Barry Ellsworth
16 July 2020•Update: 16 July 2020
TRENTON, Canada
Canada has a reputation as a polite country, but it is not immune to the dark underbelly of hate, as reported by Israeli media, Thursday.
At the request of the Canadian branch of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are investigating a far-right fringe party leader who called for the removal of Jews from Canada, the Haaretz newspaper reported.
Travis Patron, the head of the group called the Canadian Nationalist Party, posted a flyer and video on the party’s Facebook page on the weekend and unleashed a tirade against Jews.
“If they had their way, our entire way of life would be eradicated,” Patron rants in the video. “They don’t like us. In fact, they despise us because of what we are and the spirit we represent. They cannot coexist with it. And what we need to do, perhaps more than anything, is to remove these people once and for all from our country.
“Beware the parasitic tribe.”
Patron also peppered his rant with descriptions of Jews as “swindlers” and “snakes” and claimed they are “inside manipulators” who have wormed their way into the media and the central bank.
The Toronto-based Wiesenthal Center’s Jaime Kirzner-Roberts told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation the danger is that a fringe element takes such rants as a clarion call to act.
“We know that these words translate into action,” she said.
Shimon Koffler Fogel, chief executive officer of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, agreed.
“It is absolutely outrageous that such vile hatred would take up any space in the public square,” he said. “Such dangerous and dehumanizing language has all too often led to violence.”
Fogel said he will contact other social media sites to point out that the posts are clear violations of community standards.
“Enough is enough,” he said.
It is not the first time Patron and his party, founded in 2017, have come under police scrutiny.
In 2019, the RCMP was called in to investigate when the Canadian Nationalist Party posted a similar video on Facebook.
But that post did not mention Jews whereas the latest one did.
“According to hate-speech laws, for something to be illegal hate speech, it needs to invoke hate against identifiable groups,” Kirzner-Roberts said.
The Canadian Nationalist Party became a registered political party in 2019, and ran three candidates in the federal election that year.
Elections Canada has several criteria political parties must meet to achieve registered status.
The main one is that a party must have 250 members who are electors – that is, the party can endorse “one or more confirmed candidates in a general election…,” Election Canada states.
A party’s ideology is not taken into account.
The five major political parties in Canada are Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the New Democrat Party, the Bloc Quebecois, and the Green Party.
There are another 16 parties that are outside the main stream, including the Canadian Nationalist Party.
Of the fringe groups, The Christian Heritage Party ran the most candidates in the 2019 federal election (51). None of the fringe parties were successful in electing a candidate to Parliament.
