The Madding Crowd

It was thirty-five years ago that the historian Irving Abella observed, “Canada is a peculiar nation. Peopled by immigrants, it is a country, paradoxically, which hates immigration.” That certainly seems true today. A recent Leger poll, conducted for the Association for Canadian Studies, showed that 65 percent of the population believes we have been admitting “too many” immigrants. Another poll, conducted by the Environics Institute, found that almost six in ten agree there has been too much immigration. This may well be an attitude that has been fostered by the heated debates in the United States, where Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and much of the Republican Party have spent months denouncing mythical dog- and cat-eating Haitians and immigrant killers and rapists.

But there are many organizations and individuals expressing rather similar, if less preposterous, lines of argument against immigrants to Canada, especially newcomers who are Muslims or people of colour. That and other pathologies — antisemitic, anti-vaccine, anti-Ottawa on almost everything — are the subject of The Great Right North. Its authors are three Quebec academics: the criminologist Stéphane Leman-Langlois and the political scientist Aurélie Campana, from Université Laval, and the criminologist Samuel Tanner, from the Université de Montréal. These scholars have spent a decade examining Canada’s right-wing universe. Their bibliography is massive; their interview subjects, numbered but not named, are many.

The authors divide those subjects into the ultra-right, the radical right, the xenophobic vigilantes, the anti-state militias, the freedom conspiracists, and the nostalgic racists. Not surprisingly, they find that many who are attracted to such groupings are current or former members of military and police forces, as well as criminals, and their families.

The ultra-right organizations are the most dangerous because they “glorify violent means of action,” which are considered “needed” or are valued because they offer men a “warrior” role. The Canadian Proud Boys, for example, deliberately replicated an American group that was founded in 2016 by the writer and podcaster Gavin McInnes, who grew up in Ottawa. The Canadian branch came to public notice in July 2017, when its members sought to protect a statue of Edward Cornwallis, the founder of Halifax, from being torn down. Few in number, they believe in the great replacement theory (“Jews will not replace us,” Proud Boys infamously chanted at an August 2017 demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia), and they fear the feminization of society. Masculinity is glorified; presumably to protect it, members are forbidden to watch pornography or masturbate more than once a month. (Good luck enforcing these prohibitions.) “Non-reproductive sexual practices,” the authors note of the group’s philosophy, “threaten demographic superiority by lowering the birthrate of Westerners.” Ottawa named the Canadian Proud Boys a terrorist entity in 2021.

None of the other groupings discussed in the book are as explicitly violent, though some zealots among them might be. Yellow Vests Canada, a radical right-wing organization in western Canada, protests against immigration and argues against carbon taxes and for pipelines; it also joined the United We Roll convoy to Ottawa in early 2019. The Freedom Convoy, which paralyzed the capital three years later, was more successful and more dangerous, along with the border blockades associated with it. Two of the men who obstructed the border crossing at Coutts, Alberta, armed themselves and subsequently received jail sentences of more than six years, though they were found not guilty of conspiracy to murder police officers. Some of the Ottawa convoy leaders still await a decision in their legal proceedings. The authors note that participants “received support, training, and intelligence from both active and retired police officers.” That is frightening.

Most of the remaining organizations studied in The Great Right North are small and pose a limited threat, at least for now. But many of them are very active on social media, finding a growing audience for their views; a British study, funded by Public Safety Canada, observed that anti-Muslim postings predominated among the thousands of websites and YouTube channels set up by Canadian extremists. Some of the Islamophobic and xenophobic ideas of their adherents seem to have found their way into the arguments employed by Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada and, less stridently, by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are at a historically low ebb, and the distaste for a prime minister and a government that have tilted to the left, allied themselves with the New Democratic Party, hopelessly messed up immigration, and created an influx of foreign students and temporary workers has inevitably strengthened the backlash from white supremacist organizations.

One such group is Quebec-based La Meute (meaning “wolf pack”). Started by two former soldiers in 2015, it defines its purpose, one of its founders told the authors, as “to gather those who worry about the Islamic invader who sneakily travels our land and quietly gravitates to the political sphere.” Its aim is to “eventually become important enough to exercise political weight” in fighting immigration and to protect the “nation against the Islamic invasion.” Largely a Facebook operation, La Meute has had as many as 50,000 online followers, though it has only a hundred or so active members.

“There’s a lot of people in the middle who are not anti-immigrant,” another activist explained in an interview, “but they sense maybe there’s something wrong with what [Canadian society] is doing, and somehow we’re bringing in too many people or many of them are not integrating well in the Canadian society. But they don’t know exactly what the problems are, how to connect them. And that was the group we were largely appealing to.” To judge by those recent opinion polls, there is a receptive public for this approach.

Leman-Langlois, Campana, and Tanner completed their research before an explosion of antisemitism in Canada was brought on by the brutal Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and by the subsequent Israeli retaliation against Hamas’s Gaza strongholds, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. Canadian Muslims were among those outraged by the scale of the Israeli response in Gaza, and Samidoun, an antisemitic organization operating for years in Canada, financed protests with funding allegedly from Iran. (In October, Samidoun was declared a terrorist organization by Ottawa and Washington.) Students and faculty across the country set up encampments on university campuses and tried to force their administrations to divest investments in entities originating in or selling to Israel. Others picketed or violently attacked Jewish schools, synagogues, and businesses in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and elsewhere. Artists and authors have boycotted shows, award ceremonies, and performances that might have Jewish or Zionist connections.

Adam Gopnik, raised in Montreal and now a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker, has been among those to draw connections between virulent antisemitism on the right and on the left. Adapting his 2024 Irving Abella Lecture for the Globe and Mail, he wrote in October, “But if there is left antisemitism and right antisemitism — can we distinguish them? I’d say yes — that right-wing antisemitism tends toward historical conspiracy — it looks back — while left-wing antisemitism is contemporary — it looks around.” He went on to argue that antisemites on the right decry what they view as the past plotting of the Jews — and even blame the Holocaust on its victims. The antisemites on the left, however, focus on Israel and “the need for anti-colonialist discourse in a postcolonial world — in the sense of placing as particularly Zionist all the features of classic European hatred of Jews: conspiracy, finance, outsiders, murderers.”

Any right-left antisemitic alliance, especially one that, however briefly, aligns Muslims with the far right that hates them, is situational, temporary, and fraught. But if the far right alone is not a major threat at present, a combination of far-right, far-left, and Islamic extremists operating together for even a short time could be much more dangerous.

An issue like immigration could also bring the left and the right together, much like antisemitism. If the United States cracks down hard on undocumented migrants, for example, there could be a massive rush for refuge in Canada, led by Muslims and people of colour who fear deportation or repression. The far right, readily abandoning any affinity with Muslims, would be in an uproar. And the left, their universities short an estimated billion dollars in tuition revenues over the next two years because of Ottawa’s cuts to foreign student visas, could well become very unhappy with straitened conditions and turn against all outsiders.

The left is noisier than the far right, but far-right activists are potentially much more of a threat to our democracy. The “Fuck Trudeau” flags that decorate trucks and farmhouses across the country are more than merely rude; so are anti-Muslim and antisemitic sentiments. “We are at a crossroads of multiple vulnerabilities,” the authors conclude, “where loss of public confidence in institutions, growing spheres of disinformation, economic and environmental insecurities, technological unpredictability, news media fragility, and identity politics, all of which are launching pads for the far right, could radically alter our political landscape in the next few years.” They are correct. The RCMP and CSIS ought to keep a careful eye on the wannabe terrorists among us.