An apparent white nationalist demonstration on a busy overpass near London, Ont.’s downtown on Sunday afternoon is concerning for witnesses and experts who track extremist behaviour.
The scene has stuck with Londoner Dave Vermue, who was driving along Horton Street when he says he saw roughly 30 men standing at attention, masked and wearing black, waving flags on the Wortley Road overpass.
“I thought there were Boy Scouts on top of the bridge until I passed underneath, and saw what it was,” said Vermue, who captured footage of the demonstration on his vehicle’s dash camera. “I immediately thought of stormtroopers from Nazi Germany.”
From that overpass, the group displayed a banner reading “remigration now,” alongside the Canadian Red Ensign flag, the flag of Ontario and the flag of the white supremacist nationalist group Second Sons Canada, which claimed to have organized the gathering on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Vermue said he didn’t need to understand the motto to know what was going on, and that he isn’t comfortable with it.
“I’m totally flabbergasted at their method of protest,” he said. “They have every right to share their terrible views and be censured for it, but to make a public display in uniform and present it to look like military propaganda [is concerning].”
Second Sons is led by Jeremy MacKenzie, who also founded Diagolon, an “extremist militia-like organization,” according to the RCMP. Earlier this year, he filmed himself making a Hitler salute in a video shared on Telegram.
The group is one of several “active clubs” CBC News has investigated — white nationalists that organize combat training to prepare for what anti-hate researchers say is a belief in an imminent race war.
Groups like Second Sons almost always obscure their faces and identifying features like tattoos, in some cases using Nazi symbols to that end.
The “remigration now” message brought to London, like many of the mottos used by these groups, is designed to appear less extreme than it is, according to Hazel Woodrow. She’s the education program manager for the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN), which studies white nationalism in Canada.
Woodrow said it’s also more subtle than banners reading “mass deportations now” displayed by Nationalist-13, a distinct active club that held demonstrations and training in London and St. Thomas this year.
“It’s a buttoned-up version, a repackaging, of ethnic cleansing,” Woodrow said. “The forced removal of, for groups like Second Sons or the Dominion Society of Canada, non-white people.”
Woodrow and CAHN believe the Dominion Society is connected to Second Sons, acting as the political arm of the group’s network.
The London Police Service said it was aware of Sunday’s protest, and noted that the group was in place for roughly 30 minutes before leaving the area without incident.
On X, Second Sons posted that it held a combat training session in the city before protesting. CBC London has identified the location of the meeting as Westminster Ponds.
The Dominion Society’s founder reposted the post on X made by Second Sons. The group has promoted the concept of remigration, saying on its website it’s “the only path forward to save Canadians from becoming a minority.”
The group also calls for the suspension of all permanent immigration for at least a decade, making Canada “less hospitable” for immigrants, the revocation of permanent residency status, mass deportation, and more.
Woodrow said it’s an ideology that has spread across southern Ontario and beyond in recent years, and is gaining traction.
“The idea that these white nationalist groups are significantly smaller than they present online would have been very true up until a couple of years ago,” Woodrow said.
“The organized white nationalist movement in Canada is the biggest it’s been in modern history. A big part of that is Second Sons Canada, the Dominion Society, Diagolon, the Active Club movement.”
Experts who have spoken to CBC News in the past said a main driver of that growth is social media, which makes it easier for like-minded people to find one another.
Vermue said he hopes to never see anything like it again.
“This is happening right after Remembrance Day. My [uncle] died in the Air Force over Normandy. My father’s family was in the [Nazi-occupied Netherlands],” he said.
“I don’t want that message here. I don’t want to see 30 of these people, or 40, or 60, or 100. I don’t want to see them at all. Not in my neighbourhood.”
