Canada on a global scale is considered, at best, a neutral place. We have outer space and beavers on our money, everyone is constantly apologizing and our passport comes with a gold star of diplomatic entry. Our international reputation is that of polite Euro-minded Americans, the personification of easy Western living and democratic societal success. Diversity, free healthcare, top notch education and living standards.
Though I spent my first memorable years in Kitchener, spending childhood predominantly in the US meant I too thought these incredible things about Canada. When my family first came back I quickly made friends of all backgrounds and believed to be living in a ‘post-race’ society. It took me about a year before I realized it was a mirage.
Ask any Canadian on the street from Vancouver to Halifax and I bet you 6/10 have a Nazi story if you pressed them.
Not a heroic tale about their grandpas fighting against them-a story about someone from their peer group or community. That Nazi skinhead house down the street, that kid from high school, that dude who always took the bus wearing red laces and growling at anyone remotely not white. Even worse, you may find out that grandpa played for Germany and is considered a “great guy” in some typical Canadian families, I’ve seen more than a few shrines to grandpa with SS insignia.
Returning from Los Angeles, where the movie ‘American History X‘ was practically a documentary about the Metzger family of Huntington Beach-I thought….there is NO way Canada could ever come close to American Nazism. No way.
I’ve been eating my fucking words ever since.
For 20 years now I’ve gone from accidental infiltration, to observation, to hopelessly cataloging the Canadian Nazi problem. For many in the Jewish community and punk scene in general, it’s not really a secret that these hate groups exist. What is lesser known is for how long, how prolifically and where those groups are today.
The recent Hunka Scandal political blunder in Canadian Parliament is a great starting off point. While many Canadians were absolutely shocked to find out that the Ukrainian WW2 veteran we were honoring was a Nazi, many wondered how such a fault in due diligence could have occurred in the first place. One potential reason could be that up until we had the internet we totally just glorified former Nazi soldiers who shared their skill sets with us post war. It was quite simple.
We like to blame America for a lot of the nefarious post-war actions and programs, like Operation Paperclip for example. On the surface, our participation was valiant. As many Canadians are the people pleasing children of England, we are very particular about our documentation and history keeping. We’re quite good at drafting agreements and able to keep secrets. Our nice guy mask allows for that, people don’t often question Canadian intentions…unless you’re Indigenous.
When trying to piece together Canada’s role in post-war actions you need to keep in mind that Canada, wasn’t even really it’s own independent country yet, flying federally under the Union Jack until 1965. While here that may seem cute and quaint (as we were her majesty’s favorite commonwealth country ) in actuality it means that all diplomacy, government, social and economic relations were under the control of England. So while ‘wee’ Canadians are great at keeping records, where and who those records have belonged to is another story.
During the second World War the country was trapped between American media and diplomatic influences while being guided and used by the British government. As a show of this confusion from around 1941-49 Canada held over 20,000 Japanese descended Canadian citizens in internment camps. As they had previously done in the first World War with the registering of 80,000 Ukrainians and interment of close to 10,000 people.
“In March 1941, Ottawa required all Japanese Canadians, whether they were British subjects or not, to register with the government. This policy was based on a recommendation from the Special Committee on Orientals, a federally-appointed advisory group. In effect, this declared Japanese Canadians to be enemy aliens.”
Internment of the Japanese
Our government and armies may have been ‘Royal’ but our methods and allies were driven by American interests. From the end of the second World War until the creation of the Canadian flag-things were busy in beaver country. In order to carve ourselves out as an actual nation after the incredible amounts of global shuffling, we needed to prove ourselves as an independent entity. One of the ways we did this towards the end of the war was by holding our diplomacy with Vichy France longer than the British empire-almost two years longer. This French connection is crucial to our current state of things here in Canada.
I could sit here and get into the intricacies of the underlying histories of English, Canadian and French relations that contribute to general diplomacy but for the sake of our current issues I am going to focus on the country as a whole between 1945 and today. Much could be analyzed and drawn back in time, but in current era we genuinely have a bit of a mess on our hands and have spent the last 30 years attempting to bury it. Much like the church.
With that out of the way…where did Canada’s Nazi problem start?
With the aforementioned ‘Hunka Affair‘ scandal taking place, there is an uptick of interest into the files of European ’emigrants’ (not immigrants for some reason) during the post-WW2 period. Many skilled and reputable journalists are sifting through the dusty undigitized archives of Immigration Canada as I write this, and soon there will surely be more articles and stories of middle ranking SS soldiers who made a good little home for themselves here in the great white north. More than I could ever accomplish.
So I want to talk about Ernst Zündel.
In the coming months we are going to see many outpours of ‘well-meaning’ Canadian citizens proclaiming their ignorance to such people and ideologies occurring in Canada. People from high levels of government might claim innocence to the past actions of previous political parties. Some may even publicly cry.
These sentiments however can be hard to believe when you have characters like Ernst.
Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel was born on April 24, 1938 in Calbach, Nazi Germany. Emerging into war, his father was quickly drafted as a medic and captured as a POW. His father was release in 1947 but returned with addiction. After completing an artist trade school in 1957 he draft dodged to Canada in 1958 at the age of 20. Ernst quickly settled in Toronto, Ontario where in 1960 he met a young Quebecois woman, Janick Larouche, in a language class. By 1961 they moved to Montreal to marry. It was there that Ernst met the well established Adrien Arcand aka “the Canadian Führer” who took Ernst under his wing. As we go along with our expedition the French connections will reveal quite a feat of Anglo-Franco relations.
Adrien Arcand was an incredibly busy man-he was a fascist, a bigot, a politician, an anti-Semite and hate monger…but amazingly not a Quebec separatist. He apparently wanted ‘to build a powerful centralized Canadian Fascist state within the British Empire‘. A lofty goal but he made it farther than you’d think.
*side-note* this Canadian Fuhrer poster was recently made and found on a Quebecois pro-Nazism page-I will not link it but it is not at all hard to find sadly.
After learning the ways of ‘Holocaust denial‘ from Adrien, Ernst set out to try to convert the masses in the most German way possible, through publication. During the 1960s and 70s Ernst made a good career for himself in creative design, even creating a few covers for Maclean’s Magazine-the Time Magazine of Canada. During this period he was a seemingly normal guy, an artist, who’d made a new life for himself here in little ol’ Canadia after the terrible happenings in Europe.
By night though he went by the pseudonym Christof Friedrich where he made some absolutely abhorrent shit.
After the Montreal Sir George Williams Affair in March of 1965, Ernst was apparently a student at what is now Concordia University and supposedly witnessed this incident take place. He was so incensed by this that he very confidently as a German-Canadian contacted J. Edgar Hoover directly to praise his racist policies and to ask Mr. Hoover to “Please furnish us with copies of all F.B.I. reports relating to this subject and also reports by various Congressional Committees” as he needed it for his personal “Post Mortem” investigation.
The audacity of this dude.
F.B.I. response
There is also the curious use of an alternative spelling of his surname “Zuendel”, this appears to deviate even from his German birth records. Perhaps it was an initial attempt at spelling an umlaut vowel in an English society but there is no clear explanation for this. It’s an interesting detail as his records progress as eventually he is only known by the “Zündel” name.
As Ernst was becoming a well established artist his work and techniques became sought after in the art world. With Montreal being an artistic hub and connection to the New York galleries, Zündel made several trips to the United States during this time. Sure enough that little letter to J. Edgar Hoover put him on a watch list where by May of 1965 they had compiled a file on his ideology and profile. It took roughly 3 months for the F.B.I. to establish from another country, with no internet that this dude was a Nazi.
Even in 1965 Hoover’s F.B.I. thought this guy was a threat, and if we knew half of what Hoover’s administration pulled off in his day, it’s terrifying that they thought Zündel was extreme. Even Texans complained of his Nazism.
It was during this time he began to organize for the Quebec political party Ralliement créditiste du Québec which went onto win 12 seats in Quebec by 1970 and influence many parties that followed. Only when he went onto become the defacto spokesperson for the parents group ‘Concerned Parents of German Descent’ did his views start to become more understood. This new ‘fame’ Ernst was receiving led journalist Mark Bonokowski to do some digging and found his penname Christof Friedrich, eventually publicly outing his Nazi love letters in the late 1970s.
While many would think that level of public exposure would spell the end of Ernst and he would have gone on to live a sad life devoid of human connection and communal warmth-All this really did was create a calling card for the next Neo-Nazi messiah. A real German for North American white supremacists would have been exciting, his accent alone would be intoxicating. By 1975 he relocated to Toronto, holing up in a house in Cabbage Town.
Much like Adrien in Quebec, the 1980’s saw several instances of public workers being acknowledged for hate crimes against the Jewish people. James “Jim” Keegstra was one of the more obvious cases being the first person successfully convicted of a hate crime under the now titled section 319(2) or ‘Willful promotion of hatred’ a new law at the time.
Keegstra, once town mayor of Eckville, Alberta, was an unassuming secondary school teacher in the early 1970s. By 1981 he had received enough school board complaints that a formal investigation into his teaching took place. There it was discovered that for over a decade he had been teaching revisionist history regarding the Holocaust being a hoax. Though warned by officials to cease he refused to drop the curriculum which led to him being outed from teaching in 1982. He ran for mayor again in 1983-lost-then was federally charged with ‘criminally promoting hatred’ in 1984. He attempted to appeal his original ruling until 1996 when the Canadian Supreme Courts tried his case for the 3rd and final time where he received a one-year suspended sentence and 200 hours of community service. For anyone who’s got slapped with community service, 200 hours is torturous but what fucking community wants this dude?
At the same time as Keegstra was teaching, Ernst’s home had become a refuge for the growing number of fascist cosplayers that ran loose in the UK influenced Toronto street scene. It was there in Cabbage Town that his true legacy began. With his extensive publishing and political experience he began operating his own small publishing house, Samisdat Publishing, creating and distributing thousands upon thousands of pro-Nazi (and general bigotry) leaflets. First being distributed in Toronto but quickly word caught on and his tracts were ordered by international hate groups to boost their recruitments.
His undeniable popularity and influence led to his first legal trial for violations of criminal code of Canada section 177. It is difficult to attain records around these cases so the timeline of events has been provided by Nazi revisionists The Institute for Historical Review, so please take this information with a grain of salt:
“Ernst Zündel was charged on 18 November 1983 under section 177 of the Criminal Code of Canada which provides: Every one who wilfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years. The charge was originally laid under a private complaint by Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association founder Sabina Citron. The carriage of the charge was later assumed by the Crown, however, under an indictment dated 26 July 1984 which read as follows:
1. Ernst Zündel stands charged that he, during the year 1981, at the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto in the Judicial District of York, did publish a statement or tale that he knows is false, namely the article “The West, War, and Islam”, and the said article is likely to cause mischief to the public interest in social and racial tolerance, contrary to the Criminal Code.
2. Ernst Zündel stands further charged that he, in or about the year 1981, at the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto in the Judicial District of York, did publish a statement or tale, namely “Did Six Million Really Die?” that he knows is false and that is likely to cause mischief to the public interest in social and racial tolerance, contrary to the Criminal Code.
On 28 February 1985, after a thirty-nine day trial, Zündel was acquitted on the charge concerning ‘The West, War and Islam‘ but convicted on the charge concerning ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’. The conviction was overturned on appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal on 23 January 1987 and a new trial was ordered. The second trial of Zündel, which concerned only the booklet ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’, commenced on 18 January 1988. This book summarizes the evidence that was heard at the second trial over a period of three months. The last witness appeared on 26 April 1988. The case was heard before District Court Judge Ron Thomas. Appearing for the Crown were attorneys John Pearson and Catherine White. Acting for the accused, Ernst Zündel, was defence attorney Douglas H. Christie.”
Just to note-section 177 of the criminal code has to do with trespassing at night, so once again please consider the information above to be flawed-but unfortunately they seem be keeping more records than we have on the other side.
We may laugh at leaflets as a source of recruitment but to this day militaries have used and declared leaflet drops as effective tools of subversion and influence. It may seem silly but it worked well. With the internet, now we just use TikTok.
Though documentation of street activity during this time is hard to come by, there essentially became a bit of a war in the 80s between punks across Canada. It was again, quite simple, either you were a Nazi or you were not. Both sides were vehement about their positions. This is catalogued in the music of Canadian punk bands of the time, as shown by Manitoba born Propaghandi with their 1996 song “The Only Good Fascist Is A Very Dead Fascist”.
By the 90’s Ernst’s Cabbage Town home of horrors had become target practice for antifascists. Attacks on the home became frequent enough that Ernst erected a drop-down shield that would shelter the home during public attacks, it was becoming too costly to be replacing windows that often.
Prepping for Antifa in 1993-pre shield
While Ernst was building his ranks of leaflet workers, heavy hitters and comrades behind his fortified façade- He also was becoming emboldened in his public ‘pro-German’ stances, going as far as to call for a ban of the 1994 movie “Schindler’s List” as it was “hate speech” against Germans. By that point his leaflets were being translated into multiple languages. He started to figure out the internet.
In May of 1995 as claimed, the “Jewish Armed Resistance Movement” firebombed Ernst’s home causing nearly $400,000 in damage to Zundel’s home and “workspace”. It is now regarded as an unofficial holiday among local punks and a right of passage to throw something at that building. A few weeks after the initial attack he was targeted again, this time with a pipe bomb that needed to be detonated by Toronto PD. The amount of municipal resources he sucked up over the years is unquantifiable but surely more than most citizens.
An interesting and lesser known fact of the pipe bomb case is that the package delivered to Ernst’s home containing the explosive was also addressed to Tony McAleer‘s Vancouver residence. Tony McAleer is now a reformed white supremacist who practices de-radicalization and uses his platform to educate the community about the dangers of these hate groups. However he was once the head of Canadian Liberty Net and in 1998 was tried by the government of Canada for running “a telephonic hate message system“-where he was held in contempt.
To get back to Ernst et co., by June of 1995 his crew plastered flyers around town both condemning the attack, and the government response as a whole. This was the jumping off point for new radicalization-proof of the threats to German descendants. Proof they needed to increase their ranks. Having such an extensive background in publishing and design, Ernst knew this was the time he needed to step up his game. Quoted as saying:
“I think it is about time for those in authority to take their blinders off and overcome their own prejudices,” Zundel said in a press release in which he called on the authorities to “investigate leftist and Jewish violence as diligently as they pursue people of the right, before someone gets seriously hurt or killed.”
Zundel
Though Canada is seen as a backwoods beaver lovin’ hicktown of politeness, we’re also quite good with computers. Having one of the best engineering schools in the world at the time, Ernst was quick to adopt the new ways of digital print and the world wide web. He knew the power this could have, as he had previously been banned from German mail systems for distributing hate tracts (as seen above)-this was his way back into international minds.
This led to the creation of his Zundelsite. A currently active site that has been maintained in the U.S., Canada and abroad since it’s incarnation.
Zundel was not at all ashamed of his viewpoints so not only was willingly to defend them, but had the sole mission of changing the hearts and minds of as many people as he could. Proud to provide the materials required to bolster the ranks of hate groups across the globe. ‘How did he so quickly construct such a site on his own?’ one may ask. Well, in 1994 while attending the “twelfth International Revisionist Conference held by the Institute for Historical Review” Ernst met his second wife Ingrid Rimland. Born in 1936 to a German speaking Mennonite background (much like some of my own relatives), Ingrid spent her formative years fleeing war in Europe until eventually relocating to Paraguay then the United States by the 1970s. She became a well respected academic and writer. Then she met Zundel.
While Ingrid and Ernst were kindred spirits in their hatred, Ingrid had not been as openly proud of her viewpoints before meeting and marrying Ernst. Her newfound freedom in matrimony led her to begin the infamous ‘Zundelsite’ in 1994, later stated as “ground zero for Holocaust denial on the internet in the 1990s.” Quickly their site became a space for the dissemination and gathering of hate groups internationally, collectively re-writing modern history by committee in real time. Providing resources.
Though the website was founded in California by Ingrid, Canada soon took notice of das Zundelsite as a homegrown concern. Though ‘human rights tribunals’ were formed both within Canada and Germany, the new structure of the internet meant our telephonic laws could not keep up. There was no legal precedent. Due to this, most of the information that remains from that time is in favor of Ernst. While governments and educational institutions try to bury the history, his supporters use it as evidence for their cause to this day. Ernst is seen as a protagonist in their story of struggle, a martyr.
The active website contains multiple testimonials of Ingrid’s public speeches and discussions. Notably coming from every Southern California town off the 405. The legacy of the Metzger family and California Nazism is alive and well. Now bolstered by pseudo-Academic revisionism with Fatherland ideology and connection. For American white supremacists Ingrid her honorific Zundelsite brought a deep credibility to the movement. She’s educated, international and married to a German. The testimonials for her services are a self dox list, but one may notice positions of local power. These are not radical skinheads leaving testimonials, but local business women.
As an Anti-Racist human who has lived in both Los Angeles and Toronto and has dealt with a lot of fucking Nazis, these F.B.I. records are both validating and sad. What is illustrated is that Canada had to inquire about their own citizen from the United States. Zundel had been on a terrorism watch list in the U.S. for quite some time, and had many conversations with Ottawa over the decades of surveillance. It strikes me though that in many cases it is the United States warning Canada based on an American citizen who has either been negatively influenced or directly complained. There is evidence of Ottawa receiving these messages’ and returning correspondence.
From the mid 90’s into the early 2000s Zundel and his site became internationally known, growing an almost cult-like following. So much so that Canada took notice once again, they could no longer ignore the problem. In 2005 Canada finally deported Zundel back to Germany as he had already built a record there with his hate tracts. While it is almost impossible to find any actual documentation of the deportation proceedings it seems that it was a pretty swift motion with Zundel backing down in trying to fight it.
Once landing in Germany he was swiftly arrested, tried and sentenced to 5 years in prison in 2006-which he served and was released upon in 2017 but he at no point stopped disseminating his beliefs. Upon release having “served” for his crimes his true sanctification began to take place. In the face of power and imprisonment he stayed true. The Nelson Mandela of the white supremacist movement.
His Zundelsite then became an almost Guru-like living memorial. Only months after being released Ernst and Ingrid died. Though the last “copyright” on the website is dated to 2011 it is still currently active. It is either being personally hosted or is being paid to be renewed. Websites don’t actually stay around forever. It is being kept alive as a starting point.
When I began this research I only had one target in mind, a single entity. Upon expanding my knowledge of these webs I realized there were several key players in this situation and I am unable to cover them all. While there are clearly decent citizen Anti-Hate watchdog groups online, there is no centralized space or community. While we continue onto Ernst’s legacy and impact I will make special parting mention of several unmentioned Canadian comrades and contemporaries to Zündel.
Though difficult to gather all in one place, Zündel’s own unassuming lawyer, Doug Christie, had amassed quite the little who’s who of clientele in the world of hate organizations before his passing.
Our idea of what a Nazi sympathizer looks like, their backgrounds and interests may be a little skewed. Cause it seems like ol’ Dougy here was a pretty good representation of the types of people you’ll find in these groups. People who you’d think, would probably fucking know better. Academics, educators, artists, lawyers, politicians.
Zündel’s children now live prosperously in Canada, one of his son’s is actually the President and CEO of a large provincial College and a high ranking member in many municipal and federal organizations. While I will not directly name them as I do not believe in doxing, what I can say is that they all went on to live successful lives and LOVE Jesus.
In 2016 in Quebec City, Canada saw one of it’s worst hate crimes in decades. Reminiscent of American church attacks in the southern United States, a crazed racist planned and executed a murder plan against innocent members of his community. Within less than a day the provincial Premiere (equivalent to a state Governor) Francois Legualt declared Quebec to be a racism free place, sparking months of protests against him and his xenophobic policies.
This Mosque attack did not happen in a vacuum. The shooter himself was a member of a group called La Meute, who happens to be inspired and connected to a group in France called Front National.
Front National is headed by a woman named Marine La Pen, who’s father Jean-Marie La Pen was previous leader and founder of the party. Monsieur La Pen also has a similar history of espousing viewpoints like Zundel’s and passed them neatly down to his daughter Marine.
The European connection is a large part of the current problem in Quebec, and it needs to be acknowledged that it is not an entirely homegrown problem. Much like Zundel’s connection to the homeland of Germany, Quebec’s radicals wished to stay connected to their European background. Je préférer ma racisme en francais si-vous-plais.
This hate crime happened to coincide with a large scale research project carried out by Dr. Barbara Perry and Ryan Scrivens. Their netnographic research was conducted using data collection where they claim to have uncovered at least 100 extremist factions in Canada and at least 30,000 people involved in ‘sovereigntist’ causes. Once again however, there is little available research and in some cases public archives have had data removed.
The Zündel legacy cannot truly be quantified as he was not alone in his building of hate communities in North America or abroad. What can be said is that he had a major impact as an internet pioneer and inspiration to many hateful people. Tirelessly campaigned till the bitter end. Providing a blueprint of success for those who grew with his ideologies. By Ernst’s death in 2017, Trumpism had already taken it’s toll on the continent. While we were globally witnessing a new type of American presidency the United States started to become a breeding ground of “alternative facts” and public dissention.
After multiple racial incidents over the past decade, the Black Lives Matter organization became a large scale force with many protests erupting around the country using the ‘BLM‘ moniker due to the unending systemic and human rights issues. While this was happening, people like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones began pushing conspiratorial narratives to their millions of fans and supporters helping to sow ‘us vs them’ social division. Russia took the opportunity to exploit these internal conflicts and began running a now provable and scarily orchestrated social engineering campaign. Helping to stoke the pre-existent fires, going as far as to create entire grassroots organizations and set up protests and counter protests. As is the usual foreign influence play.
By 2019 talks of ‘civil war’ were becoming common in American online spaces. Groups began forming using publicly available platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Telegram and Instagram. By the Covid lockdown of 2020 the political tension had hit a fever pitch across the continent. Americans fought against the health mandates in record numbers eventually leading to the societal culmination of white man issues that was the ‘Insurrection’ of 2021. Canadians watched from above as our southern neighbors reacted to the perceived tyranny of their government. Some of those gleaming agreeing Canadians, took notes.
Thus began the great Trucker Protests of 2022. In historical action for our backwater country, we finally graduated on the world stage as an international contender for losing control of our general public.
As previously mentioned, Canada has always been surprisingly technologically advanced. Our education system is not great, but will at least ensure basic literacy unlike our US counterparts. So when you have a general population that is potentially educated, skilled and tech savvy-if they don’t like you, that could be a big problem.
For those of us who live in ‘big cities’ in Canada, it can be deceiving in terms of how we think most people feel. City folk tend to be more liberal, more science (less religious) based, more practical. Rural people are self-sufficient and community driven. When the government suddenly imposed restrictions on rural folks, they lost their shit.
With Canada being both resource and skill rich as an economy we do an enormous amount of trade with the US, they are our biggest ‘customer’ if you will. So many of the people who move these goods from Canada-U.S. are Canadian long haul truckers. By early January reports of mandated vaccines for cross-border truckers began creating tension for truckers unsure if they could continue working if they refused. By January 15th the government set forth mandatory screenings/vaccination plans in order to attempt to curb transmission of Covid at the time.
By mid January, large proportions of the trucking industry were gravely out of alignment with the Canadian government. With Canada’s population of 41 million that’s actually a pretty large portion of your overall workforce working within the trucking industry. Many of these trucking companies were independently owned, with many of the truckers being independent contractors often owning their own trucks. En masse there was fear and distrust within the industry’s workforce and soon they began to form groups.
Imagine if another vital industry were to suddenly mobilize against the government as collective bargaining?
What if nurses suddenly decided to refuse their unsafe and under-funded conditions?
Or teachers?
Whether we like it or not our economy absolutely relies on the constant upkeep of these trade deals. Keeping goods moving is how our continent was designed to function, so therefore any disruption to that flow can be highly damaging and cause long expanding ripple effects.
In early 2022 post-Insurrection tension had swept over the border. Canadians were, as a population, on their third round of vaccines. Things were up and down and government mandates were starting to yoyo, science around the topic was still in it’s infancy and the public was growing less faithful in their idea of Canada and what it owed them. So they started chatting online, confined to their homes with nothing to do but watch algorithmically tailored streams of conspiracy they began to form communities of like-minded individuals. Some of the people in these groups had some skills and took up leadership positions. With this the idea for the Trucker Protests was formed and executed.
The first Convoy rolled out from Delta, BC on January 23rd, scheduled to arrive in Ottawa within the week. As each city the convoy rolled through gained more and more participants the local and national news practically ignored it. Leading to the infamous statements made by Trudeau that the impending convoy was just “a small fringe minority” and nothing to worry about. Unfortunately for Justin this became the rally cry against him for the next month of honking the city endured, becoming emblazoned onto t-shirts, flags and other accessories to mock him with.
By January 29th multiple convoys had converged upon Ottawa with a few million in funding thanks to their online crowdsourcing. It’s from this point that chaos broke out and to this day there’s still people trying to sift through aspects of what the fuck actually happened during that month. As I started looking into these groups it became quickly apparent that there were hundreds of different rationalizations for why this was happening, often to conflicting extent. Suddenly though, they began behaving in a more cohesive way, rhetoric was forming and more frequently I was seeing links to a single person for info and instructions.
This man was Pat King.
“The empty vessel makes the loudest sound” and Pat King is a good example of that. His quick talking and ability to pivot and command made him the ipso-facto leader of the Canadian Trucker Movement, so much so he was eventually jailed for it.
Quickly after the convoy took off, American truckers created their own support pages and began planning their own protests. Later resulting in a pretty funny cross-border ‘Give Send Go‘ situation (stay tuned) that later helped to indict and suppress the movement as a whole.
In late January 2022 the plan to descend upon Ottawa was launched with national media paying no mention. Primarily using Telegram, the “CONVOY for Freedom” group became the landing pad for participants in early days with 2,500 members by January 31st. As the movement progressed so did the paranoia, conspiracy and support within it as the number of convoy groups exploded on multiple platforms. This makes totaling the number of participants almost impossible to know. We now also know that many email chains and organizations were formed during this time, in some cases coordinating with officials.
The Canadian press was flippant at first, no one seemed to understand that people were organizing on a mass scale. The entire unfolding came as a big surprise to Ottawa, though if they had been paying attention would have had the entire schematic to their cause. This sudden rush of Canadian rebellion was off-putting with officials claiming the situation would be over within days. By the time it ended a month later, the nation’s collective history had changed.
What helped jump start the government taking notice was the mass leak by DDOS of user data for the aforementioned GiveSendGo campaign, turned out this was a somewhat internationally financed operation.
Now while I could very easily dox many silly donors who gave their full government names, and occasional business credentials, I truly feel bad for these people and just want to understand where they’re coming from. I was surprised once again to see ‘God’ (or more likely ‘Thank God’) to appear in the 10’s of thousands. I keep getting God smacked by data. During this time period of action it became a digital game of whack-a-mole with crowd funding but amongst the chaos, a cohesion of thought started to take place.
A hotbed of competing ideologies arose. Many conflicting independent ‘news’ outlets popped up ranging from full out Q-Anon conspiracy channels to live coverage gonzo journalism. It was hard to makes heads or tails of the situation, I found myself sat with my Ottawa raised partner trying to collect all the various channels of data. We had multiple devices screen grabbing live radio chats, live videos, combing organizational groups, just trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Though we were both overwhelmed with life and responsibilities at the time, both being researchers, we knew this was a historical moment. We needed to capture it, witness it. He ended up using some of this collected data in his musical compositions and sociological fieldwork.
As things progressed on the ground in Ottawa, Pat became well…like a King. Broadcasting live videos initially from his Facebook he began organizing and commanding larger and larger numbers of people. Soon a communal lexicon began to take place like ‘honk honk‘, manifestos were being laid, supply tents being built. A cohesive vision was being created amongst a scary amount of mostly literate people with middle class incomes. Soon government officials (especially the career populists) took notice of his influence, some publicly condemning, while other members of government openly supported him.
Garnering tens of thousands of followers and at peak times boasting nearly 5k active users, this was not ‘a small fringe minority‘ as the Prime Minister has unfortunately claimed.
By early February of 2022 within the active online community, people were starting to seek out the reassuring guidance of Pat. Though he was not the only voice commanding the group, as seen with co-conspirators Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, he was definitely a fan favorite. As the Ottawa encampments grew, the internet got involved seeing this movement as a vehicle for secondary ideologies. What started as essentially a trade mandate protest had now become a global movement with deep Q-Anon ideology and extremist appeal.
It was almost impossible to find a cohesive message by late February 2022, and Ottawa residents began to press their city to remove the truckers who had been occupying the capitol for nearly a month. In the early days of the occupation the Ottawa police realized they were massively ill-equipped to handle something of this nature. These were hoards of disenfranchised mostly white Canadian truckers, not Indigenous elders, they couldn’t really touch them. So, for the first time ever the federal government used the ‘Emergencies Act ‘ creating quite the controversy as it may have been unlawful.
Once they grasped the situation, people had to be held accountable and by Feb. 15th (the day after enacting) Ottawa’s Police Chief Peter Sloly became the quick scapegoat, assumedly in attempt to appease the public. Having this shiny new act to to enforce, the fed began freezing bank accounts of people they deemed to be ‘influencers’ to the groups rendering them essentially destitute and unable to travel. By the 18th Pat was arrested, and by the 25th denied bail.
Now while I could go into detail about Pat’s ironic time in jail and subsequent troubles surrounding Canadian constitutional law, that’s not the point of all this.
The nail I’m driving at is that Canada has a problem (as does Europe) with the rise of Far-Right ideology and public dissention. When I first ‘came back’ to this country it was as if we were living in a hive mind, I was often shocked to hear people say such similar shit. Have such similar feelings, but with decades of time now spent in this country I have never seen it divided like this.
While writing this and sifting through all the data I collected two years ago, the tensions have not really cooled. Pat King begun trial on the 13th of May 2024. There has already been another smaller scale resurgence since.
Canadians are facing-much like the rest of the world-an election year with radical political polarization. I am worried at the feeling of familiarity to American populist tactics and agendas.
Trudeau’s own brother became a prominent figure during the Convoy, teaming up with Pat King for a long form streamed interview. It is heavily edited for context and sped up as they speak like molasses.Interesting to now see Kyle Kemper once again entering the political conversation in 2024, this time with our ol’ former bow tie wearin’ buddy Tucker Carlson. A completely terrifying and logical match. Canada’s absorption of Americana has always been a cultural truth however now, the US is absorbing Canada. Justin Bieber, Drake, Kyle Kemper. We only send our best.
While we’ve continentally been watching our troubles roll on, several international wars have become part of daily conversation. Something else to argue about. To use as a pundit for whatever cause our politicians need to tap in order to maintain their positions of power. It’s becoming harder to discern what is real, people are becoming fatigued and falling prey to extreme ideologies in higher and higher numbers.
In this topsy turvy world people are making radical choices, in some case completely out of character. With so much happening at once, the constant existential threat, cost of living stresses, opioid crisis, institutional breakdowns, global catastrophe. Such high tensions have understandably led people to seek security, a sense of purpose. People are looking for leaders and a community acceptance of who they are and the freedom to form society to their will. The problem with that is that some people believe that not everyone is actually equal.
Project 2025 is a good example of what happens when beliefs form groups, and those groups have power. Forming a conservative super PAC, Project 2024 aims to create a new government in it’s own image, one that really loves country music and hates abortion.
Only time will tell in what direction this goes but the international convergence of issues brings us back to where it all began.
When Zundel was sending thousands of Canadian made hate tracts overseas, he hoped for the future we’re currently in.
Germany has spent the last century publicly flogging themselves for the crimes committed during the First and Second World Wars. While they have made great efforts to de-radicalize and become a diverse and forward thinking society, some of the original participants could not be de-radicalized. Some Germans, like Zundel, absolutely believed in the Third Reich and their superiority and they have been waiting for their moment.
Things are moving fast and we have a lot of work to do. Never underestimate a leaflet.
Hoodrat Anthropology 