The voice thundering through the speakers warns of suffering, disease and financial ruin, as yellow-vested devotees respond with chants of “No surrender!” and “We will resist!”

This is not a sermon predicting the end of days or a fired-up militia preparing for war.

It’s a Dec. 15 rally of the yellow vest movement, which came to Canada a couple weeks before. The rallies have taken place at the Alberta Legislature and Churchill Square in Edmonton every Saturday for the last month. And it looks like it’s not going anywhere any time soon, with another rally planned for this Saturday at Churchill Square.

The movement originated in France in November with rallies and marches in some cases erupting into large-scale riots and arrests. It has since has spread globally and is gaining traction in Canada.

While it started in Europe as a labour movement protesting income inequality, business-friendly economic reform and a high cost of living, here it has expanded beyond economic concerns, delving into anti-globalism, nationalism, anti-government sentiment and xenophobia.

The crowd fluctuates in size but easily attracts hundreds each week. The rallies have at times been tense, with counterprotesters accusing the yellow vesters of being racist, with several shouting matches resulting in fist fights.

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The yellow vesters call for building pipelines, demand a clampdown on illegal immigration and decry Canada signing the UN Migration Pact, a non-binding treaty that aims to improve global co-operation on international migration.

“This is a blatant attack on our national sovereignty and our individual freedoms as a nation state,” a speaker bellows to an excitable crowd at the Alberta Legislature grounds.

“You are going to pay! You are going to suffer a reduction in the quality of the taxpayer-funded services!”

Week to week, the crowd is fairly homogenous: mostly white, young or middle-aged men but there’s also a sizable number of women. The signs slamming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley are legion, showing an eagerness to attack personalities as well as policy.

People like Carman Doan said they attend to support pipeline construction and Canadian oil but also to defend Canada’s “sovereign borders.”

“We fought for that in two world wars and we’re just going to hand it over to a (foreign) body? I’m totally for immigration; we need immigration in Canada … but we want it done properly,” Doan told StarMetro. “We don’t want to just open our borders wide because we’re not even a country then.”

Among everyone StarMetro spoke with, there was a prevailing sense that the country is changing and it’s working-class Canadians who will be left behind. That’s at the heart of Canada’s yellow vest movement, says Jared Wesley, a political scientist at the University of Alberta.

“One core element that’s present in a lot of these movements, particularly in North America, is this sense of perceived status loss,” Wesley said. “There are certain people in society that feel like they’re falling behind other people in society who don’t look like or aren’t like them.”

Wesley emphasizes the word “perceived.” While older, white men no longer have as big a piece of the power pie as they once did, they still dominate the top of most institutions, Wesley said.

In Alberta, the movement has seen a lot of traction because of the oil recession, the federal government’s inability to build a pipeline and the province imposing a carbon tax. But according to Wesley, many Albertans also feel threatened by the province’s changing demographics.

“You can’t ignore how the social aspects and that whole political element of being left behind is much more complex than just a paycheque,” Wesley said.

Although some yellow vest members denounce extremists in their midst, the movement, intentionally or not, is providing a platform to individuals and groups with extreme views. The Wolves of Odin — an Edmonton-based splinter group of the Soldiers of Odin who insist they’re only against radical Islam but have posted blatantly Islamophobic remarks on social media — have attended every yellow vest protest in Edmonton.

The Yellow Vest Canada Facebook page, which has more than 100,000 members, is particularly toxic, said Canadian Anti-Hate Network director Evan Balgord, a researcher who has been tracking the yellow vest movement nationwide.

“If you go through it at any given moment, you’re going to find anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, you’re going to find death threats, you’re going to find other calls to violence, racism directed to Muslims — and it doesn’t take very long,” Balgord said. “I found my first death threat in five minutes.”

Within five minutes of browsing the page, StarMetro found comments about Nostradamus predicting a race war, conspiracy theories about how the Rothschild family of bankers (who are Jewish) rule the world and one commentator saying they hope a plane carrying the prime minister would crash.

A profile under the name Jess Derouin posts about how sharia law, an Islamic form of governing, would be implemented in Canada in “5-10 years tops if we don’t act now.”

“This isn’t just about pipelines and the economy and taxes. This is about preserving our values and way of life,” the post states.

Another profile under the name Marcus Aurelius posted: “Multiculturalism is merely acceptance of the destruction of your culture.”

The movement has no clear leadership, but at least some of the national and local organizers have anti-globalist views.

The Yellow Vests Canada Facebook page lists a “Tyler Malenfant” as its administrator. The same Facebook profile was used to post comments on an Al Jazeera news article about a Jewish conspiracy to “destroy” Christianity and replace North America’s white majority through a concerted effort of mass migration.

When asked about his comments on the news article, the user of the profile deleted the comments and denied they ever existed. The user said the screenshots StarMetro took were fake.

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Stephen Garvey, who has organized at least one of Edmonton’s yellow vest rallies, is leader of the Calgary-based National Citizens Alliance, a group that has been banned from festivals for spreading controversial views on immigration and multiculturalism.

There are some yellow vesters who feel the movement is being misrepresented by fringe groups, and the economic message is being lost.

“Really the message is right in the middle,” Terry Wiley told StarMetro at a Dec. 22 rally. “And it’s sort of undermined by everyone trying to shout over each other.”

Yellow vester Gil Whyte is also frustrated with how the media focuses on the attendance of groups such as Wolves of Odin.

“We are not pro-Soldiers of Odin … We’d rather they just didn’t show up,” Whyte said. “We also think that we can’t stop them from coming out and having their voice (heard).”

Irfan Chaudhry, director of MacEwan University’s office of human rights, diversity and equity and an instructor who has researched hate crimes in Canada, said that while many yellow vest protesters have legitimate concerns with the economy and the government, it’s evident there is racism and xenophobia simmering beneath the surface.

“You might be there for one reason, but the ideology or the motive or the grievance that’s being fuelled by lot of the groups that go there is connected to some of that xenophobic rhetoric that’s being spread,” he said.

“It’s fuelled with rhetoric around being welcoming and inclusive up to a certain point. And I think that’s where these conversations get really interesting. People will say, ‘I’m not racist, I just want this kind of person in here,’” Chaudhry added.

The movement seems to have found fertile ground in Alberta. Balgord, who is based in Toronto, said the protests in Alberta appear larger and more sustained than in other parts of the country.

“The fact that this is like a very western-driven thing is also a bit of a shift,” Balgord said.

There’s also the recurring idea that the rest of the country doesn’t acknowledge or respect Alberta’s contribution to the national economy, Wesley said.

Balgord has observed the yellow vest movement in Alberta bringing together what he calls the “vanilla” far right — a 35-plus group that is anti-government and suspicious of Islam — with a new wave of younger, more web-savvy white nationalists who have their own symbols and interact in their own circles.

“A unique facet about it in here in Canada is it’s kind of serving as a lightning rod … The yellow vest movement is proving to be a meeting ground for all of the far right. It is at the moment acting like a ‘unite the right’ kind of thing here in Canada,” Balgord said.

A confluence of factors have contributed to a rise in Islamophobia in Canada, he said. First, the federal Liberals’ anti-Islamophobia motion, M-103, was seen as stifling to free speech.

Then there was the wave of Syrian refugees, followed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeting a welcome to people fleeing war and persecution, in a perceived rebuke to Trump’s border wall. That made migration from non-white and non-Christian countries the face of Canada’s immigration program, Wesley said.

“That hasn’t happened in previous generations,” he said.

For Chaudhry, the fact that the larger movement has provided a cover for some of the more insidious elements in its midst is a major concern.

“Most people will come together and protest, which is absolutely fine, but you also have small offshoots who say protesting is not enough. We’ve got to do something … and that’s where you might see places (of worship) being defaced or vandalized,” he said.

“I think there’s real impact in terms of how those false narratives fuel these fears.”

Wiley, one of the protesters, said you’ll always find a minority with extreme views in any group. And while he acknowledged some people’s anger might take an uglier form, he insists at the end of the day, the yellow vest movement is simply about people who are concerned with the country’s future — and their pocketbooks.

“It’s hard to worry about the end of the world when you can’t get past the end of the month.”

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