Former PPC staffer called for white revolution
Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada fired the head of its St. Catharines riding association Thursday over alleged past ties to a violent neo-Nazi group in the United States that called for a race war.
PPC spokeswoman Johanne Mennie confirmed Thursday evening that 48-year-old Shaun Walker, the CEO of the party’s St. Catharines association and spokesperson for local candidate Alan deRoo, was fired for not disclosing his past.
“A background check only yielded Canadian results and Mr. Walker did not disclose any information in our ‘non-embarrassment’ pledge about his past in the United States,” Mennie wrote in an email in response to questions from The Standard. “As of today, Shaun Walker is no longer part of our organization.”
Mennie did not answer follow up questions from The Standard about whether the party confirmed allegations of Walker’s past ties to the National Alliance or a 2007 criminal conviction for arranging assaults on non-white people in Salt Lake City five years earlier. Nor did she answer questions about the pledge, how the PPC vets employees, nor why the party was unable to find readily available online information about Walker.
An investigation by The Standard found a speech Walker gave in April 2005 on the white nationalist radio show “American Dissident Voice Broadcast,” in which he calls for a white American revolution to make the country racially pure by creating “change on such a large scale that the bleeding heart liberal today will become a racial stalwart tomorrow.”
“We want for the white race tomorrow what our ancestors always had,” Walker said in the 23-minute long broadcast. “We want a nation with a government that has laws, and enforces them, to the effect of only benefiting white people.”
He was also a featured interview in a 2005 documentary about the rise of anti-semitism in the United States, during which he compared the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz to Disneyland and a haunted house.
Walker, who said in the broadcast he was born in California to Canadian parents and spent time growing up in Saskatchewan, did not return multiple interview requests made by The Standard.
On Wednesday, Walker sent a press release to local media outlets announcing DeRoo — a former Libertarian Party of Canada candidate — would run under the PPC banner in St. Catharines in October’s federal election.
On Thursday morning Atlanta Antifascists posted a long thread on Twitter, alleging that Walker was the same man who once led the notorious National Alliance, a white supremacist organization labelled as a terrorist group by the FBI in 2002.
The thread posted several of Walker’s Facebook and Twitter posts and the photos of Walker, including one at a local PPC party event in 2018 at the St. Catharines public library downtown, appear to be the same man that an online Southern Poverty Law Centre file identifies as Shaun Walker, past president of the NA. The file says Walker is a former US Marine who was trained as a sniper.
The SPLC website says the National Alliance is “explicitly genocidal in its ideology,” and was founded by William Pierce, whose racist novel about a white revolution inspired the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of a government building by Timothy McVeigh that killed nearly 170 people. According to the SPLC file, a Shaun Walker became president of the National Alliance in 2005. In his radio broadcast that year, Walker introduced himself as the new leader of the NA, and outlined the ideology of the organization.
Walker led the organization until 2006, when he was arrested by the FBI for his part in arranging assaults on non-white people in Salt Lake City bars in 2002 and 2003. He was convicted in 2007 with two other men for taking part in a conspiracy to intimidate and assault racial minorities in Salt Lake City and sentenced to 87 months in prison. That sentence was later appealed and reduced to 37 months, and Walker was released from prison in 2009.
It is not clear when Walker moved to Ontario, but under Canadian law anyone born to Canadian parents is a citizen.
On Twitter Walker was an active supporter of Faith Goldy’s attempt to become Toronto’s mayor in 2018, and also made posts supporting Doug Ford Progressive Conservative party leadership bid.
In social media posts dating back to 2014, Walker identifies himself as a vineyard manager and winemaker in Niagara.
Walker’s social media accounts cited by Atlanta Antifascists on Twitter were locked down Thursday, hiding their contents from public view. However, The Standard was able to find many of them using the cache in Google’s search engine.
DeRoo did not respond to multiple interview requests from The Standard Thursday, or answer questions about what he knew about Walker’s past. Someone from his official campaign Facebook page directed all questions to the PPC national spokesperson.