The chilling rise of white supremacy in Canada:
How the Conservative government’s immigration
rhetoric, the internet, and an anti-violence rebranding give the movement new power
By Andrew Livingstone
For This Magazine
When Brother Smith
sees a white woman holding a
black man’s hand, disappointment boils up inside him.White women, he thinks, shouldn’t even allow the opportunity to have a mixed race child. Its the race mixing he worries about the most. The declining number of pure white race people in the world- eight percent by his account- is the result of such unions, and its a problem.
“We’re disappearing,” he says, “and we can’t be crossbreeding,it goes against nature.” It raises other races, he says, but de-elevates the white race. The rightful race.
The only race
Sitting inside the West Toronto Shopping mall food
court last July, Brother Smith tells me he is not theHollywood, American History X uber-violent version of
a white supremacist. If there were a casting call today,
however, he could make it based on looks: Tattoos cover
Brother Smith’s forearms, disappearing underneath
the rolled-up sleeves of his white dress shirt. His head
is shaved to BIC razor length, but there is a slight stubble.
In other ways, though, he looks exactly like every
other forty-something blue-collar worker who has spentdecades of his life in a factory: callused hands nurse a cup
of coffee and muscular arms look like they’d lifted hundreds,
even thousands, of boxes over the years.
though, he had non-white colleagues. He didn’t like it
but would “stomach it” in order to survive. He certainly didn't make friends with them.
of the Creativity Movement. He joined about four
years ago. The Creativity Movement, founded in 1973
by one-time Florida state legislator Ben Klassen, was
originally called the Church of the Creator, before changing
monikers in 2004. Smith wouldn’t reveal membership
numbers in Canada; there is no headquarters here either, just a blog run by Smith. According to its website, the movement is a “professional, non-violent, progressive pro-white religion" That promotes white civil rights, white self-determination, and white liberation via 100 percent legal activism.
To Smith and his fellow Brothers and Sisters following the precepts of Nature’s Eternal Religion are the only actions that make sense; all others lead to the extinction of the white race, and that is unthinkable.
The movement does not believe in, or condone, violence to reach its goal of white domination. Those with
criminal records aren’t allowed to join the organization.
To achieve the rise and domination of the white race
without violence, The Creativity Movement’s guiding
book, Nature’s Eternal Religion counsels its members to:
populate the world with more white people; show preferential
treatment to white in business dealings; and embrace “good grooming” to attract the highest caliber of the opposite sex—white, of course.
This seemingly measured attitude is what drew Smith
in: he doesn’t want to hurt people, but he does wanteverybody to think about what it means to be white. The
Creativity Movement’s ability to separate itself from that
American History X stereotype is what attracts people
like Smith: the non-radical who just happens to believe
white people should be the only ones in Canada. “We feelwe are better than them,” says Smith. “It sounds crass,
but that’s just the facts. Calling me a racist isn’t going to
silence me.”
Or thousands of others like him. While diversity is
largely accepted as an ingrained part of Canadian society
today—with a large educational emphasis on cultural
and racial acceptance—it is, in many ways, a surface sentiment.
Organizations such as the Creativity Movement
and other groups like Blood and Honour and its parent
and other groups like Blood and Honour and its parent
group the Aryan Guard, continue to capture new members
in their webs of hatred every day. Even the most
remote corners of the country have racist, organized
pockets. “They come from all walks of life,” says Det.
Const. Terry Wilson, a member of the New Westminster
police who was assigned to the B.C. hate crimes unit. And
they are able to exist under many radars: Recruitment,
adds Wilson, no longer happens through pamphlets on
car windows or street corners, but it does happen.
The internet, with social media and technology, has
significantly upped organizations’ ability to spread the
pro-white rhetoric—and connect like-minded individuals and groups globally. There is endless free advertisement
on the web, says Wilson. There are also dozens of pro-white
focused chatrooms, such as Stormfront.org and
forums belonging to specific groups, such as Blood and
Honour, and the Hammerskin Nation, a forum whose
membership included Wade Michael Page, who shot
and killed six Sikhs in a Wisconsin temple last year. “One
person who might be on the fringe or might be sort of
leaning [their] way,” says Wilson. “[They] can groom that
person into the beliefs.”
It is getting easier and easier to find people who lean
toward ideologies of race supremacy, as well. The pro-white
message has almost become mainstream, says
Barbara Perry, a professor at the University of Ontario
Institute of Technology and one of Canada’s leading hate
crime experts. Organizations now vocalize around hot button
issues, such as immigration, the unemployment rates, rising health care costs, social funding cuts, and an unstable economic future. What they say finds echoes in the federal Conservative government’s more insidious messaging around immigration—what exists beyond the photo ops and token gestures, much of which has largely gone unchallenged. Take, for instance, Citizenship and
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, who fielded questions
in Burnaby B.C. this past November about changes
to the Temporary Foreign Workers Program. Immigrants,
he said, were taking advantage of “the problems we all
know exist in our system ... Why?
Because we Canadians
are so polite!
"We don’t like saying no to anyone.”
“That’s the frightening thing,” says Perry. “It lends
credibility to them and to the crazies on the street.”
That’s exactly what leaders of the pro-white movement
want, too: to blend into the national debate, a drip line
of white supremacist ideology stuck in the larger vein. In
this way, the movement can recruit and grow their numbers,
making white supremacists out of everyday, white
Canadians—without them even realizing.
White supremacy is not a new concept in Canada.
In 1914, the Komagata Maru, a steamship en route from
Hong Kong, dropped anchor in Vancouver carrying
hundreds of East Indians. After two months docked on
Canadian shores, the federal government sent it back
to India with all but about 20 (who already had resident
status) still on board. At the time, Canada didn’t carry
an immigration policy against immigration from India—
only an order-in-council from 1908 called the Continuous
Passage Act, stating that East Indians could only immigrate
on straight passage by steamship from India; such
passage wasn’t even available at the time. Once sent back
to the then British colony all 20 Sikhs, upon disembarkation,
were shot dead. That same decade, Canadian border
agents and medical staff turned away every single
African-American attempting to enter Canada at the
Alberta border for “medical reasons,” whether they were
healthy or not.
Before WWII, white supremacist organizations could
be counted on one hand. The White Canada Association,
established in Vancouver in 1929 to prevent further
immigration from all of Asia into B.C., was one of the first
anti-non-European immigration organizations formed
in Canada. Outside of that, there was, of course, the Ku
Klux Klan. In the mid-1910s, the Klan had thousands of
members across the country. Klaverns were established
in Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal, Oakville, Ont., and
Toronto, plus a dozens of other cities and towns across
Ontario. At its peak in the ’20s, the Toronto Klan numbered
more than 8,000 members. It was common for
cross burnings to take place, especially in Hamilton.
There were also plenty of undertones of anti-Semitism.
The Klan was especially popular in Saskatchewan. By the
’20s, its membership grew to between 15,000–40,000 in
Saskatchewan (estimates vary).
The Klan was able to significantly influence provincial
politics there. While Klan perspectives were
reflected in both the ruling Liberal party supporters and
the Conservative party, ideology was more popular with
the Conservatives. With Klan support, the Conservative
government toppled the Liberals in 1929 election. The
success of the Klan was short-lived, though, and by the
early ’30s, the onset of the Great Depression and changing
political climate caused membership to dwindle. By
the mid–’30s, the party had disappeared from the prairies
and much of Canada. (The Klan, though, would return to
In the meantime, fervent anti-Jewish rhetoric would
take the Klan’s place. In the ’30s, Quebec had one of the
biggest and oldest Jewish communities in Canada. With that came Adrien Arcand’s anti-Jewish political party,
the Parti National Social Chretien. Arcand was the editor
of three Montreal weekly newspapers, all of which
spread anti-Semitic messages to show Arcand’s support
of Hitler. In 1934, Arcand worked as a publicist for Prime
Minister R.B. Bennett’s Conservative Party in Quebec.
In fact, during the ’30s, dozens of pro-Nazi clubs existed in
In fact, during the ’30s, dozens of pro-Nazi clubs existed in
Toronto.
Infamously, the friction between Nazi supporters
Infamously, the friction between Nazi supporters
and Toronto’s Jewish population cumulated in the 1933
Christie Pits riot, during which a baseball game between
Jewish and non-Jewish teams resulted in six hours of
violence, including on Bloor Street, where a number of
Jewish shops existed. As a leader in the fascist movement,
then, Arcand was well-respected by many; his organization
is said to have had thousands of members—until
the tide of Western sentiment turned against Hitler. Even
so, he later ran for federal Parliament in 1949 and captured
a second-place finish (5,590 votes) in his Richelieu–
Verchères riding; he finished second in the 1953 federal
election in the riding of Berthier–MaskinongĂ©–delanaudière
with 39 percent of the vote (7,496 votes).
Fascism’s continued popularity was, perhaps, a sign
of things to come. Of the approximately 130 radical right wing
groups that have existed in Canada since 1945, 25
percent were formed between 1945 and 1970. The rest
were formed from 1971 onward. The point is: Organized
groups continued to persist, and in bigger numbers, even
as “racist” and “fascist” became dirty words. “Collectively
we’re above every other country [in terms of immigration
and multiculturalism],” says Perry, “I hate to admit it, but
I think [racism and white supremacy is] simmering, it’s
part of our colonial past and it’s going to be hard to get
rid of it.”
Today’s pro-white movement
has moved on line and it is flourishing, at least in terms of chatter. People from all
walks of life —rich, poor, factory worker, college student,
lawyer, doctor, teacher, young, and old—gather in online
forums to discuss their thoughts and feelings about non whites and the current state of the country. Stormfront.
org, a website that connects thousands of white supremacists in one forum to discuss all things white power,
is particularly popular. Here, they seek re-affirmation
and support from others who think like them. When
they want to vent about how Brampton is overrun by
“browns,” there are dozens of people there to empathize
with them, sharing their own experiences from Muskoka,
Ont., Manitoba, Surrey, B.C.—even Australia. Long-time
members, some with thousands of posts, latch onto newbies,
first-timers who have taken that crucial first step
toward turning pro-white thoughts into action by revealing
how they really feel on the forum.
trying to outdo each other with macho boasting,” says
Paul Fromm, one of Canada’s most well-known pro-white
leaders—not affiliated to any one organization,
but a mentor to all for the past 40 years. Sitting next
to Smith at the food court table, Fromm looks exactly
like the everyday white supremacist he’s trying to create.
He’s a former English teacher in Peel Region. You
couldn’t pick him out of a crowd and say, “There is a
white supremacist.” The movement, says Fromm, needs
serious people, not those who’d rather do a lot of drinking
and fighting. It is actively trying to put more emphasis
on being educated, he adds. Ignorant, uneducated
comments on Stormfront.org are mostly struck down for
more educated responses. Some chat board members
even try to re-program certain forum-goers to be more
intelligent. They tell them to read books and the news; to
strengthen their arguments to be more than just off-the cuff,
emotional outbursts.
Indeed, white supremacy is more connected than
ever. The movement, if you can call it that, says Wilson, is
stronger because of the fibreoptic cables that connect the
world through the internet. “Now, you can have a white
supremacist in any small town who is alone in his own
regional community but is supported by all the activities
internationally,” he says. The growing support in Greece
and other European nations, including long-established
groups in Russia and the U.K., feeds the person in small
town Canada. It’s globalization of the white supremacy
movement; distance bears no restriction. “The internet
has given them the ability to find just about anything that
will justify their argument,” Wilson says. “If you look for
positive things to your argument, you’re going to find it
and you focus on that and you’re supported more and
more by your belief.”
Still, as scary as this connectedness is, white supremacists
are still very disorganized, and this makes them
weak, says Perry. But maybe not for long, she adds. The
Conservative government’s mounting attack on immigration
and the image such attacks form for Canadians—not
to mention recent and future changes to how immigration
occurs—could be the catalyst for white supremacy
to dig its nails into the mainstream opinion.
The Conservative government
has taken a hardline approach to immigration since getting a majority in parliament in the last election. Just in 2012, the changes the government has made to how immigration works in Canada are some of the most sweeping changes Canada has experienced in years: reduction in refugee health care availability, a scrapped skilled workers program in favour of a new program that allows employers to pic and choose from a pool of potential immigrants; plus
tightened rules and procedures around conditional immigration status and spousal sponsorship. The government will now fingerprint all refugee claimants and immigrants and cross-reference them with criminal databases, essentially pinning criminality on all immigrants and refugees attempting to establish life in Canada
The most glaring change is the ability Kenney now
has—which he gave himself power to do in the passing
of Bill C-43—to personally reject the entrance of anyone
based on “public policy considerations.” What this
means is still unclear—and these are only a few in a long
list of changes spearheaded by Kenney and the current
government.Kenney and the feds are making a case in the media and with the public that immigrants are duping the system, says Perry, and taking advantage of loopholes and
lax regulations to make it into Canada—all rhetoric that
sounds very similar to that of many white supremacists.
In March 2012, for instance, Kenney said the government
wants to crack down on “passport babies,” a phrase
he uses for children born while couples are traveling in
Canada. “With today’s inexpensive and rapid modern
travel, someone can fly in for a couple of weeks, have
a child and fly out, and otherwise never actually live in
the country and have no intention of doing so,” Kenney
said. “It strikes me that times have changed and perhaps
we should modernize our approach to reflect the international
norm and the vulnerability we have to people who want to cut the corners.”
Between 1975 and 2005, Gallup conducted annual
surveys on whether Canada should raise or lower immigration numbers; a third option was to stay the course.
Viewed over time, the surveys reveal a rollercoaster of
attitudes toward immigration. Outside of 1982 (a recession
year) Canadians polled said numbers should stay
the same or be increased. However, between 1991 and
1997 the country was split, just under half wanted immigration numbers to decrease In 2005, 80 percent were
happy with the current immigration numbers. In 2010,
more than 80 percent of Canadians polled for the study
believed immigration was good for the economy, while
25 percent had Fromm’s sentiment that immigration
would take jobs from Canadians. “We’re wedded to the
"We're wedded to the ideology," Perry says of Canada’s image on the international stage, “but at the local level we’re wedded to it until it affects us, whether it’s a loss of jobs or a confrontation with someone from another community.”
In some cases the political climate toward immigration
has even caused a break from the movement’s overarching
goal to shed its violent reputation. In Alberta,
the influx of immigration to the province’s major cities,
Calgary and Edmonton, in the last decade has led
Blood and Honour in Alberta, a violently-inclined group
that has a string of its members up on assault charges
for several incidents over the last few years. Its unofficial
leader, Kyle McKee, along with two other members,
attacked two Sikh men in Edmonton this past March,
hours after being confronted by anti-racist protesters
during a pro-white march led by McKee in the streets
of the Alberta city. Edmonton was also target of expansion
for the Calgary-based group and McKee was making
regular trips to the city since 2011 on recruiting missions.
Police found shotguns, rifles, a stockpile of ammunition
and a collection of knives when they searched the brazen
man’s home in Calgary—not much of a surprise considering
his interest in posing for photos with guns and Nazi
paraphernalia.
Such pro-white sentiment has always been present in
the province, Perry says, but now it has a reaffirmation—
from the federal government in particular. The strength
of the Wildrose party in particular, she adds, caused the
Conservatives to go much farther right than they might
have wanted to in order to win the most recent election
there. “This political rhetoric is lending credence to this
kind of argument by how far right we’re moving in this
country,” adds Perry. “It’s terrifying to me.”
Sitting in the mall,
Fromm does not lower his voice as he talks—loudly—about “how the country is overrun with non-white immigrants.” He peers out from under his black, wire-rimmed glasses as two dark-skinned teenage girls—15-, maybe 16-years-old—who walk by. Both stare. Arms crossed tightly and resting on his belly, Fromm shrugs his shoulders as they pass in abrupt silence.
Fromm cocks his head back and chuckles. “Immigration
built this country,” he says. Fromm is not, of course, being
sincere: He’s mimicking a comment Mississauga Mayor
Hazel McCallion made during the mayoral campaign in
2010. Fromm ran against McCallion on an anti-immigration
platform with the hope of encouraging whites to be
“proud of their European heritage.” He finished eighth,
far behind McCallion. “I wanted to raise the banner,” he
The Mississauga race may not have been close, but
small towns and more “rural, blue-collared cities” facing
outward immigration from the major centres in Canada
are ripe for the pro-white movement’s growing strength
and numbers, says Perry. In 2010, a number of smaller
Canadian cities were above the 4.1 national average of
hate crimes per 100,000 people. The cities well-above
the average were Guelph, Ont. (15.3), Ottawa (13.9),
Kitchener-Waterloo (10.5), Peterborough, Ont. (9.9), and
London, Ont. (7.9), while nine other cities spread out
across the country exceeded the national average.
Facing new immigration and cultural diversity seemingly
“foreign” to them, Perry says its these types of cities
where we will see growth and some strength in the pro-white
movement. Not only because of the anti-immigration
sentiment brewing there, but also due to the easy
access to the hateful message on the internet, Wilson
says. And with small towns and cities feeling the heat
from a sluggish economy and people of all races moving
into once-predominately white communities, it’s ripe for
the message to seem logical. “When the economy flourishes
they [white Canadians] don’t see it,” says Wilson,
“but when it hurts them they are looking for a reason why
and extremism has the ability to say this is the reason"
And Smith and Fromm know that. “I talk to so many
people on a regular basis who make off the cuff remarks,
but they aren’t involved,” says Smith, adding “the comments on the Toronto Sun, they're saying the same thing I feel"
the pro-white rhetoric acceptable—even popular, commonplace— in the political and social conversations in
Canada, they need more people to be comfortable with what they believe ( or at least what Smith and Fromm
think they believe). They must, in other words remove
the taboo feeling of talking about immigration and white
pride—and they must do it in today’s opportune climate for the movement to truly gain steam " The challenge is to get these people who are angry and concerned and get them active" says Fromm. "Its nice to let off steam in an anonymous setting( on the internet), but you have to mobilize them to act.
These are the people Fromm wants, young people worried
about a job, young families worried about their
children and older people worried about how the country
has been hijacked. However, they’ll take anyone. Escaping
the stereotype—or as Fromm calls it, the misinterpretation
of being a racist—is all part of the movement’s next
big step. It’s nonsense that today’s white supremacist is
compared to the Klan, he adds. Everything the media and
education system is doing, Fromm continues, is making
white people feel guilty: they don’t have a positive image
or self-concept.
Instead of this, Fromm wants to make the
Instead of this, Fromm wants to make the
white race proud of who they are—proud like Brother
Smith. “It’s wanting my race to survive and continue to
advance and grow and that’s not happening,” says Smith.
“The white race is dying. You look around, there aren’t a
lot of white people. If people point to me and they say I’m
a racist. I don’t care.
"I am a racist.”
Article was published in THIS Magazine
March/April edition 2013
http://this.org/
Author of the Article is Andrew Livingstone
Article made available online by Andrew Livingstone here...
white supremacy in canada.pdf
Andrew Livingstone blog..............
http://andrewjlivingstone.wordpress.com/magazine-man/
Need references
ReplyDeleteIt should be that if you want to be a Canadian citizen then it should be mandatory to follow Canadian holidays keep prayer in schools. want to be one of us then speak english. don't cover your face.go back to your own country if you can't follow our
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