Ontario Election 2025: Looking At The Small Political Parties Taking Far-Right Positions

Picture of the Ontario Legislature. Source: ola.org

The Ontario election is quickly approaching. While the incumbent government, Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative Party, is projected to hold its majority when the polls close on February 24, the race has become a home to multiple smaller parties.

Recent events have shown how small, and often dismissed, fringe parties can grow quickly.

In Germany, federal elections last week saw the far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland — AfD) rise from a fringe party founded in 2013 to receiving the second highest share of votes of any single party in 2025 with close to 20 per cent of the vote.

British Columbia saw a sudden surge of support for the BC Conservative Party, which fielded a number of candidates, including the party’s leader, who have shared far-right conspiracy theories over social media and on the campaign trail. The party had been irrelevant for decades until it went from zero seats in 2020 to 36 seats in 2024 after cannibalizing the predominant conservative party BC United (formerly the BC Liberals).

Ontario Party 

Derek Sloan is positioning his Ontario Party as a further-to-the-right alternative to Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. Sloan was initially ejected from the federal Conservative Party of Canada in 2021, two years after first being elected, when he received a donation from neo-Nazi Paul Fromm. Sloan said he was unaware of the donation as it was made under Fromm’s full name Frederick P. Fromm, pointing out that Fromm had also voted in the CPC leadership race.

At the time, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said it was not one thing that resulted in Sloan’s ouster. Sloan had also gone against party discipline in 2020 to oppose a law that banned the harmful practice of “conversion therapy,” programs that attempt to convert 2SLGBTQ+ people to heterosexuality or their gender assigned at birth. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic health restriction, Sloan also posted a message and video to social media asking if Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam worked "for Canada or for China?"

Taking over as leader of the Ontario Party in December 2021, Sloan has recruited others who opposed pandemic-related health measures for the 2025 election, namely former MPP Randy Hillier and Party President Tom Marazzo, who became a public representative of the 2022 Ottawa “Freedom Convoy.”

Marazzo has previously called for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier Doug Ford to be “criminally charged with conspiracy to commit murder” because of vaccine mandates.

Marazzo is a founding member of Veterans 4 Freedom (V4F), an anti-vaccine advocacy group formed after the Ottawa convoy. While often attempting to present itself as a serious political advocacy organization, V4F's social media also contains false information and racist comments, including a claim that the Canadian Armed Forces aptitude test standards were being lowered to “accommodate the 2,600 permanent residents, who according to our CFRG source, are mostly ‘East Indian.’”

Marazzo also had the founder of the white nationalist network Diagolon, Jeremy MacKenzie, on his live stream for an interview in June 2023. His current social media feed is a mixture of Ontario Party boosting, criticism of sitting politicians, and reposts of far-right figures like Alex Jones and Maxime Bernier—leader of the far-right People’s Party of Canada. 

Hillier has been serving a public relations role for the Ontario Party, putting out information about individual candidates and making party announcements in videos released over the social media site X. 

His social media presence featured a recent collaboration with Greg Wycliff, in which the two sing a song that includes the line, “what happened to this town, everybody’s brown.” Hillier also appeared during Diagolon streams over the lockdowns, but like with many others, this relationship eventually soured. 

The Ontario Party’s platforms include the creation of an Immigration Control and Enforcement department for the province which they propose calling ICE Ontario, referencing the United States’ federal agency of the same name.

“The Ontario Party vows to Take Back Immigration from the federal government. Rampant and uncontrolled immigration has led to a crisis in Canada. The Ontario Party will impose a moratorium on all new immigration to Ontario and set up a specialized enforcement agency to tackle the criminal cartels, immigration scams and deport illegal aliens.”

Other parts of the platform include “ending gender ideology in schools.” This platform saw the Ontario Party endorsed in 2022 by Queenie Yu, founder of the Stop the New Sex-Ed Agenda party. 

Stop the New Sex-Ed has only two candidates listed on their website, including a sitting school board Trustee at the Niagara Catholic District School Board, Natalia Benoit.

Benoit was censured as trustee in 2024 when she was recorded making comments about her previous motion to ban the Pride flag from being flown at schools. An independent investigator found Benoit did violate the board's code of conduct when she said she didn’t want “any flag at all … Like the Nazi flag, we don't want that up either, right?"

Benoit told the CBC in a statement that her comments were not a comparison between the two flags. 

"It is a statement that no flags should be flown which would cause conflict and controversy in our schools. Alleging the comparison was only spreading lies provoking a hostile environment."

The suspension was handed down after an independent investigation by law firm Parker Sim LLP.

New Blue

The New Blue Party, like the Ontario Party, was also founded by a former elected official who was removed from their caucus. Belinda Karahalios was elected as an MPP for Cambridge in 2019 as a member of the Progressive Conservatives.

She was ejected from the party in 2020 after opposing a bill that allowed the PCs to extend the emergency powers granted during the COVID lockdowns for up to two years without consulting the legislature. Shortly after, Karahalios and her husband, Jim Karahalios, founded New Blue.

Jim Karahalios has never held office, though he has run for the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives and the Conservative Party of Canada. He was twice removed from the CPC leadership race—a judge restored his candidacy after finding the wrong CPC body had voted for his ouster—after being accused of what court documents called "racist Islamophobic remarks that besmirched the expressed principles of the Conservative Party." 

Jim Karahalios had called Erin O'Toole's campaign chair, Walied Soliman, a supporter of Sharia law.

Running in Kitchener-Conestoga, during the local debate, Jim Karahalios stuck mostly to discussing housing rights. When candidates were asked about how they would keep the region safe for members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, he dodged the question. 

Jim Karahalios instead chose to respond to Liberal Candidate Joe Gowing’s suggestion in his response that not all the candidates believed information about 2SLGBTQ+ people should be taught in schools. 

“It starts by respecting the dignity of human life. That starts from conception to natural death,” Karahalios said, adding that he believes in “parental rights.”

The New Blue party’s one page platform is not detailed, but does rail against the “Ford PCs and their left-wing ideologies and lobbyists,” claiming they intend to leave Ontario “woke and broke.”

Canadians’ Choice Party

The Canadians’ Choice Party (CCP) is only running two candidates. The pair includes longtime neo-Nazi Paul Fromm who is running in the west GTA riding of Etobicoke Centre.

Fromm has been active in white supremacist circles for nearly 50 years, sometimes attending protests uninvited, often holding the Red Ensign.

Though he’s less prominent than previous generations, at his peak Fromm travelled to network and connect disparate far-right and neo-Nazi organizations. Often making international trips, Fromm gave talks to racist skinhead crews like Volksfront and the since terrorist-designated Blood and Honour.