Throughout September, white supremacist groups have become vocal, staging marches to little media attention — but strong public backlash — in both the GTA and Niagara Region.
On Aug. 31, white supremacists under a group named Second Sons staged a rally at the foot of Isaac Brock’s Monument in Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Queenston Heights. Local news organization, niagaranow, reported that the rally contained about 50 participants.
The group has been labeled as a “militia-like extremist organization” by the RCMP. The Second Sons website describes their belief that their “birthright has been stolen from [them] as [they] are being pushed out of society, academics and the workforce, and replaced by foreigners without any connection or roots to the Canadian people.”
Second Sons joins the list of white supremacist groups growing in Canada, centred around what Mack Lamoureux from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue describes as “training for what they believe is to be an upcoming race war.”
According to a CBC visual investigation in collaboration with The Fifth Estate, the members of these white supremacist groups place emphasis on muscle building and martial arts training where “they post videos of their training sessions, taking care to hide their faces and obscure their locations.”
Such groups in the Niagara Region include Nationalist-13 as well as the Second Sons, which both function as part of a decentralized extremist platform, where identities and locations are hidden as much as possible, according to the CBC’s investigation.
No other mainstream news organizations have investigated these groups, which have recently moved from solely online activities to emboldened hate marches and harassment of targeted groups.
In Mississauga, a new anti-hate campaign has been undertaken to manage the over 30 per cent increase in hate crimes which include violence, harassment and intimidation.
On Sept. 15, a group of protestors under the name of Canada First organized a march in Toronto’s Christie Pits Park to call for mass deportations and to further invoke nationalist sentiment.
The group did not overtly label themselves as white supremacists but did host the march at the site of a historic race riot that took place in the prelude to the Second World War.
The historic riot involved the Canadian Swastika Club — as reported by the The Province in 1933 — who claimed to have nothing to do with Hitler. The group, however, displayed an open resentment against Jewish and Italian immigrants.
The ensuing riot occurred in Christie Pits Park when Jewish and Italian community members opposed the Swastika Club. The riots were described as “one of the worst free-for-alls ever seen in the city.” At the time, Jewish people were the largest minority group in Canada, with the riots mirroring the 1918 anti-Greek riots and 1875 Jubilee riots (Protestant-Catholic).
Given the location of the staged Canada First march, anger within the community grew and lead to several counter protests organizing against the march, numbering the thousands of participants which ended up outnumbering the Canada First rally numbering around 100 participants; a ratio of around 10:1 as reported by TorontoToday.
This led to the Canada First protestors to be chased out of Christie Pits Park and down Toronto’s Bloor Street. While the Canada First organizers expressed a moderate position on immigration, terms in their call to action such as mass deportation and remigration — a term synonymous with ethnic cleansing — led individuals to read deeper into the protest.
The Christie Pits anti-hate march saw nine arrests by Toronto Municipal Police during tense moments in attempts to maintain order.
In Niagara, the Second Sons march received condemnation by Niagara-on-the-Lake Lord Mayor Gary Zalepa, whose statement at a Sept. 10 planning committee meeting read that “the town does not tolerate any form of racism, hate or discrimination.”
The GTA and Niagara have seen an emboldening of white supremacy groups amid timid media coverage, yet communities remain united against a historical repetition of hate.