Hateful graffiti scrawled in the Plateau
At 2:55 a.m., a person — the security footage is too grainy to determine the gender — scrawls a message on the side of the Bar Sportif on Laurier Ave. in Plateau central.
Then he/she walks down the street and back again, to add a pink heart.
This is not a message of love, however, but rather hate graffiti, exalting members of the far right, and spreading their anti-immigrant ideology.
“Save Richard Spencer,” it said on a few walls, including that of the local police station, referring to the notorious American white supremacist.
“Hail Warski,” read another, possibly referring to a similarly minded alt-right Canadian YouTuber.
“JF Gariepy King of the World” appeared twice, including on the wall of the Bar Sportif, with pink hearts and happy faces.
Jean-François Gariépy is a French-Canadian who makes videos with Spencer extolling his white nationalist values.
“I looked him up,” said Anne Labrecque, an employee at the Bar Sportif who discovered the graffiti on two of the bar’s exterior walls when she arrived for work in the morning.
“He wants to make ‘ethnostates.’ I had never heard of him. From what I’ve read, I don’t agree with him.”
The series of messages that lead up Laurier Ave. between St-Laurent Blvd. and St-Denis St., on homes and businesses and even the police station, appear to be by the same hand, spray painted in childlike writing.
It’s not the first time the bar has had to deal with graffiti, says manager Eric Langlois, but it’s the first time that painting over them is an urgent matter, given the hateful messages.
“I’ve been here 15 years,” Langlois said. “We’ve had lots of graffiti in the past, but never any that had this kind of message . ... This is extremism.”
However, the incidents did not appear to be an urgent matter to police. By 3 p.m. — 12 hours after the event — they had still not retrieved the security footage showing the culprit.
Police spokesperson Raphael Bergeron said a complaint had been made about the graffiti, but he couldn’t say whether an investigation had begun. It would likely be transferred to the Montreal police hate-crimes unit, Bergeron said.
At a scrum at city hall, Mayor Valérie Plante said she found the graffiti “worrisome” and “absolutely deplorable.”
Just as when a Nazi flag appeared on a building on Jean-Talon St. on May 1, Plante told reporters, “the Montreal police are following this very closely.”
“It’s unacceptable and in the end, if the population is aware of an act that incites hate — and, for me, this is one — they have to say something. There’s no place for this in Montreal.”
The hateful messages appeared barely a week after the Montreal Gazette published an exposé on an influential neo-Nazi who goes by the name Charles Zeiger, who lives and recruits fellow neo-Nazis in Montreal, just a few blocks east and north of the Bar Sportif.
His real name, the investigation revealed, is Gabriel Sohier Chaput.