The
National Post dropped a bombshell recently when it
reported on an extreme left-wing organization receiving $270,000 in federal funds to teach school kids that Canada's Red Ensign flag is a symbol of racial hatred—that is, the flag Canada flew under during World War II when it fought the Nazis. This taxpayer-funded "educational toolkit", authored by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN), also equates supporting a US-Mexico border fence with a Nazi salute and encourages students to tell on each other for promoting ‘hateful ideas.'
The report is a must-read for taxpayers, patriots and especially parents, however, there's plenty more that raises concerns about the "educational" group. For instance, CAHN has close links to Antifa; a movement so extreme even the Obama Administration labelled it a
domestic terrorist threat. This and other facts raises serious questions about why such a group is receiving federal grants (in fact, their
second) and is being allowed to shape the minds of Canadian children.
Apparently lost on those responsible for the grant—Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and the Heritage Department's Anti-Racism Secretariat—, CAHN's ties to the
ultra-violent Antifa movement are deep. For instance, they actively promote Antifa's work and even
encourage people to join its campaigns. This
includes promoting the work of the openly violent Montreal Antifa, the most notorious Antifa cell in Canada. One CAHN staffer even uses Quebec Antifa
symbols on social media, seemingly identifying himself as a member. The cell has been involved in numerous violent crimes, including the
tearing down of a 18-metre-tall statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in downtown Montreal.
CAHN's also
promoted the work of Winnipeg Antifa, a cell that includes an
accused child rapist who tried to run over and kill four innocent protesters during the trucker convoy demonstrations last February—Incidentally, CAHN was at the forefront of
smear attacks against the protesters, labelling them far-right fanatics rather than working people with actual concerns for their livelihoods.
To underline how threatening the movement really is, even the ultra-progressive Biden administration recently prosecuted dozens of its members,
describing them in charging documents as "known to use force, fear, and violence to further their own interests and to suppress the interests of others [including] acts of violence such as assault, battery, assault with deadly weapons, arson, and vandalism." Still, CAHN's Executive Director Evan Balgord has played a sort of public relations role for Antifa, defending and even praising the group on
CBC radio and other outlets. On top of asking Antifa members for assistance on Twitter (
tweet since deleted), Balgord wrote an
article in which he "explained" the group's "defensive violence", like "physically removing the opposition", while condemning critics who "present[] a distorted image of the movement" (he's since
removed his name from the piece).
Just as alarming, Balgord routinely pushes in the media a complete fantasy about Canada having
over 300 ‘Nazi hate organizations' operating across the country. To understand how impossibly high this number is, it eclipses similar estimates made in the United States. America's Southern Poverty Law Center, a disgraced "anti-hate" group and funder of CAHN,
says around 800 such groups are operating in the US (250 of which are black), making Canada apparently much more hate-ridden than the US on a per-capita basis.
Stranger still, the creator of CAHN's list, Board Member
Barbara Perry, received a government grant to put it together. Tellingly, she refuses to divulge who's actually on it. When the
National Post covered it last year, it showed the list to basically be an outright fraud.
Then there's the spying. It is this, not "anti-racist education", which is CAHN's main focus. Following the new grant, CAHN posted a
job advertisement for a "reporter" who will "join hate groups" using an "assumed identity" and "multiple online personas" in order to clandestinely obtain usable and damning information. On top of the fact that creating fake social media accounts violates the terms of most platforms, such activity sounds close to tortious harassment.
Obviously, this is all highly troubling. Surveilling free Canadian citizens who, for the most part, are exercising their Charter-protected speech rights—‘publicly inciting hatred' can lead to jail time in Canada, but it's very rare—in order to forever smear and dox their names on the internet should be something that makes every supporter of a liberal, open society extremely queasy. If the federal government did this directly, it would be 100 percent illegal. Why should they be able to do it through a third party?
Let's hope the Heritage Department (or at least the Conservative opposition) scrutinize the group's activity much more closely and ask themselves whether it truly deserves to be called "anti-hate" or rather anti-Canadian.
