Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada has fired the head of its St. Catharines riding association over alleged past ties to a neo-Nazi group in the United States.

PPC spokeswoman Johanne Mennie confirmed Thursday evening that Shaun Walker, the CEO of the party’s St. Catharines association and spokesperson for local candidate Alan deRoo had been fired for not disclosing his past.

“A background check only yielded Canadian results and Mr. Walker did not disclose any information in our ‘non-embarrassment’ pledge about his past in the United States,” Mennie wrote in an email in response to questions from The Standard. “As of today, Shaun Walker is no longer part of our organization.”

Mennie did not answer follow up questions from The Standard about whether the party confirmed allegations of Walker’s past ties to the National Alliance or a 2007 criminal conviction for arranging assaults on non-white people in Salt Lake City five years earlier. Nor did she answer questions about the pledge or how the PPC vets employees.

Walker did not return multiple interview requests made by The Standard.

On Wednesday, Walker sent a press release to local media outlets announcing DeRoo — a former Libertarian Party of Canada candidate — would run under the PPC banner in St. Catharines in October’s federal election.

Then, Thursday morning Atlanta Antifascists posted a long thread on Twitter, alleging that Walker was the same man who once led the notorious National Alliance, a white supremacist organization.

The thread posted several of Walker’s Facebook and Twitter posts and the photos of Walker, including one at a local PPC party event in 2018, appear to be the same man that an online Southern Poverty Law Centre file identifies Shaun Walker as past president of the NA.

The SPLC website says the National Alliance is “explicitly genocidal in its ideology,” and was founded William Pierce, whose novel inspired the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of a government building by Timothy McVeigh that killed nearly 170 people.

According to the SPLC file, a Shaun Walker became president of the National Alliance in 2002 after Pierce died.

Walker led the organization until 2006, when he was arrested for his part in arranging assaults on non-white people in Salt Lake City bars. He served two years in prison, being released in 2009, according to the SPLC.

On Twitter Walker was an active supporter of Faith Goldy’s attempt to become Toronto’s mayor in 2018.

In more recent social media posts, dating back to 2014, Walker lists himself as a vineyard manager and winemaker in Niagara, although The Standard was unable to identify what winery he may work for.

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Walker’s social media accounts that the Atlanta Antifascists cited in its Twitter thread were locked down Thursday, hiding their contents from public view. However, The Standard was able to find them using the cache in Google’s search engine.

DeRoo did not respond to interview requests from The Standard Thursday. Someone from his official campaign Facebook page directed all questions to the PPC national spokesperson.

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