In short, we don't know much yet about what these men and boys were trying to do. We don't know if this series of arrests, called Operation O-Sage by the Mounties, pre-empted the kind of actions that in the United Kingdom led to last year's bombing of the London subway by otherwise unremarkable young Britons.
That's one possibility. It's certainly the explanation favoured by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who yesterday praised the police.
Another is that this is a reprise of the infamous 2003 Project Thread fiasco, in which RCMP and immigration officials accused 23 Muslims of terrorism only to acknowledge later that at most the men were guilty of minor immigration fraud.
Still another possibility is that this may turn out to be Canada's version of the 2004 Virginia "paintball" trial, in which one man was sentenced to life and another got 85 years.
In that controversial case (even the presiding judge complained the outcome was unfair), nine Muslim men were convicted of participating in terrorist training the main evidence being that they had played paintball in the woods outside Washington.
What we do know about Operation O-Sage is that the RCMP, as well as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, have been tracking the suspects since 2004. We also know that at least some of their neighbours knew police were watching them. Presumably, some of the suspects did, too.
If the alleged conspirators knew they were under surveillance, it seems odd that they continued along merrily with plans to make explosives.
But perhaps they are not bright terrorists. Or perhaps they are not terrorists at all.
With luck, we will get these answers at trial.
