Police, activists keep eye on Alberta’s extreme right

As images of clashing white supremacists and counter-protesters flashed across her phone screen one week ago, Renee Vaugeois thought back to a cold day in front of Edmonton city hall.

In Churchill Square that day, a small group of people aired grievances about — among other things — a motion in the House of Commons condemning Islamophobia after a mass shooting at a Quebec City mosque. A larger counterprotest formed, organized by members of Black Lives Matter. The two sides scuffled, one of the rally-goers was led away in handcuffs, and the sides dispersed after a few hours.

Compared to the bloody clash in Charlottesville, Va. — with its torches, swastikas and bodies on the pavement — the Edmonton rally wasn’t much. But for Vaugeois, the rage and the hatred were familiar.

“Charlottesville, it just made me sad,” said Vaugeois, who went to observe the Edmonton rally as president of the Alberta Hate Crimes Committee, which works to combat hate-motived offences. “Because I know the reality here in Alberta is we do have those sentiments. And the tensions are increasing every time something like this happens.”

Far-right nativist and white supremacist groups like those seen in Charlottesville have been around longer than Alberta has been a province.

Barbara Perry, a University of Ontario Institute of Technology professor who studies far-right extremism, estimated there were between 12 and 15 hate groups in Alberta in a 2015 study and likely more today.

Hate crimes in the province have spiked in recent years, many targeting Muslim residents.

Edmonton police Staff Sgt. Stephen Camp, a member of the hate crimes committee, said there’s always a risk of confrontation when extremist groups decide to rally in public.

“Can it happen here?” he said when asked about Charlottesville. “Yes, of course it can.”

Howard Palmer’s book, Patterns of Prejudice, traces the origins of Alberta nativism to the province’s first immigration boom.

The flood of non-English immigrants that arrived between 1896 and the First World War challenged the province’s AngloSaxon elite, some of whom turned to nativist ideologies from Britain, Eastern Canada and the United States.

Ku Klux Klan organizers first came to Alberta in 1924. By 1930, the Klan had 11 locals throughout the province and claimed as many as 7,000 members. Then-premier John Edward Brownlee ordered the Alberta Provincial Police to monitor the group.

The Liberator, the Klan’s propaganda arm, was published out of an office in downtown Edmonton and claimed a (likely exaggerated) circulation of 250,000.

Anti-Catholic and anti-Semitism movements also took root. In the 1930s, members of William Aberhart’s Social Credit government vilified an international Jewish conspiracy in justifying their outlandish monetary policies.

In recent decades, new anti-immigrant and xenophobic groups formed, including the Aryan Nation, the Aryan Guard, Blood and Honour, and various anti-government Freemen on the Land.

Despite its long history of farright extremist groups, there are no organizations like the U.S. Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) or Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that closely monitor hate groups in Canada, said Perry.

“We’re in denial,” she said. “We imagine ourselves — as I think a lot of the world does — as this bastion of hope and inclusivity and multiculturalism, and while for the most part that’s true, I think that overlooks that there are still some really serious problems.”

Irfan Chaudhry, a MacEwan University lecturer and hate crime researcher, said academics, the media and mainstream politicians have to grapple with how to respond to far-right groups.

Acknowledging the groups risks legitimizing their ideas, but pretending they don’t exist allows them to fester.

“I think it’s important to raise awareness that these groups do exist, without really giving prevalence to the message they’re trying to espouse,” he said.

“At the end of the day, if we don’t really understand what we’re dealing with at a broader level, it’s kind of naive of us.”

Soldiers of Odin and the III% both have chapters in Alberta and are frequently cited as part of the new generation of extreme-right groups.

Members of both organizations have held rallies in Edmonton, and Soldiers of Odin members have done “street patrols” in the city.

The SPLC, ADL and Perry say both are hate organizations — but local chapters deny this.

A member of Soldiers of Odin Edmonton would not comment on the record, but group members have in the past described themselves to other media as “a neighbourhood watch-based activity. Members of Alberta III% did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

RCMP Sgt. Marco Lou, also a member of the hate crimes committee, said Canada’s Criminal Code includes specific hate offences such as advocating genocide, public incitement of hatred and mischief toward religious property.

Hate or bias against a group can be an aggravating factor in other offences, he said, however “we don’t investigate ideologies, quite simply.”

Camp, formerly with the Edmonton Police Service’s hate crimes unit, said Alberta law enforcement should have a “central repository of information” on hate crimes and extremists and a “centralized strategy” for monitoring and investigating such groups.

Investigating hate crimes and laying charges is complex, and some smaller police detachments lack the experience and expertise, he said.

Edmonton’s hate crimes unit, on the other hand, has the resources to keep tabs on extremist groups that could potentially be a public safety threat.

Camp cited a 2012 white power rally in Edmonton where the hate crimes unit had “done their homework” on the group and knew of the event beforehand.

Riot police were ready and prevented a violent confrontation between the racist group and counter-protesters.

“If you have a jurisdiction that has no hate crimes unit — no extremism unit, no one’s monitoring this stuff — these things can happen very quickly in your community and the police are now kind of back on their heels,” he said.

Hate crime units also keep in touch with vulnerable groups — encouraging hate crime reporting — and explain what hate crimes are and what they are not, he continued.

Bashir Mohamed, a member of Black Lives Matter Edmonton, wasn’t surprised by the violence in Charlottesville.

“We’ve been seeing this sentiment become stronger in the past year, mostly because I think they’ve been emboldened and can actually be in the public,” he said.

The group plans to hold a “teachin” on white supremacy in Alberta later this month.

“It was just a big point where it was exposed publicly, so now people were able to see what we’ve been seeing,” he said. “They weren’t hiding it.”