• CANADA’S OWN HATE.
Canada is not immune to rising tide of violent hate
Most Canadians watched with shock and repulsion as events unfolded in Charlottesville, Va.
But was our reaction, in some corners, a little smug?
Surely it couldn’t happen here, we seemed to say.
Yes, it most certainly could and, in fact, it has. The recent memory of six Muslim men shot dead in St. Foy, Que., should be evidence enough that we are not immune to the violence of hatred and bigotry.
Following the death of Heather Heyer in Virginia, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed just that sentiment, stating that “We know Canada isn’t immune to racist violence and hate.”
There is ample additional evidence of our own tendencies toward right-wing extremist violence.
In a national study of rightwing extremism in Canada that I released with my colleague, Ryan Scrivens, in 2015, we identified more than 100 active right-wing extremist groups, and more than 120 incidents of right-wing extremist violence across the country between 1985 and 2014.
More than 70 of these occurred post-9/11, when our attention had turned to terrorism of a different kind. Interestingly, during that same period, fewer than a dozen incidents of Islamist-inspired violence could be identified. While not all attributable to right-wing extremists, hate crime in Canada increased by five per cent from 2014 to 2015, the most recent years for which data are available.
There is also anecdotal evidence that hate crime and hate incidents have increased even more over the past eight to 10 months. Veiled Muslim women have reported assaults on the street, in shopping malls and on buses. Jewish schools and places of worship have been targeted with offensive graffiti. Perhaps inspiring these actions, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic and other exclusionary messaging has been broadcast across the country. More significantly, neo-Nazi, nationalist and white supremacist groups have also grown in number and boldness.
The social media borders are porous, and through these platforms Canadians are also fed a steady diet of U.S. President Donald Trump’s hyperbole. His Twitter feeds reach us; his sound bites have made front-page news in the Canadian media; the alt-right social media ecology and forums are accessible — and emulated — here.
The far right in Canada has also taken up the call to arms. In the months leading up to and following Trump’s upset electoral victory, the intolerant sentiment on which Trump and several of his Republican cohort so boldly built their politics has rippled across Canada, both in the real world and on the web.
Xenophobic flyers have been posted by right-wing groups, containing such slogans as “Tired of anti-white propaganda? You are not alone;” “It’s only racist when white people do it;” and, borrowing from Trump’s slogan, “It’s time to Make Canada Great Again!”
The flyers were perhaps the first sign that something was changing in Canada, that their creators were beginning to come out of hiding.
They suggested, also, that the right-wing extremist movement was enjoying new-found “freedom” to hate. Considering the number of new groups and new chapters of hate groups that have sprung up across the country, it is likely that we’ve seen at least a 25-percent growth in the number of active groups since we published our report in 2015.
In major Canadian cities, a farright vigilante group, Soldiers of Odin, has patrolled streets to “protect” Canadian citizens from what they perceived as the threat: Islam, seeking to silence and marginalize Muslims through intimidation and a show of force.
More recently, they’ve been joined by the III%ers, a blatantly Islamophobic armed militia group. According to the leader of the Alberta-based group, these armed and paramilitary trained activists have several mosques under surveillance, on the assumption that “these mosques, from what we’ve gathered, from our intel, these mosques are fronts for training groups, for terrorist training groups . ... We will continue to watch these mosques and monitor these situations.”
Proud Boys made a public appearance in Canada on July 1, disrupting an anti-colonialist protest at the Cornwallis statue in Halifax. Similarly, the Canadian Coalition for Concerned Citizens and the Soldiers of Odin rallied against a motion, M-103, which was intended to limit Islamophobia and track hate crimes.
On March 4, these groups protested M-103 in Toronto, making the public claim that “Islam is Evil” and clashing with anti-Islamophobic protesters.
This week, the Canadian far right movement seemed to be taking its cue from the organizers of last weekend’s Charlottesville rally.
Emboldened rather than disconcerted by the terror that ensued there, Canadian white supremacist groups seem to have taken that rally as a call to arms. They appear to have heeded former KKK Grand Dragon David Duke’s proud claim that Charlottesville represented a turning point for the movement, in their effort to “take our country back.”
Following suit, Canadian white nationalists have also begun planning for demonstrations of their own.
The World Coalition Against Islam, the Cultural Action Party and the Soldiers of Odin, among others, planned to join forces for a rally in Vancouver today. The Canadian Nationalist Party also stirred controversy by announcing plans for a white nationalist rally at the University of Toronto.
The invitation called on proponents to “Join us Thursday, September 14th as we discuss the nationalist movement in Canada and the future of our country.” The university has banned the demonstration, noting that violence, hate and bigotry have no place on campus. The university is right to suggest that where there is hate, violence can easily follow.
So, how do we respond in Canada? For many of us, we continue to do what we’ve been doing in recent days: speaking out among our peers and in our communities, challenging narratives of exclusion and xenophobia.
Organizing counter rallies in communities across the country. Showing up to outnumber the racists at their planned rallies. Typically, when white supremacists advertise their demonstrations, they find themselves in the minority. This sends a powerful message. It demonstrates solidarity, reminding the bigots that there are more of us who stand against them than stand with them.
However, the anti-hate actions of those of us on the street are not enough. We need law enforcement and intelligence communities to acknowledge the threat posed by far right extremists. And we need our local, provincial and federal leaders to also counter the narratives that come not just from these organized groups, but from Trump himself.
Interestingly, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson has urged a counter-protest to the far-right rally planned for that city. Prime Minister Trudeau responded to last weekend’s murder in Charlottesville, tweeting “We condemn it (racist violence and hate) in all its forms & send support to the victims in Charlottesville.”
What remains is for him to condemn hatred as it emanates from the White House.