Whether you measure it by number of supporters, fundraising ability, or by the size of its militant groups, the white nationalist movement in Canada has never been larger or more of a threat.
Editorial
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
Illustration by Hazel Woodrow/Canadian Anti-Hate Network;source photographs: Dominion Society of Canada website, Second Sons Canada website, Facebook, X.com, Wikipedia
Canada’s white nationalist movement has consolidated into a network that includes three key branches: Diagolon, the propaganda arm; the Dominion Society of Canada, an incorporated political arm; and Second Sons Canada and other Active Clubs, the militant arm of the movement.
This network welcomes neo-Nazis, and some of its leaders talk openly about their goal to seize power, kill their opponents, and carry out an ethnic cleansing. One of their leaders recently said that things are going in their direction and that fascism is only a matter of time.
Diagolon broadcasts several livestreams a week, which offer hate speech, angry, conspiratorial reactions to the weekly news, and sometimes death threats and calls for ethnic cleansing and genocide. Their videos have tens of thousands of views.
The Dominion Society of Canada (DSC) discusses its goal of criticizing and cajoling the Conservative Party of Canada so that their people on the inside can push the party to adopt policies to mass deport people who aren’t white and European. According to a social media post, they have over 1,600 members.
Second Sons Canada (SSC) encourages its supporters to get firearms and carries out fitness training, practices mixed martial arts, and conducts military drills under the supervision of veterans. They see violence as necessary and inevitable to defend their movement, attack their opposition, and ethnically cleanse Canada. They claim over 2,000 people have signed up in the past month.
The Canadian Anti-Hate Network has discovered supporters of this network among police, the RCMP, and the Canadian Armed Forces.
Together, this is the largest white nationalist network in Canadian history.
Over five years ago, Canadian Armed Forces combat veteran Jeremy MacKenzie started livestreaming his reactions to the news of the day, which escalated in its racism, antisemitism, and extremism. He soon became the leader of a collection of streamers who would be guests on each other’s shows.
Originally calling themselves the ‘Plaid Army,’ this community of streamers and their audience grew rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic by sharing conspiracy theories and their angry opposition to health mandates, and renamed themselves Diagolon.
Diagolon supported the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that occupied Ottawa in 2022. At a spin-off protest in Coutts, Alberta, Diagolon supporters were arrested and law enforcement seized weapons and gear, including a Diagolon patch. The men were found not guilty of a plot to kill RCMP officers, but guilty on weapons charges.
In 2024, Diagolon’s leaders (MacKenzie, Derek Harrison, Alex Vriend, and MacKenzie’s partner Morgan Guptill) traveled across Canada on tour, where they wore clothing from the neo-Nazi owned clothing line, Vinland Battlewear. If they sold even half the tickets they claim, this would have been the largest fundraising event by a militant white nationalist group in Canadian history.
Vriend, also known as ‘Ferryman's Toll,’ has become as popular in the network as MacKenzie himself. He hosts livestreams and Spaces on X (a public conference call) with white nationalists and neo-Nazis. MacKenzie and Vriend are also the leaders of the militant arm of the network, Second Sons Canada. Vriend says that things are going in their direction, that antifascists will be killed, and that fascism is only a matter of time.
Diagolon widely publishes materials that are, in our opinion, equivalent or worse than materials Canadian courts have previously found to be illegal. However, neither MacKenzie or Vriend have been charged for the wilful promotion of hate under s. 319(2) of the Criminal Code at the time of publication.
“Arm yourselves. Today. If you're worried about the law, you're worried about the wrong things.” - Jeremy MacKenzie, 2025
“You gotta harden your hearts. So if hearing people talk in a very aggressive and offensive way is too much for you, are you really gonna be able to stomach like men, women and children being loaded onto fucking boats at gunpoint so they can be sent back to India? Like if the word, you know, “n****r” is obviously like the most offensive one, if that is too much for you, I seriously doubt your ability to have the intestinal fortitude to stomach what needs to happen because what needs to happen is very aggressive and extreme.” - Alex Vriend, 2024
“‘Are you gonna, are you gonna suggest deporting the Jews?’ Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think we do all the time.” - Alex Vriend reading and responding to a comment on his livestream, 2024
“Give me some guys and some weapons and we'll fucking get rid of them. We'll take them up. Get in the truck, you're going to the airport. ‘Make me.’ Okay, bang. Anybody else? Anybody else not want to go to the airport? Who wants to go to the airport? Show of hands, who wants to go to the airport? I only had to shoot one, see? Easy. - Jeremy MacKenzie, 2024
“It's funny, this all started as a joke. Making YouTube videos, but then we got noticed, right? The Prime Minister had said our name in the House of Commons multiple times. So, we realized that we can move the needle in politics in Canada. So we decided to take it a little bit more seriously.” - Derek Harrison, Road Rage Terror Tour stop in Carp, Ontario, 2024
In 2025, MacKenzie and Vriend launched a new, members-only organization called Second Sons Canada, inspired by militant white nationalist groups in other countries and the Active Club model. All full members are required to pass a series of physical requirements to join. Vetting also allegedly includes a background check and participation in group activities.
Active Clubs are an international model of whites-only workout and mixed martial arts training groups. Some clubs may visit each other, share each other’s propaganda, or network, but there is no hierarchical international leadership. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network discovered that the first Active Clubs in Canada were run by the Hammerskins, a racist skinhead gang with a decades-long history of violence.
Many groups that function as Active Clubs aren’t using “Active Club” in their names in Canada anymore. They may call themselves “Fitness Clubs,” “Men’s Clubs,” or they may not use any “-club” based name at all, but remain identifiable based on their combination of white nationalism and community-based fitness and training practices. This includes Second Sons Canada.
SSC claims to have members in every province, and chapters in most. They operate with a hierarchical leadership with MacKenzie as leader and Vriend as deputy leader. Multiple propaganda posts demonstrate that members can and do belong to both Active Clubs and Second Sons Canada.
Propaganda videos and photos show members sparring, boxing, lifting weights, and engaging in basic training-style military drills. Creating propaganda footage, around 60 SSC and Frontenac AC members marched on the Isaac Brock memorial in Niagara Falls in August.
Frontenac Active Club and leaders from Diagolon in 2024; Jeremy MacKenzie, Alex Vriend, Derek Harrison
and Frontenac AC leader Shawn Beauvais-MacDonald are visible. Source: Frontenac AC/Telegram
A constable with the Hamilton Police Service was suspended in August after CBC reported on his social media posts, some of which showed support for Second Sons.
On a livestream in September, MacKenzie stated that Second Sons has “a lot” of “war medals,” indicating that the organization has multiple active or retired members of the Canadian Armed Forces.
On Sunday, October 26, about 40 masked and uniformed Second Sons Canada and Frontenac Active Club blackshirts led by MacKenzie assembled in front of CBC headquarters in Ottawa with a banner reading “CBC hates white people.” A similar number assembled in front of the CBC building in Regina.
On October 27, SSC announced that Frontenac Active Club had formally joined Second Sons.
Vriend claims that 2,000 people have signed up to join Second Sons Canada in the past month.
“Wouldn't it suck if 200 of these motherfucking guys dressed in black showed up and said ‘What the fuck do you think you're doing in my town?" - Jeremy MacKenzie, 2025
“For years I have been waiting for the group that would be something like [United States white supremacist group] Patriot Front. If somebody's going to do it I think it’s going to be us. We’re the ones who can and it's worthwhile to have conversations with people like Thomas [Rousseau, leader of Patriot Front] because they’re already steps ahead.” - Alex Vriend, 2024
“When we take back this country, when we take back this country, it's gonna be no apologies. And when we're done taking back our own countries, I'm coming back to fucking India to finish the job the British should have done 200 fucking years ago. That's what I'm gonna do whenever we take back our country. That's where I'm at now with you fucking Indians. You don't deserve to exist on this fucking planet.” - Alex Vriend, 2025
In June, former People’s Party of Canada executive director Daniel Tyrie created the Dominion Society of Canada with content creator Greg Wycliffe and Ken (Cleveland) Jones. A registered non-profit where members can sign up for a fee of $25, they describe DSC on their website as “a non-partisan advocacy group dedicated to promoting Canadian identity, heritage, and nationalism.”
Primarily, they are pushing the concept of “remigration,” which means the mass deportations of people who aren’t European. According to multiple experts, this is a form of ethnic cleansing. Tyrie says they “explicitly reject any association with ethnic cleansing.”
Tyrie has said that they will criticize Poilievre and others in the CPC “every day” until they adopt “remigration” as policy. Mostly, this has been online. However, at a recent event held by Conservative MP Jamil Jivani in Toronto, CBC reported that “several” of the 50 people in attendance were with DSC and came to speak with Jivani about remigration.
The Dominion Society of Canada celebrated the coverage. Their goal is to normalize the concept of mass deportations of non-Europeans, and Tyrie says he wants to make Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre use their word for it (remigration) by the end of the year.
Membership in DSC overlaps with white nationalist groups and networks like Second Sons, Active Clubs, and Diagolon. Tyrie, Wycliffe, and Jones appear somewhat regularly on Spaces and livestreams with Diagolon leaders like MacKenzie and Vriend. They issued a membership card to Vriend with the number 88, which is a common neo-Nazi shorthand for “heil Hitler.” A social media post from early October suggests they have over 1600 members.
Compared to the more online Diagolon, which is focused on culture and message, and the militant, offline wing of Second Sons and fitness clubs, DSC operates as a more “professional,” optics-focused lobbying organization. They wear suits in their propaganda videos and claim to speak with people within the Conservative Party of Canada, some of whom they say are on their side.
In a Spaces call in August, Tyrie agreed with self-described political consultant Othman Mekhloufi, who said that politicians on their side should use deceit to get elected, then they can “do whatever the hell [they] want.”
Some members of the white nationalist movement have recently discovered that Tyrie's heritage is mixed, and it has become a controversy. In the last week, white nationalists have trolled him and DSC online about his part-Jamaican ancestry, saying he should be subject to the same remigration policies he and DSC promote.
“I think that obviously organizations like the Dominion Society and Second Sons and the community of Diagolon are all complementary of another.” - Ken Jones, DSC co-founder, 2025
“Radicals have an important role in the political spectrum. They might have a message that's unpalatable for the large majority, but they push the boundaries of the Overton window [The Overton window refers to the range of topics and opinions that is considered acceptable speech in mainstream politics]. And that creates space for, for more moderate organizations, like maybe the Dominion Society, and then subsequently that we can carry the baton further… So counter-signalling the radicals is generally unproductive in my view.” - Daniel Tyrie, talking about how he and DSC won’t denounce neo-Nazis or more extreme far-right actors, 2025
“There's definitely our guys on the inside that are obfuscating their message. But we're so far beyond that. The situation in Canada is fucked. We're not going to win by just being silent and being like, oh, leave this up to our guys on the inside… Even though they might have based conversations [meaning they agree with Tyrie and DSC] with you behind the scenes, that's not enough anymore. And that's also not what we're doing. We are straddling the divide between this quote unquote ‘poster class’ and this quote unquote ‘professional class’ to move our more radical, more correct position into the mainstream and put direct pressure on these guys.” - Daniel Tyrie, 2025
“We need more organizations. We need [organizations like] the Dominion Society trying to take some of that off our plate… Do it professionally. Find others who will help you work on it, and then yeah, I'll support it. The same way. I didn't do anything to help the Dominion Society. One day I heard it was launching. It launched. I was like, awesome, great. I'll sign up. I'll promote the shit out of it. I'll, you know, show their stuff. I'll work with them as best I can. I'll do whatever I can to help them out when they need it.” - SSC leader and DSC member Alex Vriend, 2025
All the president’s men are trying to make resistance illegal.
White nationalists in multiple countries, including Canada, are pushing for mass deportations of non-Europeans to be part of the political platforms of their right-wing parties.
“It certainly indicates a willingness to overlook, downplay, or dismiss the violence against women inherent in the situation,” says researcher Luc Cousineau.