Canada

The extent of Canada’s problem with far-right extremism stared me in the face on an ordinary Wednesday night.

I turned to leave a small music venue where my boyfriend had just wrapped up performing. That’s when I saw two men were standing between me and the exit, staring intensely.

I recognized them: they were Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald and Giulio Zardo, two members of the white nationalist active club that I had just unmasked in a piece published with The Tyee the day before. In social media posts, Beauvais-MacDonald has openly called himself a Nazi. He’s loud and proud about his hateful views, regularly posting videos from public places in T-shirts adorned with images of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi-era imagery.

In the photos I took of Beauvais-MacDonald that night, you can see that he’s wearing a pin with the Totenkopf skull — a symbol associated with neo-Nazis.

“Compared to other countries, Canada appears to have a disproportionate number of Active Clubs, with more than 30 of the nearly 200 known global chapters existing in Canada,” the report notes.