The recent cancellation of the post-leaders’ debate media scrum garnered Canada’s cabal of far-right activists masquerading as journalists the most attention they’ve had in years. Though not quite household names, they have nonetheless managed to punch far above their weight in recent years — albeit not in terms of hard hitting investigative journalism. 

(A review by a federal court judge found only two per cent of content produced by Rebel News and reviewed by the court contained original reporting.)

In this case, they disrupted the work of real journalists, and prevented independent journalists in particular from taking advantage of one of the few occasions they have to ask the federal leaders specific policy questions.

The outsized presence of these individuals was felt in the media scrum after the French debate. There, representatives of far-right outlets like Rebel News, True North, and Juno News, were together accorded six out of 17 questions. 

At the English debate, conservative activist and Rebel CEO Ezra Levant attempted to hijack a live CBC broadcast, before getting into shouting matches with journalists. This led debate commissioner Michel Cormier to cancel the post-debate press scrum at the English debate, out of what he described as a concern that organizers could not provide a “proper environment.” Outside, Levant and his Rebel News associates predictably massaged the narrative to fit their own ends, insinuating that the scrum was cancelled to protect Liberal leader Mark Carney from the Rebel’s “tough questions.”

What happened at the English leaders’ debate played to the Canadian conservative movement’s advantage in two ways: first, by disrupting the work of the legitimate press, for which the Conservative Party shows near total disdain; and second, in causing a disruption that cancelled the scrum, Levant et al can in turn claim either to be the victim of an elitist media that won’t recognize him, or to have valiantly confronted them on their own turf.It should therefore come as no surprise that Ezra Levant was reportedly a mentor to Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, the leader who has banned journalists from travelling with him on his campaign, insulted reporters, threatened to defund the CBC, and exercises control over media trying to cover him.

Though Levant may call himself a journalist, he has also registered both Rebel News Network Ltd. and another organization, ForCanada, as third parties, organizations permitted to engage in political advocacy on behalf of political parties, issues, or ideologies during the election campaign. Michel Cormier told CBC News that he wasn’t aware of this fact, though he conceded it may have been disqualifying.

The ecosystem of third parties working to advance right-wing and/or far-right narratives, positions, ideas, and goals is extensive and has been active throughout the campaign.

Since Meta – which owns Facebook and Instagram – has blocked Canadian news from its feeds, the content of third parties such as Canada Proud has largely filled the void on two of the world’s most popular social media platforms. Among the misleading, provocative, and/or deliberately false statements trafficked by Canada Proud are claims that Liberal leader Mark Carney “hangs out with sex traffickers,” and that he suspended his campaign because of “connections to China.” Neither are true. As reported by the New York Times, Canada Proud has more Facebook followers than any of Canada’s political parties.

As recently reported by DeSmog, third party advertisers with connections to conservative parties in Canada and Big Oil have been particularly adept at spreading misinformation over social and traditional media, to advance an anti-environment, pro-oil and gas agenda. DeSmog has also reported on the many lobbyists for the oil and gas sector, as much as for Big Tech, who are part of Pierre Poilievre’s inner circle.

The debate commission’s handling of Levant, other far-right activists, and the post-debate scrum notwithstanding, the incident marked an important and disturbing trend in Canadian society and politics. Far-right activists are gaining ground over legitimate journalism, simultaneously weaseling their way into the domain of the press while working to deliberately undermine it, and both Canada’s democratic and media institutions – as much as the Canadian public – are ill-equipped to deal with the ramifications.

The far-right activists who derailed the post-debate press conferences didn’t have to use force to get in: they used the courts. The debates commission initially declined the Rebel’s applications to cover the debates in 2019 and 2021, but the Rebel was successful in obtaining court injunctions to assure their accreditation both times. This year, as reported in The Tyee, Levant had sent legal threats to the commission against any perceived limitation on their ability to participate.

Canada’s far-right media has recently received more mainstream scrutiny. And for good reason — it has exceptional reach, gives the appearance of polished professionalism, and is slowly working its way into the mainstream. 

While this phenomenon is not unique to Canada — far-right media is unfortunately alive and well in most democracies — the far-right of the Canadian media spectrum has a captive audience in both the voters and leadership of Canada’s federal Conservative Party as much as its provincial affiliates.

The symbiotic relationship between Canada’s far-right media and its rightwing parties produces a kind of mutual legitimization, in turn having the effect of pulling mainstream media to the right. The concurrent effect is to delegitimize those journalists seeking to speak truth to power and hold politicians accountable for their actions. An excellent example of this was CTV News’ abrupt cancellation of journalist Rachel Gilmore’s fact-checking segment as a result of what appeared to be a pressure campaign by Conservative Party spokesperson Sebastian Skamski.

“Far-right media uses misinformation and disinformation to dehumanize their opponents, suggest that there are sinister motives behind progressive policies, or blame marginalized groups for societal problems,” said Evan Balgord, Executive Director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, in an interview with Ricochet. 

“Politicians can then find support by responding to these narratives and encouraging them, or face less resistance when they suggest policies that will hurt marginalized groups.”

This benefits one major political party in Canada above all others.

“If a future government cuts off media funding, or access, or closes the CBC, traditional, centrist media will have a hard time funding itself. For-profit far-right media, which is very, very skilled at getting people angry and scared, and fundraising on that basis, will take up more of our media landscape,” Balgord said. 

Where did Rebel News come from?

Founded in early 2015 by former Sun News Network personalities Ezra Levant and Brian Lilley, Rebel News has served as an incubator for numerous far-right media personalities. Two of its most prominent include Lauren Southern and Faith Goldy.

Keean Bexte, another Rebel News alum, now runs a substack called CounterSignal, and was involved in the first verbal altercation in the media room at the English leader’s debate. Public filings show ForCanada bought $10,500 worth of web ads for CounterSignal earlier this month, the third party Levant runs. 

Bexte has been a frequent guest on True North’s Candice Malcolm Show and has made headlines for his extreme conservative beliefs since resigning in disgrace from a university conservative club after promoting a film produced by alt-right figures and advertising it with the slogan “feminism is cancer.” 

Southern is perhaps best known for a 2017 publicity stunt after leaving Rebel News in which she attempted to stop a ship chartered by Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) from assisting in the Mediterranean migration crisis. 

Goldy, another Sun News Network alum, was fired from Rebel News after she appeared on a talk show hosted by the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. Goldy also broadcast from the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she mocked counter protesters and promoted the writings of white supremacist Richard Spencer. 

After her firing, Goldy ran for mayor of Toronto and continued promoting racist and fascist ideas.

In recent years Rebel News has sought Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization status, which would have allowed them to apply for government tax credits. In September, a federal court ruled that Rebel News didn’t produce enough original news coverage to be so entitled. Justice Ann Marie McDonald noted that of the 423 items posted by Rebel on their website, only 10 included original reporting, and that 283 were not based on facts. 

How it all connects to Canada’s neo-Nazi history

Richard Warman is an Ottawa-based human rights lawyer with a long track record fighting online hate in Canada. Warman filed 16 successful complaints against white supremacists and neo-Nazis under the former section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, specifically relating to hate messages and online communication. His interest in fighting hate began with investigating white supremacists and neo-Nazis in the 1980s. 

Coming up in the punk scene as a teenager, Warman recognized that the far right was trying to make inroads into youth subcultures. 

In an interview with Ricochet, Warman discussed how the Heritage Front distributed their messages of hate in the pre-digital era.

“Back then, Heritage Front would pass out business cards or put up posters with a phone number, and calling it would lead to an answering machine with a prerecorded message on it,” said Warman. “The messages were about who they hated that day or week and why.”

“Every neo-Nazi and white supremacist group in Canada had a print publication back in the day, before the advent of the internet,” said Warman. 

Ernst Zundel, as an example, was an international publisher of Holocaust denying pamphlets and books, and did so from a home in Toronto’s Cabbagetown described as being both a bunker and home to Canada’s neo-Nazi movement. And though Canada’s far-right of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t experiment with community access cable in the same way as their American counterparts, they were pioneers of spreading hate online. 

One man in particular, Marc Lemire, was — according to a 1997 brief prepared by then president of the Canadian Jewish Congress Bernie Farber — a Heritage Front activist who was active in recruiting teenagers in the early 1990s. By the middle of the decade, Lemire was operating electronic bulletin boards and hosted Freedom Site. In turn, Freedom Site supported various white supremacist groups, including the Heritage Front, Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform, and Canadian Association for Free Expression, the Euro-Christian Defense League, and B.C. lawyer Doug Christie’s Friends of Freedom (Christie was a lawyer who defended white supremacists, neo-Nazis and at least one suspected war criminal. Politically active, he frequently ran as a nuisance candidate on Western separatist tickets. Christie defended both his own far-right views and those of his clients as falling under freedom of expression). 

Lemire, who was an active member of the Canadian Forces at the same time he was a webmaster of Canada’s mid-90s online hate community, was discovered by Vice News to have been employed by the city of Hamilton’s IT department since 2005 — though details of his employment, including his name, were conspicuously absent from official city documents. Lemire agreed to leave his position after the Vice News investigation, in 2019.

In 2007, Zundel was convicted in Germany for hate offences and spent five years in Mannheim Prison after being deported from Canada as a national security threat.

A new generation of white nationalists

Though there are some subtle differences between the far-right of the 1980s and 1990s and today, broad similarities remain. Generalized xenophobia remains a constant, even if anti-semitism has been somewhat replaced with Islamophobia. Concerns over a “gay plague” have morphed into new panics over trans people and the alleged grooming of children by pedophiles. Denial of the Holocaust has been replaced with denial of the residential schools. The hate isn’t fundamentally different, just evolving to fit the dominant issues of the era. 

“Previous targets for the far-right, by which I mean white supremacists and neo-Nazis, had always been Jews as target number one, followed by the Black community, then gays and lesbians, and Indigenous peoples,” said Warman. “Hate propagandists like to go with the flavour of the moment, so those traditional targets started morphing into more non-white immigrants, and from there it developed into a specific focus on the Muslim community.”

What Warman describes as an obsessive fixation with the Muslim community paradoxically opened the doors to a greater potential audience. 

“You don’t need to be a white supremacist or a neo-Nazi to target Muslims,” said Warman. “In fact, many on the far-right would deny that they’re neo-Nazis or white supremacists, but this doesn’t change the fact that if you’re putting out bigoted hate propaganda, you’re a bigoted hate propagandist.”

This past summer, an advertising truck prowled the streets of Toronto displaying anti-Muslim images and messages. The truck is owned by Rebel News, though owner Ezra Levant told CBC News at the time that the message had been created by a third party called “Canadians Opposed to the Occupation of our Streets and Campuses.” 

“Compared with what Rebel has put out over the years, that van is just a footnote,” said Warman.

Canada’s far-right media boom is no coincidence

Challenges to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, including those that ultimately led to its repeal in 2014, focused entirely on the argument that efforts to hold people accountable for hate speech amounted to an attack on freedom of expression. After its repeal, Canada’s rightwing rejoiced, while Warman noted at the time that the successful use of Section 13 in the early 2000s had sidelined the leading figures and groups in the white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements in Canada for more than a decade.

That there has been a proliferation of far-right websites and personalities posing as genuine news sources and legitimate journalists since the repeal of Section 13, he said, doesn’t seem to be merely coincidental.

One of the loudest voices arguing against human rights laws and disparaging the work of human rights organizations in Canada, according to Warman, has been Ezra Levant.

Levant was active in right wing circles when he was in law school, he says, and even attempted to sue a University of Calgary student newspaper.

Levant was an intern at a Koch Brothers summer fellowship program before working for the right-wing think tank the Fraser Institute. Later, Levant founded the original Western Standard, before selling it off and transitioning to work as a lobbyist for the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel sector. 

He freelanced as a columnist for the National Post for several years before making his way to Sun Media and eventually becoming a Sun News Network personality. 

Through Rebel News, Levant has campaigned against Liberal and NDP politicians, and routinely insinuates that the rest of the Canadian news media landscape, particularly the CBC, cannot be trusted. 

Levant made several statements that Warman viewed as defamatory, prompting the latter to sue Levant, Sun News, the National Post, and several of his National Post colleagues, for libel. The cases were all settled before they went to trial, with Levant withdrawing the allegations and apologizing to Warman.

“Levant was obsessively trying to destroy my reputation over a two-year period but in the end the settlement terms were satisfactory to all parties,” said Warman.

Like a phoenix into the sun

Though the evolution of far-right media in Canada has served to give far-right causes the sheen of legitimacy, Warman notes that there’s a history of far-right news organizations being driven into the ground. He points to the demise of the original Western Standard, followed by Sun News Network as examples. 

“This time around they seem to have discovered a sustainable business model through crowdfunding and donations,” said Warman. Irrespective of their financial situation, he warns that Canada’s far-right media remains dangerous. “They provide active voice and encouragement to forces that are destructive to Canadian society.”

“When you have a [now-former] Rebel News personality like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson, going around the UK saying Muslims are enemy combatants and that they want to kill you, and those videos reach hundreds of thousands of people, that’s pure poison.”

Anti-immigrant riots that spread across the United Kingdom in 2024 were driven in large part by extremist rhetoric that spread over social media. Levant attempted to blame the riots on what he believes are the lack of, rather than presence, of anti-immigration viewpoints from the public conversation.

“It’s toxic, not just to the body politic, but the community as a whole,” said Warman. “It’s designed to attack and isolate, and suppress the Muslim community.”

Warman says he finds it deeply disturbing that charges weren’t laid against Yaxley-Lennon, who was invited by Rebel News to tour Canada this past summer. Yaxley-Lennon, who like other far-right agitators styles himself a journalist, was able to enter the country, but was arrested and subsequently released by Canada Border Services Agency officers in Calgary on an “outstanding immigration warrant.” 

During his time in Canada, Yaxley-Lennon conducted an in-person interview with Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich, and then had a video chat with Ontario MPP Goldie Ghamari (Ghamari was subsequently thrown out of the Ontario PC Caucus by Doug Ford). As reported by the Toronto Star, Ezra Levant found Yaxley-Lennon a lawyer.

A more recent addition to the far-right mediasphere in Canada is True North, which, as reported by Press Progress, has the financial support of the number two man at the third largest publicly traded company in Canada, Shopify. 

True North was originally founded in the early 1990s as a charitable organization to help British immigrants integrate into Canadian society. In 2017, Candice Malcolm, a former Toronto Sun columnist, and Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s Chief Operating Officer, transformed True North into a digital news platform funded through its registered charitable status. 

Malcolm and Nejatian, who had previously worked as spokespeople for Jason Kenney when he was Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism minister, are among True North’s donors. Gwyn Morgan, Press Progress reported, is another major donor to True North. Morgan was formerly the chair of SNC-Lavalin and worked in the Alberta fossil fuel sector prior to that. Among others, he is listed as a trustee of the Fraser Institute, and the Canada Strong and Free Network, two libertarian think tanks affiliated with the Koch Family and the Atlas Network, one of the world’s largest networks of lobby groups funded largely by and for oil and gas interests. Morgan was also, up until 2017, listed as a contributing columnist in the Globe and Mail, writing mostly climate skepticism and pro-free market screeds.

Mark Bourrie, a journalist, lawyer, and historian who writes critically about Canadian media, noted that True North managing editor Andrew Lawton wrote a rather fawning biography of Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre and is currently running for the Tories in Elgin—St. Thomas—London South.

Bourrie says that two trends have developed over the last decade that are undermining Canadian democracy: first, propaganda sites masquerading as legitimate journalism, and second the consolidation of legacy media under American hedge fund ownership groups, such as Postmedia (the largest newspaper chain in the country with papers in almost every province, especially concentrated in the west), and the Toronto Star, which was sold to private equity in 2020 and has been shifting to the right in recent years. 

“These organizations tend to do journalism on the cheap, and for some reason, are very political, very right-wing,” says Bourrie. “And so we’ve seen the Toronto Star, as an example, move from what was once a centre-left newspaper to now running stuff that’s frankly, batshit crazy.”

“I used to work for the Star. They’re running stuff today that never would have been published by the previous owners,” he adds, pointing to the Star’s coverage of Andrew Lawton’s Poilievre biography as an example.

Bourrie recently published Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, his own biography of the Conservative Party leader.

“Lawton works for a political media outlet disguised as professional media,” said Bourrie. “It’s only there to push the conservative agenda, and the ideas of people who are even more right wing. These sites push conservatives towards a more Trumpist point of view, and I think this is extremely dangerous for Canadian democracy.”

Bourrie sees this contributing to a larger problem of legacy media not critically assessing what they’re reporting on.

“If someone is yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, the reporter’s job is to see whether the theatre’s on fire, not get a quote from someone who’s saying the opposite,” said Bourrie.

“All of this has brought us to Pierre Poilievre, who is exactly what people think he is,” he said. 

Bourrie is concerned with legacy media’s political analysts, whom he doesn’t believe are particularly good at their jobs, for suggesting Poilievre’s rhetoric is only meant for his base, and that once in office he’ll move towards the centre.

“Just like Trump did, right?”

Bourrie notes that the phenomenon isn’t limited to Canada or the United States, that far-right wing candidates have emerged under similar circumstances in France, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Slovakia, among others, including several Canadian provinces.

A combination of factors — the disintegration of the Left’s traditional power base, coupled with the disintegration of Canada’s press, is tied to the exploitation of social ills, pervasive economic instability, and a multigenerational fear of the future. It has created conditions ideal for the exploitation of people’s worst instincts by opportunistic ideologues at home, and abroad. But while legacy media and political parties point to the danger of foreign political interference, it is worth considering that the underlying conditions that allowed for the growth of Canada’s far-right media (and the politicians who have used it to become impossibly popular), are entirely homegrown. 

Well before Canadian democracy became so weakened it could be so easily exploited (either from within or without), Canadians were already losing faith in it, as well as those supposed to hold it to account. While not all right-wing media in Canada is complicit in the proliferation of rage bait, some are, and they’re gaining influence. If the effect is the radicalization and empowerment of Canada’s political right, then the Canadian left’s “equal and opposite reaction” must focus on re-energizing journalism as a tool to both afflict the comfortable as well as comfort the afflicted.