Marc Lemire, a long time white supremacist activist who was the leader of the neo-Nazi organization Heritage Front from 2000 to the mid-2000s, has been working as a network analyst in the IT department for Canada’s tenth largest city since around 2005, according to a source. Lemire is best known for running hate-filled websites and fighting a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal complaint over a racist and homophobic blog post hosted on one of his sites.

For years, Lemire was influential in the neo-Nazi movement, guiding his fellow Canadian far-right extremists into adopting the internet as a propaganda tool. Active in the far-right movement since he was a young man, Lemire created one of the world's first online message boards for white supremacists and a myriad of other websites to host and push far-right propaganda. The 44-year-old is also the founder of Freedomsite.org, a still-active website that has hosted articles focused on minorities and immigration, one which led to Lemire being hauled before the Human Rights Tribunal.

A source with direct knowledge of the situation told VICE that Lemire was hired around 2005 and his role as a network analyst allowed him access to sensitive data regarding Hamilton employees. Around the same time of his hiring by the city of Hamilton—the early to mid-2000s—Lemire was in the midst of his failed effort to restore prominence to the neo-Nazi group the Heritage Front, a group one anti-racist researcher described as “the most significant hate group in Canada since the Klan of the 1920s” and the government called, in 1994, the “the most prominent white supremacist group in Canada.” While Lemire denies being the leader, court records and an article (available on Lemire’s own website) written by Heritage Front founder Gerry Lincoln indicate Lemire was an important member during Heritage Front’s heyday and the group’s leader in its waning days.

A Veteran Employee

Through the use of online documents, a physical staff directory, and by visually identifying Lemire at Hamilton's IT department VICE has confirmed Lemire is an active employee at the City of Hamilton. According to the source, Lemire’s presence was a quiet one—his name was kept off the city’s automated phone line, work charts, email directories, and he only appears to be named in publicly available documents once. Lemire doesn’t provide his name nor title on his voicemail message at the City of Hamilton instead listing the extension number. According to people familiar with the workflow of Hamilton city workers all of the above is unusual for a city employee—other employees contacted at their extension by VICE identified themselves by their name and title in their outgoing message. To add to all this, Lemire doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile nor any sort of online footprint connecting him to his longstanding employer.