It’s the same old-fashioned racism wrapped in modern bits and bytes.

Like pollutants in a river, overt racism has surfaced again in Canada. It is based on a fear of being overtaken by “the other” but is disguised as a “preference” for the white race in the interest of the “preservation” of Canadian identity. It sets its sights mainly on Muslims and non-white people as well as on Jews, feminists, LGBTQ2 groups.

Public Safety Canada’s annual report on terrorist threats to Canada listed for the first time this year right-wing extremism as “a growing concern.”

Individuals who hold extreme right-wing views are predominantly active online, it said, thriving on a “culture of fear, hatred and mistrust by exploiting real or imagined concerns.”

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In the non-virtual world, right-wing extremism manifests in “free speech” rallies, hate crimes and other forms of violence.

The activities of these white supremacists — as evinced in the gathering outside Ryerson’s University’s White Privilege conference last week — often fly below the radar of mainstream media that are ill equipped to monitor and report on such obscure ideologies.

Because the extreme right-wing is not ideologically coherent and is dotted across Canada, tracking its growth is a task undertaken piecemeal by anti-fascists, anti-racism activists and a few academics. For years, the anti-racist Canada (ARC) collective fought bigotry one blog at a time, existing as a resource for journalists and law enforcement.

Earlier this month it got some company.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAN) was launched after a group of 16 Canadians — including an ARC operator — came together to close the data gap in researching and reporting on far-right violence.

CAN is headed by Bernie Farber, former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress and an expert on white supremacy.

Other members include academic experts, anti-racism advocates, individuals from the Jewish community who fought against the Heritage Front in the ’90s, and leaders in targeted communities. Not all members want to be named.

“It was going to Rebel Media’s M-103 conference in February of last year that brought the group together,” says journalist Evan Balgord, executive director of CAN.

That conference saw a big turnout, but also frequent rallies that weren’t getting reported by media. “I started talking to other researchers and journalists … We saw that there wasn’t enough coverage of this, there wasn’t enough research of this in Canada with the exception of course of Drs. Barb Perry and Ryan Scrivens (hate crime experts) and some others, who were doing good work.”

The Montreal Gazette recently identified “Zeiger,” the online avatar of one of North America’s prominent white supremacists as a Montreal-based IT professional named Gabriel Sohier Chaput.

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Credit where credit is due, Balgord says. “We saw in Montreal anti-fascists did good research and have been standing up to hate groups there and it’s due to their work that Zeiger was exposed.”

But they also saw the lack of co-ordination in addressing hatred across Canada, which is why they stepped up to create a professional organization.

“We know down in the U.S. there was this good model of people researching hate groups, documenting their activities, co-operating with media and law enforcement,” Balgord says.

That model was the non-profit American group the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), whose Intelligence Project tracks and exposes the activities of hate groups and other domestic extremists.

The SPLC is currently tracking 954 active groups in the United States. Canada is estimated to have between 100 and 130 active groups. “We have a tenth of their population and a tenth of the number of groups,” says Balgord. “Proportionally the problem is as big here as in the United States. There’s no real Canadian exceptionalism about it.”

The group has received a grant from SPLC and raised $5,500 through crowdfunding. It will be raising funds to create a database and to hire a full-time researcher-journalist.

It’s important to note that these far-right hate groups represent just one form of racism — the overt, open type of bigotry that is more visible than systemic or cultural racism.

CAN isn’t a silver bullet to all forms of racism, Balgord says, calling the group’s role “a Band-Aid solution.”

But he says, “I’d hope that by focusing on the worst expression of hate groups that would also have an impact on addressing systemic racism.”

The group relies on sources who sometimes put themselves at risk to bring them information. But it also bases its findings on open source investigation. Far-right groups try to present a benign face to media — for instance, they might say they’re against radical Islam or Islamic extremism. But a quick search on their social media posts shows hatred of all Muslims and even calls for violence.

“They’re not going to extreme lengths to hide what they feel,” Balgord says. “We find it and document it.”