A white nationalist group visiting Canadian locations is trying to normalize extremism, says a former neo-Nazi

WARNING: This story contains distressing content, including racist language.

A former neo-Nazi says white nationalist groups often raise local issues in an effort to gain legitimacy, promoting extremist ideas and trying to recruit new members in the process.

Tony McAleer, now a Vancouver-based anti-hate activist, spoke to CBC News after Second Sons Canada's two recent northern Ontario visits.

“It’s nothing new. It’s about covering yourself in the cloak of respectability and it's part of an overall strategy, which has been around decades, called ‘mainstreaming,’” he said.

McAleer spent 15 years in white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups as an organizer for the “Aryan resistance movement” before leaving in 1998. He chronicles his story in the 2019 book The Cure for Hate.

On its website, Second Sons Canada describes itself as a “Canadian men’s nationalist club.”

But according to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, Second Sons is a members-only organization for white men that's inspired by militant white nationalist groups in other countries.

Second Sons recently drew criticism from elected officials following their appearance last month at a Sudbury memorial dedicated to people who have died from drug overdoses. The group had previously appeared in communities including Halifax and the Niagara Region.

While at the Crosses for Change memorial at Paris and Brady streets, Second Sons members installed a two-metre-high cross and, in social media posts, blamed the overdose crisis on newcomers. The group's cross has since been removed.

“Countless Canadian youth are being killed by [fentanyl] that is being marketed here by foreign criminal cartels, but you'll never see any of our politicians lift a finger about it because there's nothing here to virtue signal about,” reads a caption to a photo posted to the group’s Telegram.

“Just more dead Canadian kids.”

This past winter, the group was in Cochrane, where members attended a rally on safety concerns along Highway 11 and raised a sign using inflammatory language, blaming newly immigrated truck drivers for highway deaths.

“The Ku Klux Klan in the ‘70s and ‘80s participated in the Adopt a Highway program in the United States, where a civic organization adopted a stretch of highway and cleaned the litter on it,” McAleer said.

“They didn’t do that because they wanted to see clean highways. They wanted to do that as a way of getting their name out and adding an air of respectability to an organization that most people thought was pretty obnoxious and vile.”

CBC News has sent multiple emails to Second Sons Canada asking specifically for comment on their activity in northern Ontario, but has not received a response.

Brad Galloway, co-ordinator of Ontario Tech University’s Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism, said the beliefs expressed by Second Sons fit “within white supremacist or far-right ideology.”

“Their real concern is the argument surrounding immigration and how immigration is behind the fentanyl crisis. As we’ve seen in the United States context, that was a huge narrative there,” he said.

“They're not original. They're just borrowing these things from somewhere else.”

The concerns recently highlighted by Second Sons Canada — highway safety, homelessness and opioid deaths — already affect northern Ontario communities. Sudbury has struggled with one of the highest opioid-related death rates in Ontario, while fatal collisions on Highways 11, 17 and 69 have been a long-standing concern across the region.

But Galloway said groups like Second Sons that operate within the broader white supremacist movement often attempt to redirect frustrations about those issues toward newcomers.

He added that while members of these groups are often living out a fantasy, some of them could potentially turn to violence.

“There can be a number of these folks that are just sort of grandstanding a little bit with some of this stuff. But there are some very serious white supremacist groups that are definitely training to commit violence.”

McAleer said it also appears Second Sons Canada is attempting to establish itself as a fraternal organization that’s “very much into the aesthetic of fitness and camaraderie.”

“They’re tapping into the crisis in masculinity that already exists. There’s a lot of young men out there that are lost and it offers them on the surface what seems like a healthy outlet,” he said.

"It's easy to get seduced into these things, particularly in a time where there's an epidemic of loneliness with young people.”

McAleer said that a sense of belonging, rather than explicit extremist ideology, is often the entry point.

“What I got was acceptance when I felt unlovable, attention when I felt invisible, and power when I felt completely weak and powerless,” he said of his own experience entering the movement in the 1980s.

“It was a false sense of power. But to the damaged ego, it doesn’t matter. It’s the illusion that counts.”

We really try to focus on what the message they’re trying to relay is, and if that message is actively promoting and trying to get a certain community to incite violence on an identifiable group.- Det. Sgt. Marc Belanger, Sudbury police

McAleer said the movement’s appeal can be especially powerful during periods of social uncertainty, when people are searching for simple explanations for complex problems.

Leaving extremist movements is often far more difficult than joining them, he said, because members are not simply abandoning a political belief.

“It becomes their whole identity. It becomes the people they hang out with, the music they listen to, the books they read, the clothes they wear. It’s much more than just an ideology.”

McAleer said family members often make the mistake of trying to argue someone out of extremist beliefs when the deeper issues are frequently emotional.

“We need to address what's the source of the anger, what's the source of the discontent, what's the source of the self-loathing that they're projecting onto others,” he said.

“We do an awfully good job at calling people out in this society. And I think where we fall short is calling people in. And we need to do both.”

Det. Const. Marc Belanger, who works with the Greater Sudbury Police Service’s major crime unit, said there’s an important distinction between offensive speech and criminal conduct.

“[Second Sons] itself is not illegal and groups that are similar are not illegal,” he said. “A general rule we use to kind of evaluate that is, basically, an opinion that is offensive does not necessarily constitute a hate crime.

“We really try to focus on what the message they’re trying to relay is, and if that message is actively promoting and trying to get a certain community to incite violence on an identifiable group.”

Belanger said people shouldn’t panic or see Second Sons as an imminent threat, but he noted that police are aware of the group’s activities and would act if it crossed into criminality.

“That's the line where the police ultimately want to get involved to prevent harm to our community and would be actioning something if those extremists get to that point where they're actually actioning their message into violence.”