Think the KKK can’t come here? It already did
Hate group’s clout in 1920s Canada teaches a lesson, Julian Sher says.
“History is a great teacher,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale warned last month in a remarkably passionate statement urging Canadians to defend Canada’s pluralism against what he called “the torrents of abuse … directed against newcomers” and other worrying signs of hatred.
Goodale took the unusual step of invoking a littleknown chapter in Canada’s history — the power and clout of the Ku Klux Klan in his home province in the 1920s and ‘30s. “It’s an ugly scar on Saskatchewan’s history that this insidious foreign organization built on hate, fear, intolerance and prejudice once infiltrated our province,” he stated.
The federal Liberals are playing the multiculturalism card, trying to exploit recent controversies that have plagued the Conservatives. Longtime Tory MP Maxime Bernier, who recently quit to build a new Canada-wide party, ranted on Twitter this past summer against “cultural balkanization” and “having people live among us who reject basic Western values.”
But partisan politics aside, Goodale has a point. We ignore our history at our peril.
Many Canadians like to think of their country as a beacon of openness and multiculturalism in a world where xenophobia and antiimmigrant sentiment seems to be raging.
It can’t happen here, we like to tell ourselves. But it can — and it already has.
Few Canadians realize that for a brief period in the 1920s and the 1930s, the American-based Ku Klux Klan flourished in Canada. It had a small and briefly violent presence on Ontario, and a larger following in Alberta and British Columbia. But it was in Saskatchewan where the Canadian white hoods wielded remarkable political clout.
Over the space of a few years, the Klan here boasted tens of thousands of members, claimed 125 chapters and helped topple a government. Around 7,000 people attended the Klan’s first public rally in the province in Moose Jaw in 1927. “A fiery cross of electric lights” lit up the Regina city hall auditorium for another gathering, according to press reports. In the small town of Melfort, a crowd estimated to be between 5,000 and 10,000 sang “The Maple Leaf Forever” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” as two 20-foot crosses burned against the prairie sky.
The Klan shrewdly targeted vulnerable minorities: Catholics, French-canadians and, for good measure, the handful of “foreigners” entering the province. In words not dissimilar to what we hear today from some politicians, J. H. Hawkins, the Saskatchewan Klan leader, raged against “the permitting of any race of people to enter Canada that cannot be assimilated and become heart and soul Canadians.”
The Klan and its message were endorsed by many local newspapers and Protestant clergymen — and by the Conservatives, hungry for power.
At the provincial Tories’ annual convention in March, 1928, a large number of delegates were Klansmen. Walter D. Cowan, the Klan’s treasurer, was the federal Tory MP from Regina from 1917 to 1921 and for Long Lake from 1930 to 1935; at one point he proudly told federal Conservative leader and Prime Minister R.B. Bennett that “every organizer in it (the Klan) is a Tory.”
(During one heated debate in Parliament, an angry Liberal asked Cowan why he didn’t wear his “nightshirt” in the House of Commons.)
With the open and influential Klan support in the 1929 Saskatchewan elections, the provincial Conservatives — campaigning against the French language and immigrants — toppled the Liberals, who had governed for more than two decades.
The Klan eventually petered out in the Prairies in the 1930s, in part because some of its anti-french and anti-catholic sentiments had become public policy anyway.
“We fed people ‘antis.’ Whatever we found that could be taught to hate and fear, we fed them,” said one prominent Klan leader, Hugh Emmons, with surprising candour.
It is not that different today. While extreme in its hatred and violence, the Klan just pushes to the limits the fears mainstream politicians prey upon when they target “the other” — whomever that might conveniently be: Historically, at different times it has been blacks, Irish immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and most recently, Muslims and refugees.
In Quebec, the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) is leading in the current election polls, openly vowing to impose a harsher line on identity politics if it gains power. Federally, Maxime Bernier launched his new People’s Party last week, vowing to “respect our traditions” in part by cutting back on immigrants and refugees.
Such “dog-whistle” politics have thankfully failed in the recent past. Ontario MP Kellie Leitch, like Bernier an unsuccessful Tory leadership candidate, wanted to screen immigrants for “anti-canadian” values. The “barbaric practices hotline” pushed by the Harper Conservatives in the last election backfired.
Still, the latest public opinion surveys show that for the first time a majority of Canadians fear that irregular migration into the country has reached a “crisis” point, indicating that refuges and immigration and refugees could become an inflammatory issue in the 2019 election.
Canada is not immune from the flames of hatred. Our history shows that politicians and populists can fan those flames with the right rhetoric and easy targets. It’s up to people to decide whether we ignore the sparks or take a stand before the fiery bigotry engulfs us.
Julian Sher is an investigative journalist and the author of White Hoods: Canada’s Ku Klux Klan