Front Burner - How a far-right hate group operates in rural B.C. and across the country

Episode Date: June 13, 2019

Far-right group Soldiers of Odin has been developing chapters across Canada and popping up at anti-immigration protests throughout the country. It’s a group that Canadian border security officials have said is not afraid to use violence and Facebook has recently banned in Canada for being engaged in “organized hate” online. Today on Front Burner, CBC’s Raffy Boudjikanian explains what the Soldiers of Odin are, how they are operating in Canada and why communities like Dawson Creek, B.C., are struggling to deal with them.

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Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Dawson Creek is a city in northeastern British Columbia. The population is about 11,000. And the kind of things that usually make headlines are about the city budget or local athletes competing abroad. But lately, they've been dealing with this issue that many communities across Canada are grappling with as well. The rise of far-right hate groups. Namely, the Soldiers of Odin,

a group that has repeatedly appeared at anti-immigration protests throughout the country, been banned by Facebook for being engaged in, quote, organized hate online, and a group that Canadian border security officials have said is not afraid to use violence. Today, we help you understand who the soldiers of Odin are and why communities are struggling to deal with them. This is Frontburner. My colleague Rafi Boudjikanian has been covering this story and he's here with me now in studio from Edmonton. Rafi, hello. Hi, Jamie. So I know that you just came back from Dawson Creek and tell me what it's like there. I've never been. Well, it's a small city and it's got about 11,000 people. You'll notice a lot of farmland there when you're kind of driving through a very agricultural society.

One big attraction is a marker for the start of the Alaska Highway because that's where it begins. And so you'll see a lot of tourists kind of posing there and taking pictures and stuff. And that's really what got Dawson Creek on the map. And I know that you've been covering this group, the Soldiers of Odin, for a while now. And we'll talk about them across the country in a minute. But first, when did people in Dawson Creek first notice their presence? When did they first come onto the scene? That would have been in 2017.

So a local community group there did a take back the night walk. To people's surprise, soldiers of Odin showed up. Because these take back the night walks are often about women and protecting them against sexual assault, right? Exactly. And, you know, sort of meant to symbolize safe spaces for women, for LGBTQ, for other marginalized minorities, right? And then you have reports that three men dressed in Soldiers of Odin regalia, I guess, those leather jackets with their patches, showing up in 2017. And then a year later, they did that again. And this time, a local weekly newspaper there kind of documented that and took pictures.

And that's when concerns were really raised about, well, why are the soldiers here? The Soldiers of Odin is known as a vigilante group with anti-immigrant views. There's real concern about the various chapters. Tell me more about this group. Well, I mean, for the last two years, so kind of in the same time frame as they've been appearing at these Take Back the Night walks in Dawson Creek, they've also been at anti-immigration rallies. And that's really been across the country. We've seen that documented in Montreal. We've seen it in Toronto and Vancouver.

Here we are live downtown Vancouver. Real nasty couple alleys, but the boys are doing their thing. In Vancouver, at one point, there was some sort of clash between soldiers of Odin and anti-racism demonstrators that led to an arrest. Vancouver police briefly arrested three members of the soldiers of Odin after they scuffled with protesters. We've seen it happen in Edmonton over the last few months of 2018 as well. And they'll kind of be side by side with people wearing the yellow vest symbol and

sort of, you know, carrying signs that are against the UN migration compact and, you know, raising concerns that are completely unfounded about Sharia law taking over in Canada. You're not welcome here! You're not welcome anywhere! So tell me what they're saying about why they're showing up to, like, this take back the night march initially. Well, the soldiers of Odin say that they're a community group, that they're interested in keeping streets safe and kind of patrolling and helping out as a kind of local charity, although they're not registered as local charities anywhere, as far as I know. And what are anti-hate groups or watchdog groups in Canada saying about them?

Well, anti-hate groups say, look, the soldiers of Odin started off in 2015 in Finland and they were actually founded by an avowed neo-Nazi. And so they are really concerned that the soldiers are spreading in Canada and essentially say all that stuff about, you know, them being a community group or interested in helping out local charities, like that's all a PR stunt, right? To mask what they're really up to. Right. And of course, we've seen this with other far right groups, like this idea of trying to mainstream your ideas. It's a community based group that helps people in need.

And we also fight to protect our Canadian laws and values. Once the media started picking up on the soldiers of Odin, the Canadian group really started to backtrack. They deleted a lot of their stuff online. They scaled back on their Facebook page. And they said, you know what, no, we're not a right-wing extremist group. We're actually, in fact, dedicated to helping people within this country. I know one of our colleagues in Dawson Creek spoke to someone who says he's the president of the chapter there.

And how does he describe himself, particularly in relation to the Finnish roots of this? Well, colleague Andrew Criatta, he spoke to Tim Johnson. Yep, my name's Tim, president of the Soldiers of Voting Peace region area. And he basically says, look, I have nothing to do with the Finland group. We are not a right-wing, racist, white supremacist group. If those are your views, those are your views, and we do not accept that in our group. issue in the Dawson Creek area and therefore started focusing his efforts more toward charity, toward helping out local communities. Now, he sort of was pushed by Andrew about, well, why keep the name, right? Like, why keep the Soldiers of Oden name if you don't want to carry the baggage that comes with it? Basically, people know who we are as is, right? You know, if we say,

hey, we're the soldiers of Dawson Creek, you know, people won't really know who you are. You know, it doesn't matter if we get any, you know, good media attention, bad media attention. Attention is still attention, right? So just staying in Dawson Creek for a minute, what do the people in the community think about this group? One of the people I interviewed while I was there, Stephanie Gowdy, she is a local activist and she was very concerned at the presence of the soldiers of Odin. I was very taken aback that this was happening here in my community. Dawson Creek is in a fairly conservative area, but to see something this blatant, to have a group walking around wearing insignia

and having beliefs that have been well-documented, anti-immigrant and Islamophobic, was really disturbing. And she actually started a petition last fall. So after that second time that the soldiers marched in that take back the night walk and basically was asking for local political leaders at all levels of government to take a firm stance and clearly denounce the presence of the soldiers. So she's worried that by not doing that, you're kind of normalizing this kind of anti-refugee, anti-immigrant discourse that you and I were just speaking about.

I don't think it should be a left-right issue. I think any group that has views that are hateful, that discriminate against any groups, should not be tolerated. I don't think it's much to ask to have people openly say, this is not okay. This is not okay in our community. Does this group have any supporters in Dawson Creek? None that I met. I can't tell you that you can see on social media that they have supporters. So when, you know, the D.C. Creek Mirror, the local newspaper, did a couple of stories about them, you could see in comments people defending the soldiers. You know, it's

hard to tell whether they're members of the group itself or just supporters. And what about the police? Has there been any response from law enforcement? In October last year, the local RCMP detachment showed up at City Council in Dawson Creek and their staff, Sergeant Damon Worrell, essentially said they've been watching the group and they know that the group had been active in Alberta for 12 months. The RCMP are aware of them. We have been monitoring them in Alberta. Over the year that they've been operating in Alberta, there has been no indication of any kind of criminal element associated to that group. And as far as they can tell, the people

in Dawson Creek who identify as soldiers of Odin have no criminal background and there is no public safety concern as far as they know to the group's recruiting activities in Dawson Creek. That's all I have for you today, depending on any questions. And that kind of didn't land very well with the anti-hate groups that I was talking to you about, because again, they're worried that with the police coming out and saying essentially, hey, nothing to worry about, that you're helping to normalize the whole thing. And in that letter, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network wrote to city council, they said, you know, the RCMP was wrong in their assessment. Right. So I want to tackle

with you how one might deal with this issue in a minute. But first, can we parse a little bit more this group across the country? So I know you've reported on the soldiers of Odin and their presence across Alberta. And I remember during the recent lead up to the Alberta election, there was a controversy because some United Conservative Party candidates posed with members of Soldiers of Odin. They held a party event on Friday where pictures show candidates socializing and posing with members of the Soldiers of Odin. Now the UCP is distancing themselves from the alt-right group. Unfortunately, our UCP constituency association was not immediately aware of what the abbreviation SOO stood for.

To be clear, Soldiers of Odin and their hateful views are not welcome in our organization. And I know you've also reported from Grand Prairie. And tell me about that. We got a tip that Soldiers of Odin were holding a community Easter dinner in Grand Prairie. And they were renting a hall from the local branch of the Royal Canadian Legion. Here at home, the Royal Canadian Legion says it is promising to investigate after its Grand Prairie Alberta branch rented its hall to the soldiers of Odin. Yeah, I just called the Legion and said, is this true? And they said, yeah, it is true. And furthermore, they said that six members of the Soldiers of Odin branch in Grand Prairie are also members

of the Legion. We went to Grand Prairie, sat down and did an interview with the Royal Canadian Legion, and they actually got a handful of members of the Soldiers of Odin to come meet us and their chapter president there did an interview with me and kind of said the same stuff that the Dawson Creek group has been saying. We get to help our fellow Canadians in any way that we can. We've always been about supporting our veterans and signing up and helping them out with some membership dues. It was the least that I could do. We talked before about people in Dawson Creek who were very concerned about this group operating in their city. Are there similar concerns in Grand Prairie?

So online, I certainly noticed people raising the alarm about the local Legion branch hosting the soldiers of Odin and basically saying, don't you guys know who the soldiers of Odin are? And then sort of linking to previous media articles about those anti-immigrant protests. In terms of people who attended the dinner, now, I didn't speak to any of them. We were there after the dinner, now, I didn't speak to any of them. We were there after the dinner took place. But the feedback I saw from them online was, you know, this is great. And we're talking about Dawson Creek and Grand Prairie right now. But we also know that the soldiers of Odin have chapters across the country. And can you tell me a little bit more about their scope and how they're operating across Canada?

bit more about their scope and how they're operating across Canada. It's sort of more difficult now to say that they have active chapters, you know, on, you know, in each province, because, you know, Facebook recently banned all their pages, right? So it's, you can't just go online and check any more like soldiers of Odin Quebec Quebec or soldiers of Odin, BC and, you know, find these individual pages. But, you know, they've been an active presence for the last couple of years. And I remember watching this Vice documentary on the group in Quebec. They interviewed several people who talked about protecting European culture, not wanting people from countries that don't like us to be allowed into our country. There was footage of rallies where people were shouting down with Islam. People have concern with radical Islam, you know, so people got to be vetted in, not just take a bunch of people and get them in Canada.

And I understand our values might be seen as racism, but culture is not racist. So Muslims are not a race either. There is a moment in that documentary that there is a little kid interviewed and the kid says in French... Throw them all in the river and then the reporter asks, who are you talking about? And the kid says... Islamics. Okay.

Do we know anything about whether or not the numbers have been expanding in recent years or even months? The most recent sort of formal reports, I guess, we have from entities like the Canada Border Services Agency a couple of years ago, they had, there was this declassified intelligence report saying, you know, watch out for this group, you know, members have sort of a bit of an extreme right-wing ideology and they could be prone to violence, but didn't really quantify them per se. Do we know why intelligence agencies are saying that they could be prone to violence? If you examine their social media pages, it's not very hard to see why an intelligence agency might have come up with that kind of assessment, just in terms of the language that's used about, again, quote unquote, illegal immigrants. And there is this line of thinking in, you know, I guess, anti-hate academia, that this permissiveness, this allowing of online speech to this effect is sort of a bit of a negative influence on people. So even if

the group itself formally doesn't commit violence, the existence of this kind of online rhetoric, if you're someone who has violent tendencies, you know, you might go online, read this stuff, and then sort of become even more indoctrinated, right? And you might decide that you're going to carry out an act of violence. Essentially, this is how people become radicalized. We'll be back in a whole new way, where stories are brought to life by powerful performances from renowned actors and narrators. With the free Audible app, you can listen anytime, anywhere, whether you're at home, in the car, or out on a jog. The first 30 days of the Audible membership

are free, including a free book. Go to www.audible.ca slash cbc to learn more. So we've talked about Grand Prairie, Alberta, Dawson Creek, B.C., and how political leaders and the police haven't necessarily done anything about this group. Have we seen any move from government or law enforcement against this group in the last several years since their inception in Canada? So other than that declassified CBSA report, we've seen the RCMP sort of not directly refer to the soldiers, but again, refer to Odinism as a religion that seems to attract white supremacists. Is it contradictory to what law enforcement in Dawson Creek said, that there was nothing to be concerned about, essentially, with this group?

Well, I guess the Dawson Creek RCMP's larger point was the people in our community who associate with this group have not committed any crimes as far as we know. I did want to do an interview with them as well. They turned me down. And then I reached out to national RCMP, essentially kind of asking, you know, do you guys talk to your local detachments? Do you tell them, you know, how to address the rise of these groups? And what do you have to say about this? So we asked them for an interview. They refused. They said they'd provide us with a statement, and we're still waiting for that statement. Okay. You know, this is sort of instructive to me of how difficult this issue is to address. You know, of course, we have hate laws here in Canada. You cannot just say whatever you want. And it's a crime to incite hatred, to call for support, encourage, argue killings of members of a group. But it feels to me, and I'd be interested to hear your perspective here, that oftentimes when we're talking about these far-right groups, not just the soldiers of Odin, there are a lot of other groups that fit under this umbrella as well, the language that

they use is not as direct, right? It's more opaque. And then the other thing is, how do you go after every single person saying anti-refugee stuff online? Like, do police have the resources to do that? Right. You know, maybe I shouldn't have said the word opaque. Some of this rhetoric seems very clear, but it might not meet the definition of what we have currently defined as hate speech in this country. Yeah, because then you also have to think about, you know, say you arrest someone, then you have to get a Crown prosecutor on it, then the prosecutor has to weigh in on whether that does meet the definition of hate speech. And yeah, it just seems like quite a challenge. And then to add to the challenge of this, feels like the other way to deal with it is to try and shut down the spread of it. Facebook announced that they had shut down the Soldiers of Odin pages. And then the Toronto Star and BuzzFeed reported very recently that these pages are just popping back up again under like

slightly different names and that the people involved in these groups, they're just finding other ways to communicate on the same platform. Yeah, I've seen that myself. Shortly after we did that Grant Prairie story, I got a note from a reader saying, hey, just so you know, this page is up on Facebook, and sent me the link, and I looked online, and it was called SOO Canada, right, instead of Soldiers of Odin Canada. And then

that stayed up for a few days before Facebook caught on and evidently shut it down again. And then about a week after that, I saw something called Canadian Odin Soldiers. And then that lasted a couple of days before Facebook shut that one down too. So yeah, it's a challenge for the tech companies too. Well, this is a very complex issue and we talk about it a lot on the podcast. It feels really important and urgent right now. So Rafi, thank you so much. My pleasure. It was great being on. Thank you.

So just a note to say that since Rafi's story about the Grand Prairie Legion allowing the soldiers of Odin to host a community Easter dinner at its local hall, the Royal Canadian Legion, so essentially its head office, released a new hate policy. The policy prohibits branches from affiliating themselves with any known hate groups, anyone who promotes hatred or violence due to, quote, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or any other social determinant. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe.

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