The Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAN), a new research group, is aiming to research, monitor, and expose hate groups active in the country.
The network is comprised of 15 researchers, legal experts, journalists, and community leaders striving to investigate over 100 hate groups, according to a CAN press release.
Evan Balgord, a journalist and the executive director of the CAN, said the group noticed a rise in activity near the end of 2016 and into early 2017.
He said the rise was both in the number of groups, as well as their online activities.
In 2016, police reported 1,409 hate crimes in Canada, an increase of three per cent or 47 more incidents more than reported in the previous year, according to Statistics Canada.
Accounting for the population, this amounted to a rate of 3.9 hate crimes per 100,000 Canadians in 2016.
According to Balgord, CAN noticed that there was no organization that monitored hate groups on a national level that could work with law enforcement, journalists, and community organizations to counter them.
“The network and court-recognized legal experts stand prepared to assist the court, if investigations lead to charges being made against individuals,” he said. “The CAN group works similarly to the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) in the States, and the organization is doing so with the support of the law centre.”
The SPLC is an American-based non-profit organization, which monitors the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists—including the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi movement—according to the organization’s website.
Balgord said CAN recently exposed identity of neo-Nazi podcaster Thomas White.
“They tend to go underground, produce less propaganda . . . the simple act of exposing hatred seems to severely disrupt them,” he said.
Some of these groups have also made their way to university campuses.
On Sept. 11 last year, anti-immigration posters from a group called Generation Identity made a brief appearance on the Carleton University campus, according to a previous article by the Charlatan. Three days later, the University of Toronto drew national media attention for not allowing the Canadian National Party, a radical right-wing political party, to host a rally on campus.
“When it comes to the alt-right neo-Nazi groups, one of their main activities is putting posters up on campuses . . . [to] primarily draw their members,” Balgord said.
Balgord explained that most alt-right neo-Nazis “are individuals who are generally upwardly mobile, have received some post-secondary education and many of them may be current students or very recently graduated, and are still hanging around the university scene.”
CAN is currently crowdfunding to hire full-time researchers and journalists and to set up a website in the future, according to the crowdfunding page. As of publication, about $7,000 has been raised of the $50,000 goal.
Photo illustration by Aaron Hemens
