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What the right does right: Learning from Canada’s conservative revolution

January 5, 2010 in Briarpatch Articles, Jan/Feb 2010: Responsibility to protest by briarpatch | No comments

By Armine Yalnizyan
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

Progressives in Canada today have no shortage of ideas. What we lack is movement – any movement. There is no women’s movement, no labour movement, no peace movement. The antiglobalization movement fell apart in the wake of 9/11. Copenhagen notwithstanding, even the environmental movement has become more an exercise in individual consumer choice than a demand for systemic change.

This isn’t to say there aren’t many gifted and hard-working people fighting for women’s rights, labour rights, peace, environmental justice and other issues of interest. But there is no shared sense of purpose-filled momentum on the left, no sense of common struggle that connects one set of activities to another. Any “movement” in Canada today, in fact, is occurring at the other end of the political spectrum. Conservatives today have the numbers, the momentum and just about everyone’s attention. Why is that?

Conservatives are doing well in several tasks vital to movement building. They raise money. They do constant outreach. They appeal to people from every demographic and region. They reinforce messages that make people feel like their concerns and interests are being acknowledged and acted upon. Most importantly, they target their messages at you: You know best how to spend your money; governments don’t represent your interests; taxes are a burden; etc.

What the right understands so well is that even the most politically disengaged citizen has a set of values that form their personal ideology. Those core values influence what we think should or shouldn’t be happening, and will always shape our political choices more than loyalty to a party label. The conservative movement has never shied away from framing their thinking in ethical, moral, even religious terms – the things that should happen, if only the decision-makers in public life shared their convictions.

For the past 30 years, conservatives have focused on a few key messages: government regulations are the enemy; destroying the tax base is a “relief”; corporations should be permitted to do whatever they want. Progressives, meanwhile, have responded with policy prescriptions, attempting to formulate the perfect list of actions for the government to take.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with policy formulation. The problems we face are increasingly complex, and require bold thinking to solve them. But voters expect to see themselves in every frame, and big policy ideas like reducing poverty, investing in infrastructure or leaving Afghanistan are often about places or people they don’t know or, worse, don’t want to know. With fewer progressive intermediaries explaining why these things should matter to you, progressive policies and active governments appear increasingly irrelevant.

It isn’t that large numbers of Canadians have become inherently conservative. Poll after poll shows that Canadians and Americans alike are longing for a movement that will articulate their concerns that corporations have far too much power and that the middle class is being squeezed. The moment is ripe for voices that can respond creatively to these concerns.

What we need to do is speak to people where they are, and tap into the progressive values they hold at the very same time as more conservative values. Values of fairness and pragmatism; of the shared need for sustainability and security; meaningful opportunity for each and every one of us, particularly the next generation; and time to enjoy life, not just work.

People turn to movements because their concerns are reflected in the movement’s core values, not just – or even primarily – in its policies. We’ve got our work cut out for us to inspire and energize our base, not just with a sense of confidence and clarity, but also with a way of talking about politics that integrates the me and the we. After all, none of us really likes to be told what to do – but where’s the counterpoint to conservative messages that appeal only to our inner five-year-old? Who’s reminding us that we all want the same things, that we are all in this together, our fates intertwined? Are these messages not as satisfying as the instant gratification of conservative politics? Or have we just not learned how to communicate them effectively?

Here’s an obvious fact that the conservative movement will never use in their messaging: focusing only on individual advancement actually impedes what most of us are going to get, as individuals and as a society. The winner-takes-all approach leaves most people by the wayside. It doesn’t provide us, collectively, with a road map to anywhere. The road ahead, consequently, is wide open. As the African proverb says – if you want to travel fast, travel alone; if you want to travel far, travel together. It’s up to us to show how far we can get, if we just go down the road together.

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Mass protests and the future of convergence activism

January 5, 2010 in Briarpatch Articles, Jan/Feb 2010: Responsibility to protest by briarpatch | 1 comment

By Jane Kirby
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

Is summit-hopping a dying tactic or the next Olympic sport?

Ever since tens of thousands of people converged on the streets of Seattle and successfully shut down the World Trade Organization in November 1999, convergences have been the tactic of choice for confronting global capitalism. It is no surprise, then, that those who see the upcoming Olympics in Vancouver as one more attempt by state and corporate elites to expand their own interests at the expense of the general population have called for a convergence from February 10 to 15, 2010.

Organizers have been working steadily towards the event for over two years, and have called for activists from across the country and around the world to descend on the Vancouver area to express their opposition to the social and environmental havoc wreaked by the Games. The convergence will consist of a two-day popular education conference followed by four days of action, focusing on the specific themes of indigenous peoples, land, poverty, women and the security crackdown on civil liberties. Countering the “corporate circus” of the Games with the spectacle of mass resistance, organizers hope to pack the streets with people engaging in diverse yet coordinated actions, disrupting the Games and sending a message of dissent to the world. But beyond this expression of dissent, what do activists actually hope to achieve with this tactic?

Organizers with the global justice movement have levelled substantial critiques of precisely this kind of mass protest, questioning both its effectiveness at achieving real change and its potential to distract or detract from more locally rooted organizing efforts. Those engaging in anti-Olympics resistance have had to grapple with difficult questions about the usefulness of convergences and consider whether the tactic can be modified to address both the concerns that have been raised and the specific circumstances of the event and the host community. Activists’ success or failure in dealing with these concerns in Vancouver will have significant implications for future organizing in the city, as well as the future of convergences as a tactic.

The rise and fall (and rise?) of convergences

Now emblematic of the heyday of the antiglobalization movement on the continent, Seattle saw the co-operation of labour groups, anarchists, NGOs, church groups and others in organizing a days-long gathering of resistance involving popular education, independent media training and an array of street actions ranging from marches to strikes to militant direct actions.

While mass demonstrations were nothing new, Seattle ushered in a new wave of mass protests in North America and beyond. Nearly every meeting of global political and financial elites over the past decade – the summits of the WTO, IMF, G8 and World Bank, in addition to numerous free trade agreements – has been met with resistance that organized itself according to the convergence model. For many, these convergences are celebrations of creative resistance and solidarity, direct threats to the state and corporate purveyors of global domination, and the primary voice of the antiglobalization movement.

However, such convergences have seen decreasing numbers of participants in recent years, as states increasingly win both the tactical and the public-relations battles.

Many explain the decreasing numbers seen at more recent convergences as one of the realities of organizing in the heightened security climate of the post-9/11 years. However, the antiglobalization movement had been demonized in the media from the start, with decontextualized coverage of the militant tactics of the black bloc in Seattle dominating mainstream coverage of the event. Likewise, intense state repression is nothing new for antiglobalization organizers, as thousands who braved the tear gas and rubber bullets saw in Quebec City in early 2001.

Indeed, the waning of the convergence model can be explained at least as much by activists’ own frustrations with the tactic as with state repression. With so much organizing effort directed at coordinating large one-off protests, convergences have increasingly been criticized for distracting from day-to-day, on-the-ground struggles that have more potential to achieve concrete gains. And while activists engaging in summit-hopping – the practice of following the world’s political and economic elite from global gathering to global gathering – saw themselves as contributing to anti-globalization solidarity, they generally remained detached from, or in some cases served only to alienate, the local communities in which they acted. The fact that summit-hopping is costly and time-consuming almost guaranteed that the activists that engaged in it had relative privilege, isolating them from those most affected by globalization’s ills.

As activists Manuel Pastor and Tony LoPresti aptly noted in an article in ColorLines magazine, convergence protesters could be found “swooping into town for the action, then departing, with the local community serving as a mere stage for the Kabuki play of protest and repression” (“Bringing globalization home,” June 2004). For critics both inside and outside the movement, convergences are little more than riot porn for activists seeking thrills, and have served neither to advance struggles against capitalism or other systems of domination, nor to win concrete gains in people’s lives.

Why, then, proceed with a convergence in Vancouver?

Global spectacle, local debacle

One of the most cogent challenges facing the anti­globalization movement in general, and the convergence tactic in particular, has been the difficulty of connecting the day-to-day issues of local communities to broader analyses of systems of global domination. With the Olympics, these connections have proven easier to make. Although the Olympics are a global phenomenon, the exploitation and marginalization that inevitably accompany them are rooted within an intimate and local context: global spectacle, local debacle. Anti-Olympics organizers have recognized that this connection between the global and the local has opened up opportunities for a convergence model more grounded in ongoing local struggles.

For many people who would have seen decisions made at meetings of the IMF, G8 or WTO as irrelevant to their daily lives, the anti-Olympics convergence has the potential to forge an explicit and real connection between global forces and local struggles. While the effects of the decisions made at global summits are dispersed in time and space and are not strongly connected to the communities in which the summit meetings occur, the impact of the Olympics on poor communities and nearby ecosystems is immediate and direct.

With nothing but broken promises of social housing hanging over East Hastings in Vancouver’s infamous downtown eastside, the fact that developers and the business lobby have shamelessly exploited the Olympics to their own advantage is widely recognized. New luxury developments have meant that rents have skyrocketed across the city, and critics have estimated that 1,150 units of low income housing have been lost in the years since Vancouver made its Olympics bid. At the same time that the numbers of homeless and impoverished populations have swelled, crackdowns on city bylaws have meant the de facto criminalization of poverty in an attempt to “clean up” the city in the lead-up to the Games. The Assistance to Shelter Act is the most recent in a series of policies that could be used to force the homeless off the streets and into temporary shelters, where the true social legacy of the Olympics will be invisible to international media. Public spending on Games-related infrastructure and venues is expected to reach up to $6 billion, leaving public debt as one of the more likely enduring legacies of the Olympics for local residents. (The province of Quebec only paid off its “Big Owe” 1976 Olympic debt in 2006.) And as the city gears up for the largest peacetime security force ever seen on Canadian soil and attacks on civil liberties ranging from the surveillance of activists to the establishment of protest zones draw criticism from even more moderate corners, the impacts felt by local communities will only intensify as the Games draw near.

As Anna Hunter of the Anti-Poverty Committee and the Olympic Resistance Network points out, “there is such a large number of Vancouver citizens that oppose the Games, not because of some political motivation, but because it has disrupted their lives, cost them money and invaded their communities.” This groundswell of opposition is significant, especially considering the sheer popularity of the Games and the multi-million dollar marketing machine supporting the Olympics. It also presents activists with the opportunity to encourage broader understandings of and resistance to capitalism, colonialism and other systems of domination.

Perhaps more significantly, this grounding within the local context allows preparations for a convergence to occur within the context of, rather than as a distraction from, ongoing local organizing. What can be cast loosely as “anti-Olympics organizing” has in fact been part of the day-to-day work of a wide variety of groups – from anti-poverty groups protesting evictions and gentrification, to indigenous groups as part of their centuries-long struggle against colonialism, to migrant justice organizers supporting the temporary workers engaged in building the venues and related infrastructure, to environmentalists resisting highway expansion. The quite literal convergence of these day-to-day struggles into a single, coordinated mass protest presents an opportunity for solidarity among multiple sectors that can serve as rich fertilizer for ongoing organizing in the city.

Resisting the Olympics has become intertwined with a variety of issues such that, for many activists, it is no longer just about opposing a one-time event. According to Harjap Grewal, an organizer with No One Is Illegal Vancouver and the Olympic Resistance Network, anti-Olympics organizing has in many ways strengthened rather than distracted from ongoing organizing. “It actually can add momentum, visi­bility, resources and energy to organizing already happening in the city and across the country,” he said.

According to Chris Shaw, author of the book Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games and long-time street medic at antiglobalization protests, the public, performative nature of the Games also makes them particularly vulnerable to protest in ways that other global gatherings are not. “All those financial meetings have become very adept at going to places like Qatar where you couldn’t get to. And what are you going to do in Qatar? The answer is not much. But if we can force the Olympics into that sort of thing, where they have to have their meetings in places where no one can get to, it destroys the entire machinery of the Olympics. How can you put tourists there and not protesters?”

This is not to suggest that a convergence in Vancouver does not have significant limitations as a tactic. Even if the Olympics were substantially disrupted, or even stopped through a convergence, the damage to the city and region is largely already done, with low-income housing demolished, unceded and ecologically sensitive land developed and surveillance and security measures already implemented. Whatever demands the organizers might hope to make, then, are largely moot by the time the Games actually take place. The best that convergence organizers can hope to achieve in this regard is to make a statement to the rest of the world, making it more difficult for the International Olympic Committee to stage Games in the future. In this sense, the benefits of an anti-Olympics convergence will largely accrue to future host cities (or those that manage to avoid becoming host cities), rather than to the local community.

Civil-liberty-threatening security and surveillance measures are a particularly troubling side effect of the locally rooted nature of convergence planning. While using large events like the Olympics to justify the implementation of security mechanisms is nothing new, the fact that the day-to-day activities of organizers are strongly connected to planning a convergence means that ongoing activities are now also subject to surveillance. This may have longer-term consequences for organizers in Vancouver, as the state mechanisms available to monitor and suppress dissent get stronger.

When the music’s over

After the Games are over, convergence organizers will face the challenge of using the momentum generated by the convergence to engage the local community and make concrete demands in responding to the mess they leave behind. While the willingness of the state to respond to most activist demands remains doubtful, there is some potential for this kind of mass mobilization to achieve real gains.

For instance, a groundswell of public outcry and threats of legal action prompted the modification of a draconian Vancouver bylaw in late November. This was a significant win for anti-Olympics organizers, as the bylaw would have severely restricted free speech and peaceful protest for the three-week period of the Games and set a dangerous pre­cedent for similar future legislation. Other demands of the Canadian state, sponsor corporations or the International Olympics Committee are less explicit or well-developed, and this may be one significant limitation for using the momentum of a convergence to strategically advance the aims of the movement.

Some activists, however, see convergence as a creative, oppositional tactic not dependent on making demands of dominating forces. Indeed, the spirit of convergences has always been one of building more democratic alternatives rooted in people – rather than state or corporate – power. While the goals of the convergence certainly include a significant disruption or shutdown of the Games that could mount an effective challenge to the institution, this is only one part of the picture. By building on the geographical rootedness of the anti-Olympics struggle, there is hope that the alternative expressed within a convergence can extend beyond the five days of protest and will serve to strengthen local social movements.

No Olympics on stolen land

Realizing this potential of convergences to truly build a rooted solidarity will largely depend on organizers’ ability to overcome the exclusions that have marked previous mass protests. Despite the fact that people of colour bear the brunt of globalization’s ills, the face of antiglobalization convergences has historically remained predominantly white. Overcoming this (perhaps unintentional) racist exclusion of people of colour from convergence organizing and protest has been a major goal of anti-Olympics organizers.

One of the more substantial shifts in organizers’ approach has been an explicit recognition that the Olympics, and any accompanying resistance, is taking place on unceded native land, and that this consideration should be central when considering the approaches and issues tackled within an anti-Olympics convergence.

“The convergence call of ‘No Olympics on Stolen Land’ is unprecedented in bringing to the forefront the recognition of Indigenous self-determination,” notes Harsha Walia, project coordinator at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre and an organizer with No One is Illegal Vancouver and the Olympic Resistance Network. “Rather than being treated as one of many issues, it creates the necessary anti-colonial foundation which has often been missing in previous mega-protests.”

This effort to root the protest in an anti-colonial framework represents a substantial shift not only in what is being talked about, but also who is doing the talking. Indeed, the anti-colonial focus came from the strength of native people organizing rather than any benevolence on the part of white organizers. Members of the Secwepemc and St’át’imc nations filed their official opposition to the Vancouver Games bid with the International Olympic Committee in 2002, long before the Olympics was on the mind of most other activists in the area. The convergence planned for February 2010, to a large extent, builds off the call made at an Intercontinental Indigenous Peoples’ Gathering in Sonora, Mexico, in 2007, where connections were drawn between resistance to the Olympics and ongoing resistance to colonialism across the continent.

The rooting of the movement in aboriginal demands for self-determination, rather than their mere inclusion within a set of priorities defined by non-natives, represents an important evolution in convergence organizing that has the potential to foster greater solidarity among natives and non-natives.

Unfortunately, putting this potential into practice has sometimes proven more difficult. As Walia explains, “At times it has led the movement to become paralyzed in a search for (often tokenized) Native leaders, feeling stuck in the dynamic of ‘conflicting opinions’ (as if Indigenous people are supposed to be a homogeneous group!), or the placing of an unrealistic and inappropriate burden for directing the movement on Indigenous people struggling just to survive. It is kind of the Leftist version of the white man’s burden.”

The need for non-natives to share the work of organizing the anti-Olympics convergence is particularly evident given the nearly $1 billion in security measures in place for the Games. While critics and activists of all races have faced harassment and intimidation by security officials in the months leading up to the Games, natives and other racialized individuals are likely to be the disproportionate victims of security and surveillance mechanisms. This presents a substantial barrier to participation in a convergence protest for many people of colour, and presents a particular responsibility for those who are involved to stay true to their commitments to support those most at risk.

Despite these tensions, there is nevertheless some hope that the anti-colonial foundation of the convergence will resonate in other cities and with future organizing efforts.

The future of convergences

If plans for the anti-Olympics convergence in Vancouver suggest anything, it is that the commonly repeated (though just as often ignored) refrain of “not using cookie-cutter tactics” does not imply that activists should simply throw out tactics that have been problematic in the past. The 2010 Olympics has presented organizers with the opportunity to adjust the convergence model in ways that address concerns.

“People say that convergences aren’t valuable, that we need to do something else, that it’s deflating, or it can’t be effective,” notes Grewal. “We could be fixing and improving things. Who is missing? What are the tactics we haven’t been using? As we address those things, convergences could keep having an impact.”

The anti-Olympics convergence has attracted interest precisely because it has taken a tactic known for being disconnected from communities and made it locally relevant, responsive to the demands of colonized people, and tactically attuned to the opportunities that convergence activism presents. In many ways, the plans for an anti-Olympics convergence have made use of the most effective elements of past convergences – the spirit of creativity and solidarity – to build a more grounded and more useful application of the tactic.

This reimagining of the convergence model will only become more essential as the opportunities for resistance multiply. “We’re not only going to be converging at the G8 and WTO anymore,” Grewal says. “We’re recognizing that systems of global domination and capitalism and colonization are rooted in these celebrations as well, these spectacles of sport.”

The success of the anti-Olympics convergence remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the convergence will not be judged exclusively by its success at disrupting the Games as a one-time event.

“Ultimately, our resistance over the last three years, and during the Olympics, will influence the next phase of resistance,” says Gord Hill, a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw people and editor of No2010.com and WarriorPublications.com. “The post-Olympic scenario contains all the potential for greater social conflict.”

With the exacerbation of poverty from the Games and the public sector cuts and job losses that are likely as a result of massive government deficits, one can only hope that social movements will be up for the challenges – and opportunities – that the post-Olympic period presents. The legacy of an anti-Olympics convergence will ultimately be determined by its success at strengthening local movements – that is, by the relationships built and the people meaningfully engaged in the organizing.

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Fighting fire with fire: Anti-racist organizing in Alberta

July 21, 2008 in Aug 2008: Olympics vs. the Downtown Eastside, Briarpatch Articles by Andrew Angus | 8 comments

Illustration by Nick Craine

By Ava McDougall*
Briarpatch Magazine
August 2008

*Author’s note: With the exception of Jason Devine and Bonnie Collins, all anti-racist activists quoted in this article have been given pseudonyms. The writer’s name has also been changed. The reason for this should be obvious: neo-Nazis are dangerous, and those who organize to stop them put themselves at risk.

Even more dangerous than neo-Nazis, though, is the prospect that the actions of a few extremists could distract attention from the systemic discrimination and violence that indigenous peoples, people of colour and queer people (to name just a few of our society’s marginalized groups) encounter every day.

Blatant racism may infuriate or disgust us, but so too should elevated rates of poverty, violence, and poor health among members of oppressed groups-the real-world consequences of systemic racism and discrimination. Neo-Nazi organizing in our communities demands our attention, but so do these more subtle but far more widespread manifestations of racism.

Jason Devine and his fiancée Bonnie Collins live with their four sons, ages three to nine, in a cluttered townhouse on a quiet side street in Calgary. Both Devine and Collins are active members of the Communist Party of Canada and Anti-Racist Action (Calgary). On February 12, 2008, while the boys slept upstairs, Devine heard a crash and saw a flash outside his kitchen window. He knew immediately that someone had thrown a firebomb at his house.

Luckily, the Molotov cocktail was poorly constructed and most of the gas burned up in the air between the back fence and the corner of the wall it struck. No one was hurt and property damage was minimal, but the message was clear, at least to Devine and Collins. Their anti-racist organizing had drawn the ire of local racist skinheads.

According to media reports at the time, the police suspected neo-Nazis in both this and another firebombing that occurred earlier the same day in another part of Calgary. Though no one has yet been charged, Devine is convinced the attack was undertaken by members of the Aryan Guard, a white supremacist group that had recently set up in Calgary.

To Devine, the only surprise about the attack was that it was so long in coming. “I’ve been waiting for it since Western Canada For Us.”

Western Canada For Us (2004)

Founded in 2004 by Glenn Bahr and Peter Kouba, Western Canada For Us was an Alberta-based group founded on the ideology of white nationalism, which the white nationalist website Stormfront defines as “protecting” white people from being “snubbed” by “burdensome racial preference schemes in hiring, racial preference schemes in university admissions, racial preference schemes in government contracting and small business loans.” White nationalists commonly place blame for any social ills (crime, unemployment, poverty) on non-whites. They blame Jewish conspiracies for controlling government, the media and educational institutions, and they are also generally disdainful of queer people, people with disabilities, and leftists. While they claim to be “proud, not prejudiced,” posts made by Bahr to online forums make this assertion hard to believe: according to Bahr, First Nations people are “vermin” and all homosexuals’ lives should be “terminated.”

Western Canada For Us was very active during the few months it existed. Between January and May 2004, members organized a meeting in Red Deer, which was attended by notable neo-Nazis Paul Fromm and Melissa Guille. They also held a rally in support of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel and operated a popular website and forum. However, all was not well within the organization. Power struggles split the group and Bahr became the target of an aggressive campaign initiated by Anti-Racist Action (Calgary). After being exposed as a neo-Nazi to his neighbours and employers in early March, 2004, Bahr lost his apartment and job in Red Deer and moved to Edmonton. In May 2004, police raided his home and seized numerous items bearing Nazi symbols, including two computers that were hosting the Western Canada For Us website. This seizure effectively dissolved the group, after which Bahr moved back to his parents’ home in Langley, B.C., to await his 2005 trial for promoting hatred and a 2006 appearance before the Canadian Human Rights Commission. This commission found Bahr and Western Canada For Us guilty of violating the Canadian Human Rights Act prohibition against distributing hate propaganda through the Internet. Each was fined $5,000 and ordered to cease the discriminatory practice.

Because Devine was the public spokesperson for Anti-Racist Action (Calgary) and was named as the group’s “leader” on white nationalist websites (even though Anti-Racist Action is non-hierarchical), he was an obvious target. Anti-Racist Action (Calgary) had not only cost Bahr his home, livelihood and freedom, but had also shut down a white supremacist group that seemed to be gaining ground. Devine’s name and image were familiar to racist organizers, so it was a fearful time for him. “I’d wear my winter coat in the summer with the hood pulled up. The cops would look at me weird, but whatever. I didn’t want [the racists] to recognize me and follow me home.”

After the dissolution of Western Canada For Us, things got pretty quiet-at least until late 2006. That’s when the Aryan Guard marched into town.

“The rally was met with fierce resistance, with approximately 200 anti-racist demonstrators pursuing a few dozen Aryan Guard members and supporters through downtown Calgary.”

The Aryan Guard (2006-present)

Living in Kitchener, Ontario, Aryan Guard founder Kyle McKee and his roommate Nathan Touchette gained notoriety by flying a Nazi flag outside of their apartment. In April 2005, upon hearing the two men were interested in moving to Alberta to take advantage of the hot economy and labour shortage, Calgary mayor Dave Bronconnier told them to “stay home.” They didn’t.

The Aryan Guard formed as a group in late 2006, primarily recruiting and organizing via the Internet. Founders McKee and Dallas Price put out calls to fellow Calgarians on white nationalist websites like Stormfront and held their first meeting on March 21, 2007, a date widely known as the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination that has also been declared “White Pride World Wide Day” by white supremacists. The next time the group came together was April 20, 2007, when they celebrated Hitler’s birthday with dinner, drinks and a swastika-shaped birthday cake.

Since then, members of the Aryan Guard have put up posters, handed out leaflets and responded to anti-racist rallies with their own protests. They hold regular meetings and continue to use the Internet to recruit and organize. Their numbers, judging by public appearances, have grown from approximately 15 in October 2007 to 40 in March 2008. The Aryan Guard uniform-shaved heads, jackboots, tattoos, swastika and SS T-shirts-is becoming a fairly common sight around Calgary.

“A year ago, it would be rare to see these neo-Nazis walking around,” says “Bernard,” an anti-racist activist from Calgary. “Now you can find them on buses and trains, in parks and at bars. They’re all over the place now and their numbers are growing.”

The Aryan Guard organized their first public protest in August 2007 as a counter-protest to an anti-racist march. Since then, they have organized a demonstration against Muslim women’s right to wear head coverings when voting and a “White Pride World Wide” rally in March 2008. The rally was met with fierce resistance, with approximately 200 anti-racist demonstrators pursuing a few dozen Aryan Guard members and supporters through downtown Calgary. Heavy police presence ensured that the confrontation didn’t escalate beyond a heated screaming match.

The Aryan Guard’s mandate is based on the “14 words,” a phrase coined by David Lane in the 1980s while he was serving a 190-year sentence for racketeering, conspiracy and the 1984 murder of journalist Alan Berg. The “14 words” read “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.” The group claims to be family-oriented and opposed to violence and illegal activities. They say that they are “White Pride,” not “White Power.”

Anti-racists don’t buy it, though. “White Pride is clearly and solely a euphemism for hatred,” Devine says. Their website “is completely disingenuous. They say they’re non-violent, but they pose with weapons. These people have violent tendencies, at the very least.”

Bernard agrees. “I would classify them as racist terrorists. They use fear tactics to spread their political beliefs.”

If videos posted on the Anti-Racist Canada blog are any indication of the kind of non-violent family values the Aryan Guard espouses, Devine and Bernard have a right to be skeptical. In a profanity-laced diatribe, Aryan Guard member Jason Harley explains that multiculturalism is like putting a red sock “representing the communists” and a blue sock “representing the Jews” into a washing machine with a white load of laundry. “Everything turns fucking fruity and purple and fucking gay. Fucking retarded. There you go. Fucking white supremacy.” In another video, two Aryan Guard members fight bare-chested in the snow on a quiet residential street.

“”It had never happened before that people were being jumped for the colour of their skin. I pretty much stopped going downtown. It didn’t feel like my hometown anymore.”

The Final Solution (1989-92)

Intimidation and violence by racists is nothing new to Alberta. The province has a history with the Ku Klux Klan that dates back to the 1920s. Neo-Nazi skinheads, their rhetoric and their uniforms are not new, either.

Between 1989 and 1992, a group of skinheads calling itself the Final Solution (referring to the Nazi plan to exterminate the European Jewish population during World War II) moved into Edmonton and brought with it a culture of fear and violence.

“They seemed to appear overnight,” says “James,” a former member of the Anti-Fascist League, which was active in combatting the spread of racist propaganda and violence at the time. “A couple of them landed in Edmonton and next thing you knew there were 15 to 20.”

“They were quiet at first,” he adds. “I think they came to Edmonton because there was no history [of skinhead activity] here and they were getting run out of other towns. I think they probably told themselves that no one was paying attention so they didn’t want to fuck it up. But you get a few drinks in them and they’re a pack of rabid wolves. If they were out drinking and someone of a different colour looked at them the wrong way, that was it.”

According to James, once Daniel Sims arrived in town and Terry Long started funding the group sometime in 1989, it became a movement. They began actively recruiting, organizing and distributing propaganda. Sims and Long are infamous in white supremacist and anti-racist circles alike. Sims was one of two neo-Nazi skinheads who brutally attacked journalist Keith Rutherford on his doorstep in 1990, leaving him blinded in one eye, while Long was the leader of the Aryan Nations in Canada and a father figure to many young skinheads, allegedly providing money, training and literature for their membership drives and campaigns. Long was brought before the Alberta Human Rights Commission in 1991. When served with a notice of claim on behalf of Rutherford, he skipped the province and went into hiding-first in California, then in B.C.

“One thing that’s important is how it changed the city,” James says. “It had never happened before that people were being jumped for the colour of their skin. I pretty much stopped going downtown. It didn’t feel like my hometown anymore. I had never felt unsafe before, but it really split the community.”

In an effort to clear their city, anti-racist organizers launched a three-pronged campaign. According to “Jean-Claude,” a long-time anti-racist activist, “We had three main focuses. One, know as much as possible about them. Two, make their lives as uncomfortable as possible. Three, target substitution.”

The tactics Jean-Claude refers to have been used by Anti-Racist Action organizers since the early 1980s. Using the information they’ve gathered, anti-racist organizers let the leaders’ co-workers, schoolmates, neighbours and friends know about the person’s racist beliefs and activities through posters, flyers and phone calls. Then they try to make themselves the focal point of the group’s frustration. As Jean-Claude puts it, “get the racists focused on us instead of random taxi drivers.”

“Back then, you could find out whose name was on, say, the phone bill,” says James, referring to the days before PINs and security questions. “You could phone EdTel and say you were so-and-so and you were moving to Vancouver tomorrow so could they cut off your phone service-and EdTel would.”

The climax of the campaign happened in the summer of 1990 when about 50 anti-racists gathered in downtown Edmonton to blanket the city centre with posters. Within a few minutes, however, police seized their supplies. So they got on their walkie-talkies and decided to gather again.

“We were standing around wondering what to do,” says James. We had all these people and we were all riled up. Then someone said, ‘Let’s go to their house!’ So, we appointed a couple of spokespeople, gave everyone else instructions not to shout or say anything, and went over” to a popular white supremacist hangout known as the “Skin Bin,” the downtown home of several Final Solution skinheads.

According to James, the anti-racists gathered on the sidewalk while the neo-Nazi skinheads levelled shotguns and made it very clear what would happen if the anti-racists set foot on their property. The spokespeople and neo-Nazis argued, but James said it was a calm exchange. In the end, the anti-racists’ main point was made. Racists weren’t at all welcome in Edmonton.

“It took about a year,” says James. “When they did leave, though, they left pretty quick. They must have realized that they could get their asses kicked to Vancouver and back. Between that and their electricity, water and phone being cut off, I think they were getting uncomfortable.”

“‘We had three main focuses. One, know as much as possible about them. Two, make their lives as uncomfortable as possible. Three, target substitution.’

The shelf life of a neo-Nazi

It’s widely agreed that most neo-Nazi skinheads are youth. Even the most cursory investigation of the membership of groups like the Aryan Guard and its predecessors supports this perception. McKee, for instance, is 23 years old. Most other Aryan Guard members and supporters are under 30.

“A lot of them were from less-than-ideal situations,” says James, referring to the Final Solution skinheads he encountered. “They were introduced by kids their own age, but groomed by older men-father figures who were drastically missing from their lives.”

Jean-Claude is quick to point out that perhaps the reason that most of the members of the Aryan Guard are so young is that “the average ‘shelf life’ of a neo-Nazi is one to three years.”

“Harry,” who was heavily involved in the punk and skinhead scene during the Final Solution era and friendly with many of the skinheads, agrees. “The ones who were really hard into it either moved away or were thrown into jail.”

Daniel Sims is perhaps a perfect example. Once the most prominent Final Solution skinhead and, according to James, “one of the few who scared me because he was a lifer,” Sims has spent several years in prison in both Canada and the U.S. Sims has recently disavowed his involvement with neo-Nazi skinheads in television and magazine interviews.

As Sims puts it, “they put themselves on the fringes of society by choice.” This isolation from the mainstream coupled with aggressive anti-racist campaigns seems to cause young recruits to eventually burn out or bow out, particularly when key members are imprisoned or forced to move due to hostile conditions.

What‘s next?

Since the March 21, 2008, rally, the Aryan Guard has been fairly quiet, but members are still active on Stormfront and there has been talk of creating an Edmonton branch of the Aryan Guard. Meanwhile, anti-racists across Alberta are putting their heads together on how to drive the new crop of white supremacists out of their province. They are exchanging information and keeping each other abreast of developments in their respective cities.

“Leaving them alone is not an option,” says Devine. “We can’t just sit around and wait for the police, because essentially the police’s hands are tied. It’s not a crime to hate Jews or Blacks or whatever. Until you say ‘Jews are all evil and need to be killed,’ it’s not a hate crime. Until they break the law, it’s our job to alert the community.”

“We show up to let them know that we’re watching them and that the community doesn’t have to be afraid,” he says.

Devine’s community isn’t alone. Cities across Canada, in fact, are affected by white supremacist groups. Saskatchewan is home to the Brotherhood of the Klan and the Saskatchewan Aryan Nations. Ontario has the Canadian Heritage Alliance and the Northern Alliance. Stormfront members come from every corner of the country. Members of these groups know each other, attend each other’s events and move from city to city. Calgary is just the most recent gathering place, largely due to economic and political conditions.

“Alberta is generally pretty right-wing,” says Bernard. “On top of that, there’s the boom, so it makes it a hotbed for anyone trying to make money, which includes neo-Nazis.”

If anti-racists have their way, though, the neo-Nazis won’t stay in Alberta for long. Unfortunately, that means they may soon be attempting to regroup in your community. Anti-racist activists believe that if you maintain a vigilant anti-racist stance, they won’t stay for long.

Ava McDougall is a freelance writer and activist based in Alberta. She has several publication credits under her real name, but this is her first-and hopefully last-published under this pseudonym. Due to personal safety concerns, that’s all the information she’s willing to provide.

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