From Marches to Modem:
A report on organized
hate in Metropolitan Toronto
- Access & Equity Centre - Metro Toronto (City
Council)
Page 29
- _Marc Lemire_
- by Bill Dunphy
If you'd like a glimpse of the future of organized hate in this country,
look no further than this 21-year-old army reservist.
Armed with little more than rudimentary computer literacy and a few
thousand dollars worth of electronics, Toronto's Marc Lemire has already
secured himself a lead spot on Canada's roster of racist propagandists.
Through his computerized Digital Freedom
bulletin board service (begun in April 1995), and his Freedom
Site homepage complex on the World Wide Web, (up and running since
February 96) Lemire has provided a virtual library and town hall meeting
place for Canadian white racists. Although his claims for their reach and
efficacy may be somewhat overblown, there is no denying that anyone making
a serious study of organized hatred in Canada need take a close look at
this young racist's career.
Lemire
points a finger at employment equity's effects on fire fighter hiring decisions
as the reason he first joined the white racist movement in general and
the Heritage Front in particular.
"I always wanted to be a fireman, ever since I was a little kid,"
he said in a 1996 interview. "And then your dreams are shattered -
that was one of the compelling reasons I joined." [1]
Never mind that Lemire hooked up with Wolfgang Droege and the Heritage
Front before he was even old enough to apply for a fire fighter's job.
Like a couple of dozen angry young white men this decade, Lemire formed
a bond with Droege, and eagerly embarked on flyer distribution campaigns
and teen recruitment drives for the Front back in the early 90's as that
group was really hitting its stride.
But by the summer of 1993 Lemire had fallen in with a sub-group for
Front members and associates, a small circle of young men who chafed under
the Front's leadership (and CSlS Grant Bristow's acid tongue). These men,
Ken Barker, Phil Grech, Les Jasinski and Lemire formed their own bonds
of kinship and began drifting away from the Front and spending increasing
amounts of time in their own company.
By the fall of 93, Grech, Jasinski and Lemire were sharing an east
Toronto flat while Barker had moved back to his home turf of Oshawa.
Of the four Lemire, while not an obvious leader, was certainly the
most stable. Two of the men, Barker and Grech had recurring health and
emotional problems. Jasinski was an unstable extremist and Christian Identity
zealot who'd already been booted out of a local Ku Klux Klan cell because
of his dangerously violent rhetoric.
Still,
the group looked with some disdain on the tattooed and beer-drinking skinheads
who seemed to be holding a certain sway in the Front and they began developing
their own ways of getting things done. Some were time-honored and traditional
- leafleting, letter-writing and setting up a telephone hotline. Others
were more dangerous.
One Wednesday morning that fall, Grech donned a clown's mask and yelling
at the terrified tellers, vaulted the counter of a TD bank in Oshawa. After
fumbling momentarily with the cash drawer, he tore it open, grabbed a fistful
of bills and ran out. An alert bank employee noted his car and later that
night it was found a few blocks away in the parking lot of Barker's apartment
building.
Hold-up squad officers raided the Oshawa apartment where Barker lived
with his young daughter and found disguises, a wad of cash, ammunition,
a realistic-looking, but fake bomb, and two shotguns, one of them with
its barrel sawed-down.
The next morning police raided the east end flat where Lemire, Jasinski
and Grech lived and arrested Grech.
He was charged with the bank robbery and Barker was charged with weapons
offences and a late-night donut store stick-up from the month before. In
that robbery, two masked men - one armed with a shotgun - terrorized the
overnight help before making off with a grand total of $257.
Jasinski later confessed under oath in court that he had bought both
shotguns, sawed the one down and used it in the donut store hold up. But
he was never convicted of any criminal offence. [2] Grech
pled guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, Barker was convicted
of weapons storage offences.
Lemire was never charged with any criminal offence arising from that
group's activities.
While his buddies fought their legal battles, Lemire turned to the
ideological battlefield opening the Euro-Canadian Action Line, a taped
telephone message service promoting white racist causes and views.
Like his friend Barker's Equal Rights for Whites hotline, Lemire strove
to avoid breaking Canada's hate laws, targeting government policies on
employment equity, multiculturalism and immigration, and avoiding name-calling.
Although he offered time on the hotline to others - notably Jasinski
who taped some Christian Identity rants - the hotline proved to be pretty
much a one man show. And something of a flop at that. In his third month
of operation he was only attracting 30 calls a week.
But the move away from the Heritage Front's
skinheads and into the smaller, independent end of the racist movement
was not a total loss, even if most of his close associates had made a series
of very stupid mistakes. The Front had fared no better.
In 1993 at the very height of its powers, the Heritage Front was falling
apart, convulsed by street fights with anti-racist
extremists and courtroom battles with the establishment. The Front
collapsed as a "mass" movement and has yet to recover.
But Lemire, like his mentors Ernst
Zundel and Paul Fromm, emerged relatively
unscathed from the wreckage of the early-90's white racist movement's boom
and bust. Like Fromm had done 15 years earlier, Lemire cobbled together
an innocent sounding front group from which to operate. Initially called
the Euro-Canadian Alliance, and later changed to the Canadian
Patriot's Network the groups have never really been anything more than
Lemire and one or two others.
One of them, Chris Saunders,
would help Lemire into the area that would ensure his spot in the thin
histories of Canada's organized hate groups.
Saunders was something of a computer geek.
Lemire
had earlier signed on with the Canadian Armed Forces reserves, angling
for medical training. And in the summer of 94, he had to leave his hotline
in Jasinski's hands while he crawled through the bush at Camp Petewawa.
But after his return things changed.
That September he announced the change to the Canadian
Patriots Network. By October Lemire had his first private Internet
account. By December he helped Saunders set up one of this country's first
white racist computer bulletin boards (a BBS, as they are more familiarly
known.)
The idea of using a BBS - an electronic meeting place where people
can post and pick up notes, view files and have real-time conversations
- was not altogether new to the white racist movement. Texas Klan leader
Louis Beam had set
up the Liberty Net as an underground communication and resource centre
nearly a decade earlier.
But that was not a recruiting tool, it was more of a secure line of
communications. Saunders and Lemire's Politically Incorrect BBS was meant
to attract, recruit, and convert. Even here they were following the lead
of American racists - former Klan leader and Droege associate Don
Black had had huge success with his Stormfront
BBS in Florida.
Four months later Lemire and Saunders parted ways and Lemire opened
Digital Freedom BBS in April 1995, a service
which he described as "Free Speech and Pro-White". [3]
There were and are more sophisticated computer jockeys in the white racist
movement in Canada, but Lemire displayed an almost obsessive pride in his
BBS and drove hard to make it the biggest and the best around.
Within the movement he succeeded, building up a massive collection
of files and resources (even if they are poorly organized) and attracting
a large core of users and an even larger corps of occasional visitors.
With Black he dreamed of setting up an international network of "pro-white"
BBS's and did put together a kind of network bringing together BBS' several
countries in a loose electronic mail linkage.
That was the year of the exponential growth of the Internet's World
Wide Web and Lemire - who used the Internet newsgroups and mailing lists
to advertise his Digital Freedom BBS recognized a good thing when he saw
it. By February he was truly on-line, throwing an increasingly complex
collection of files and photos on his Freedom Site
on the WWW. And while he still gets more traffic on his BBS, and gets most
of his funds from BBS members, his website has offered him a chance to
act as a virtual emcee in a no-risk, ongoing ,town hall meeting of Canada's
white racist community.
The groups sell books and pamphlets,
audio and video tapes, and post their newsletters on the site. Last month
Lemire announced the start up of Radio Freedom,
a once a week live Internet "broadcast" radio show featuring
weekly talk and interviews computer users can listen to in real time or
download for later listening via a section of his World Wide Web site.
Elsewhere on his website, Lemire advertises
his BBS and his own data packages
and posts photos he thinks are appropriate. Most are sycophantic
portraits of movement leaders, but the odd time his coarser nature
wins out, like the time he posted a photograph of a black man being kicked
and beaten by a gang of skinheads. He borrowed a hate rock group's song
title for the picture, labeling it the "Doc Martens Dental Plan."
For his part, Lemire rejects labels like "racist" or "racial
separatist" preferring to simply think of himself and the groups he
houses on his web site as "controversial Canadians."
Although Lemire is now no longer actively pursuing an army career,
he is still carried on their books as an "employee".
The history of Canada's white racist movements, the largest of our
organized hate groups, displays a pattern of booms and busts which reached
its height at various times in the 20's and 30's. Over the last 50 years
the movement has risen and fallen in mostly smaller waves of activity that
appear to have peaked in the early 90's with the Heritage
Front and its many associated groups.
They're in decline now, but they trained an awful lot of young men,
like Lemire, in hatred and how to organize it. And unlike in previous "down
cycles" the movement has now found a few safe, if virtual, harbors
to ride out the storms of anti-racist protests and organizing.
And Lemire is one of their key harbor masters.
Footnotes:
1. From an unpublished interview with the author, May,
1996
2. Jasinski's admission came in testimony at Barker's
bail hearing and under the Charter of Rights, could not be used against
him in another legal proceeding. Although immediately arrested and charged
with armed robbery, police were unable to obtain sufficient evidence against
Jasinski for a criminal conviction. They did succeed in getting a judge's
order banning him from possessing firearms, explosives or ammunition for
the rest of his life.
3. From Digital Freedom ads posted by Lemire in Internet
Newsgroups in 1995 and handed out as part of press packages
4. For a more complete look at the content of Lemire's
web site, see Appendix F, a copy of the Freedom Site's "table
of contents" downloaded in Jan. 1996