VANCOUVER—While one Vancouver municipal candidate with the ProVancouver party has received racist messages threatening enough to report to police, the party’s leader is defending his own decision to follow a Twitter account that promotes white-nationalist talking points.

Rohana Rezel is running for city council with ProVancouver, while David Chen is the party’s mayoral candidate. The party’s message is that an unregulated flow of global capital is at the root of Vancouver’s housing crisis, and that adding more housing stock won’t fix the city’s real-estate woes.

ProVancouver is one of several new political parties that have formed this election to challenge the dominant players such as Vision Vancouver and the Non-Partisan Association.

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Rezel began receiving racist messages on Reddit shortly after he announced his candidacy. One post read, “Anyone up for IRL (in real life) trolling Rohana Rezel's event at Kits tonight? Preferably someone who can do a good Apu accent.”

“The last incident that created a lot of outrage was that this person said I belong to a community that has links to terrorism,” Rezel said.

“Then they went on about how I wasn’t aware of the cultural norms here because of my ethnic background.”

While he’s used to dealing with a certain level of “background racism” on Reddit, Rezel said it’s gotten worse since he announced his run for office. He has reported one particularly threatening commenter to police.

Chen said he agrees the comments are “very problematic,” and is especially disturbed by the call for people who oppose Rezel to “troll” a party event in person.

In the past, Chen said he has faced racist comments at public meetings, when audience members have shouted at him to “go home.”

But earlier this month, Chen came under fire for briefly following — and later unfollowing — a Twitter account with the handle @HelpIHaveNoSkin, which describes itself as “the return of the Anglo-Saxon.” The account retweets messages such as, “The only white guilt that is justified is the guilt of white people who remain silent as multiculturalism destroys their countries” and “Rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated. #Charlottesville,” referring to the violent white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. in Aug. 2017.

After Twitter users noticed Chen had followed the account, triggering an online pile-on, Chen explained interacting with @HelpIHaveNoSkin did not mean he agrees with the account’s worldview. He said he had planned to go back to the account when he had more time to find out more, because he believes listening to other points of view is part of the role of elected officials. He said that isolating and ignoring people can lead to “severe hatred and violence.”

Chen also said he thinks the Twitter user “was asking really interesting questions.”

“One of the posts I saw said, ‘Why is it so awful to be white?’” he said.

“I think that’s what happening right now is we’ve become so divided within our discussion and our arguments that the pendulum has actually swung the other way. As minority populations have grown, they’ve now made a lot of other populations — and white populations are included — sort of the victim and the target of the wrongs and the ills of the past.”

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Brandon Yan is running for council with OneCity, and he doesn’t agree with Chen’s position that the right course of action is to have a dialogue with those on the far right.

As an example, Yan referred to a rally in Vancouver in April where a group opposed to B.C.’s new sexual orientation and gender identity curriculum protested alongside the Soldiers of Odin. The Soldiers of Odin is a street-patrol anti-immigration group whose founder was convicted of racially-aggravated assault in Finland. The group denies ongoing accusations of racism and white nationalism.

“I don’t want to see my elected officials sit down with them,” Yan said. “Dialogue is good, but it can look like they’re trying to placate them and letting them present their ideas.”

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