He was 12 when two neo-Nazi thugs followed him and his brother into a downtown Hamilton shopping mall and jumped them.

Matthew Green, who is black, shares this Jackson Square incident of more than 20 years ago to show how a pair of goons can do a lot of damage.

"It only took two of them to change the way I felt in my own city," says Green, executive director of the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion and a former city councillor now running federally for the NDP.

He also offers this anecdote in the aftermath of a bigoted, violent protest mounted by Christian extremists, with alt-right companions in tow, that targeted Pride celebrants at Gage Park on June 15.

Drawing from his own experience at Jackson Square, Green speaks with authority when he laments how the LGBTQ+ teens who were exposed to the hatred will remember it for years to come.

"It was a traumatic experience for them. What should have been a celebration has turned into this trauma."

Green and other advocates say the Gage Park violence was just another sign that dangerous right-wing extremists have found fertile ground in Hamilton to organize activities.

Consider some of the characters who have attended regular alt-right rallies outside city hall for the past several months:

• white nationalist godfather Paul Fromm, who ran for mayor in the last election;

• members of the Canadian Nationalist Party, which states the country "must maintain the demographic status of the current European-descended majority";

•Proud Boys, an Islamophobic and anti-Semitic group whose members call themselves "western chauvinists."

Matthew Green remembers how when he was 12, he and his brothers were harrassed by neo-Nazis inside Jackson Square in downtown Hamilton. His brother was shoved and racial epithets were shouted at both of them. | Scott Gardner, The Hamilton Spectator

The gatherings coincide with an ongoing municipal investigation into Marc Lemire, a former member of the now-defunct Heritage Front who has worked in the city's IT department for years.

Lemire, who's now in his 40s and on leave, has dismissed his dealings with the white supremacist organization as a dalliance of his youth.

In May, he told The Spectator he rejects the "Heritage Front for what it was; as I have stated consistently for over 11 years."

As a young man, Lemire embraced the early days of the internet to disseminate more efficiently neo-Nazi propaganda, as well as the material of infamous Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel.

Before the web, hate groups had to deliver pamphlets to people's doors, which Lemire and Fromm did in a Mountain brow neighbourhood in 2001 to hate-monger amid an Ebola scare at the Concession Street hospital.

The reach of the internet has made hate groups more dangerous, says Evan Balgord, executive director of the Toronto-based Canadian Anti-Hate Network.

But, vexingly, it's also difficult to hold anyone to account under Canada's current anti-hate laws, Balgord says.

The Criminal Code-based process is cumbersome, he says, noting police must take their cases to Crown attorneys, who, in turn, need sign-off from provincial attorneys general.

Investigative work can take as many as 18 months, which means only about a half-dozen of the most egregious and sustained hate propagandists are brought to justice in a single year.

"So if you're talking about this being an effective legal tool, no, not even a little bit," Balgord says.

That's why the network is pushing for the return of a provision under the Canadian Human Rights Act that allowed people to take hate-speech complaints straight to the federal commission.

Decisions could result in cease-and-desist orders and fines, with the spectre of contempt-of-court convictions for not obeying.

But the mechanism was repealed in 2013 under the Harper government after critics argued it strangled free expression and unduly imposed censorship.

Media outlets were among Section 13's detractors, but so was Lemire, who, until recently, maintained a "pro-free-speech" website that included an archive that memorialized Doug Christie, a lawyer who defended Zundel and Nazi-era war criminals.

Since the scandal broke earlier this year, Lemire has since taken down www.freedom.org, which he last updated in 2015.

Balgord says the Section 13 resource didn't exactly stamp out hate propaganda, but he believes it at least allowed for what he describes as a "lull."

"What's going on today really makes it apparent that without it, you've got nothing, and we need something."

The number of right-wing extremist organizations in Canada has increased considerably in recent years, notes Barbara Perry, an Ontario Tech University professor who specializes in the subject.

Perry, who's also director of the Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, says she and her colleagues estimated there were a little more than 100 active groups in 2015.

Since then, there has been what she describes as a "very dramatic increase."

"I can confirm that there are likely very close to 300 active right-wing extremist groups in Canada," Perry said via email this week. "They range in size from very small groups of 2-4, up to larger groups in the 100s."

The variety includes recent arrivals to Canada, such as the Soldiers of Odin, which have drawn inspiration from the original Finnish anti-immigrant counterparts.

But Perry's list also notes new chapters of longer-standing organizations, such as Blood & Honour, which the federal government has classified as an illegal terrorist organization.

Another, called Combat 18, was also named as an outlaw group in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service's announcement this week.

The rise in far-right extremist groups mirrors a spike in police-reported hate crimes in Canada.

• In 2017, they spiked by 47 per cent over 2016, according to Statistics Canada.

• Ontario saw the sharpest increase at 67 per cent, with reported cases rising to 1,023 in 2017 from 612 the year before. StatsCan says the big jump in this province was driven by more hate crimes against Muslim (207 per cent), black (84 per cent) and Jewish (41 per cent) populations. Ontario saw a 38 per cent rise in hate crimes targeting sexual orientation.

•The Hamilton census metropolitan area, which includes Grimsby and Burlington, had the second-highest rate of police-reported hate crime in the country at 16 per 100,000 population in 2017. Thunder Bay, where Indigenous people, in particular, have been targeted, had the highest rate at 17.4.

• Statistics Canada noted non-violent crimes, such as graffiti and vandalism to buildings, represented the bulk of the national upward trend. But 2017 was also the year that a gunman shot six people dead at a mosque in Quebec City.

After the terrorist attacks that toppled the Twin Towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, Muslims across North America experienced a rash of hate-fuelled acts.

Hamilton was no exception. Arsonists set fire to the Hindu Samaj Temple on Twenty Road four days after 9/11. The culprits also smashed windows at the Hamilton Mosque on Stone Church Road East that same night.

Of course, since then, there have been other cases of hate-related property crime and mischief, such as swastikas spray-painted on buildings. But societal factors that have fuelled the rise in far-right extremist groups in Canada in the past four years aren't easy to nail down.

A man wearing a Canadian Nationalist Party shirt and Trump 2020 hat records as a Hamilton Pride attendee holds her sign during a confrontation at Gage Park on June 15. | John Rennison, The Hamilton Spectator file photo

Still, it's difficult not to point to the election of President Donald Trump in the United States as a factor in whatever's going on. Trump was elected on a populist platform that promised to not only "drain the swamp" in Washington, but also crack down on illegal immigration by building a wall at the Mexican border.

In Canada, notwithstanding the election of a federal Liberal government in 2015, far-right Conservatives like Kellie Leitch still managed to find room for a "Canadian values" screening for newcomers and a "barbaric cultural practices" snitch line.

And today, shopworn tropes of immigrants stealing "our" jobs, exhausting social services and crowding out "old-stock" Canadians are fertilizing the far-right landscape.

The climate has also given space to Maxime Bernier, who split from the federal Conservatives to found his more radical People's Party of Canada. It remains to be seen just how much of the right-wing electorate Bernier can swing. The election is Oct. 21.

Some of it will be the racist fringe, which already has a proven tendency to gravitate to milder right-wing political parties. Recall how Preston Manning had to weed out such extremist hitchhikers from his Reform Party of Canada in the 1990s.

In 1993, Paul Fromm, a former Mississauga high school teacher, told The Canadian Press his ideas were on par with the Reform platform. "I would not call myself a white supremacist."

This is the part of the extremist's playbook, suggests Ameil Joseph, an assistant professor of social work at McMaster University in Hamilton. And it is nothing new, he says.

Ameil Joseph, a McMaster University social work professor, says right-wing extremists will try to sneak their dangerous, radical ideas into the mainstream. | Barry Gray, The Hamilton Spectator

"We know since the '60s, people like David Duke tried to make mainstream the Ku Klux Klan positions as political ones divorced from the hatred so that they could be implemented.

"And we've seen that example flourish. We've seen hate groups wield social media and online environments do this similar kind of proliferation."

Alt-right adherents in Canada, for instance, parrot Trumpisms, complaining about "fake news" and adopting slogans like "Make Canada Great Again."

In a video posted online, septuagenarian John Beattie, who founded the Canadian Nazi Party in the 1960s, is seen with two masked young men giving tips on how to suit up with far-right extremist organizations.

One of them suggests reaching out to like-minded neighbours, or checking out the Yellow Vest populist movement that rails against immigration, globalism and government corruption.

Justin Long, a Yellow Vest mainstay in Hamilton, says he doesn't support any political party.

He and his fellow protesters have held rallies in the city hall forecourt on Main Street West for several months, much to the chagrin of local anti-racism advocates, including Green and Joseph.

(Under increasing pressure after the violence at Pride, city council discussed this week ways to keep the far-right radicals out of the public square.)

Other than citing "200 years of government corruption," Long declines to go into detail about what drew him to Yellow Vest populist movement, which takes its name from an unrelated working-class uprising in France.

But, he insists to reporters gathered to cover a recent city hall rally, that the media has conducted a "smear campaign" against the domestic Yellow Vest movement.

Long says he's not anti-immigrant but against lax immigration politics that allow Islamic terrorists to enter Canada unchecked.

This claim is made absent of any credible sources and facts.

On June 15, the Saturday of the Pride violence, some Yellow Vests, but not Long, splintered from their regular city hall rally and headed to Gage Park.

Once there, they filmed a clutch of Christian extremist preachers waving homophobic-themed signs and bellowing diatribes through a megaphone.

What followed was captured on video — shot by more than one cellphone and camera.

A formation of pink-masked Pride supporters fanned across the grassy east-end park with a big, black fabric screen to block the volatile display from celebrants' view.

The preachers — who say they're affiliated with a Toronto-based ministry called Servanthoods — tried to outmanoeuvre the portable barrier. One of the preachers threw a punch, connecting with a "pink bloc" member's face.

It spiralled from there with more punches, kicks and shoves. At one point, an alt-right thug, decked out in pseudo-body armour, swings his helmet — not once, but twice — into people's faces.

Chris Vanderweide, 27, was arrested this week at his home in Kitchener and taken to the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre. He faces two counts of assault with a weapon.

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But let's get back to Long.

It's a week after the homophobic Pride protest, and he's addressing reporters in a southeastern corner of the city hall forecourt.

Police have set up barriers to separate Long's Yellow Vest rally from a much larger one against hate groups.

Two groups of protesters argue at Hamilton City Hall in January. One group was associated with the Yellow Vest movement. On the other side were members of Hamilton Against Fascism. | Scott Gardner , The Hamilton Spectator file photo

He says his Yellow Vest colleagues only went to Pride to "observe," just as he might go to watch a sports event.

Long insists he has "no problem" with Pride festivals, but sticks to his guns about gay people wanting "to destroy the family unit."

He's also quick to point out he told Paul Fromm, the longtime white nationalist, not to attend the Saturday rallies after he found out about his politics.

As he fields reporters' questions, a posse of Proud Boys — modelled after the same ones who chanted "Jews will not replace us" during a torchlit "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 — stands by his side, occasionally interjecting with jabs about "fake news."

This, however, doesn't seem to faze Long, who goes on to declare how he "would not disavow" the Canadian Nationalist Party.

"If they feel like they want to stand with us in the Yellow Vest protest, then they are more than welcome to."

In fact, men wearing Canadian Nationalist Party garb stood shoulder to shoulder with Yellow Vests and extremist preachers at the Pride protest.

The party, which isn't registered, notes the organization's goals are to "improve the social and economic conditions of an ethnocentric Canada."

"We must maintain the demographic status of the current European-descended majority," the group's website says.

Leader Travis Patron has posted videos warning of the "parasitic tribe" that has infiltrated the media, central banking and politics. "And what we need to do perhaps more than anything is remove these people once and for all from our country."

Ottawa-based human rights lawyer Richard Warman has filed a formal criminal complaint with the RCMP about Patron's video and other material he has posted.

In the complaint, Warman notes how anti-Semites have referred to Jews as the "parasitic tribe" for a long time.

What he finds most alarming is Patron's "once and for all" remark, allegedly a "call to genocide against the Jewish community."

The RCMP have since launched a hate crime investigation.

With the Yellow Vests battered with bad press, Guy Annable, the movement's Ontario spokesperson, calls up The Spectator to offer a "rational voice to the conversation."

Annable wants to talk about the "antifa," a term that's generically applied to anti-fascist activists, who have been the alt-right's most diligent agitators — on the street and online, dredging up racist, xenophobic and homophobic posts and exchanges.

"We are not violent people. We are people who are wearing yellow vests. We don't hide our faces," he says, alluding to how the movement's persistent antagonists wear masks.

Annable, who called from Ottawa, says some racists latched onto the movement, but he explains that's because it grew very quickly. He says it went from 18,000 members in early December to 109,000 by the end of that month.

The Canadian version of the Yellow Vest movement — which originated in France as a protest over fuel taxes — made headlines in February, when a "United We Roll" convoy of oil and gas workers travelled from Western Canada to Ottawa. Members of extremist organizations, going along for the weeklong ride, uttered racist and xenophobic remarks.

But the Canadian movement, Annable insists, is about four things: "Build the pipelines, no carbon taxes, oil to tide water, and remove ourselves from the migration compact."

But he goes on.

"Taxpayers are pissed off. Normal people are sick of seeing their children degenderized. These Pride parades, that's the latest huge one. You should see the outrage from parents on this on these huge Pride parades and everything else. No, we have a voice, too."

So the conversation steers back to the violence at the Hamilton Pride celebration.

Yes, he says, the Gage Park situation was bad. There were some "bad apples on our side, as well." Annable adds he won't defend "what they call 'Helmet Guy.' We don't want that."

Cameron Kroetsch, a member of Hamilton Queers Against Hate, says the response to anti-LGBTQ incidents is often muted. | Barry Gray, The Hamilton Spectator

Neither does Jyssika Russell, who's a member of Hamilton Queers Against Hate.

But Russell — like Green, like Joseph — says it's important to not accept the a-few-bad-apples argument, whoever's making it.

The damage caused by the extremist fringe that showed up to the park that day is enormous.

"There is absolutely fear," Russell says about the dread the LGBTQ+ people have felt since the violence of June 15.

Community events for youths have been cancelled due to security concerns, says Russell, who works with young people.

And even among her adult friends, tales of street harassment and assaults are commonly exchanged.

That's why a recent McMaster University survey of the LGBTQ+ community that found many felt unsafe wasn't surprising to her and others.

The 29-year-old recalls how one of her first run-ins with hostility happened during her first Pride march in Hamilton seven years ago, when she came out as gay.

She says some paid-duty police officers hired to watch over the event shouted slurs at her and others.

"That was my first Pride ever ... And that set the tone for me."

Encounters like that illustrate why there has to be a sustained, robust and uniform effort to stamp out discrimination, says Cameron Kroetsch, also with Hamilton Queers Against Hate.

And it has to come not just from the grassroots, but also from those in positions of leadership, Kroetsch said.

Too often, the response to overt cases of anti-LGBTQ+ incidents is muted, he added.

"Sadly, this is the time we live in. ... Sadly, in Hamilton right now we need politicians to reaffirm their stance on the subject. That's where we're at."

tmoro@thespec.com

905-526-3264 | @TeviahMoro

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