By Julie Chadwick

Spirited rally highlights community division, tension over Nanaimo’s Discontent City

Aug 6, 2018 | 11:25 AM

NANAIMO — In the latest chapter of a story that has both united and divided the community, members of the far-right group Soldiers of Odin marched in Nanaimo as part of an action against a tent city that has occupied an empty lot downtown for several months.

With approximately 200 people camped at the site, dubbed Discontent City, it is estimated to be the largest tent city protest in the province.

Groups both opposed to and in support of the encampment faced off against each other in a tense exchange Sunday afternoon that blocked traffic along Port Dr. several times.

Of the approximately 50-to-60 people who showed up to voice their opposition to the camp, many had organized through a Facebook page called Action Against Discontent City. The event was described as a citizen patrol and needle clean up that would march past City Hall and towards the tent city site.

The group were to be accompanied by members of the Soldiers of Odin, an anti-immigration vigilante group founded in 2015 in Finland by white supremacist Mika Ranta, where they are closely aligned with the far right. The group now has chapters all over the world.

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Hundreds also showed up in a counter-demonstration at the camp’s front gate to support the homeless on-site. Many were also there in opposition to the presence of the Soldiers of Odin. A large crowd surrounded the rally, with people participating as either bystanders or silent supporters of one of the sides.

“Homeless people’s power emerges in this camp, because people live under their own rules, because they survive by being able to support themselves,” said Ivan Drury of Alliance Against Displacement, a group that organizes alongside people facing displacement in B.C.

“The response of the city, that abandons them to this fate of death, is to try and destroy their survival space. To break up their self-organized community and drive them back into the shadows where they will die.”

Drury said he believed the Soldiers of Odin’s appearance marked an attempt to break up the camp, do the work the City of Nanaimo “wants to do, and is unable to do because the camp is too powerful.”

Representatives of the vigilante group, who marched up Port Dr. and stood opposite the camp for approximately an hour, said they were invited to Nanaimo by local citizens.

“We’re on the same side, really. We just want government to act. We want these people in houses, not in tents on contaminated soil where the organizers, who don’t even live in the camp, put them,” Conrad Peach, president of the Vancouver Island Soldiers of Odin, told NanaimoNewsNOW.

Fraser Valley chapter president Brian Baxter, who was also at Sunday’s demonstration, said they were there as a response to concerns over crime associated with the camp.

“This town has asked us to come because this group, as opposed to the one in the north [end], are thieves. These guys steal. That’s why we’ve been asked,” Baxter said, adding he thinks the camp should be moved to another location.

“I’m here mostly to make them happy. Personally, I’m here because they’re Canadians, so I don’t want them to feel like they’re any less than I am.”

When asked why, if he was in support of the homeless at the camp, the Facebook event page for the march was called “Action Against Discontent City,” Baxter said he didn’t create the page.

As for the other criticisms levelled against the Soldiers of Odin, both Peach and Baxter said any accusations of racist or white supremacist leanings are completely unfounded.

However in March of last year, the CBC reported Soldiers of Odin members disrupted an anti-racism march in Vancouver with smoke bombs and three men identifying themselves as members of the group were arrested for breach of the peace. Months later they were also spotted protesting outside a mosque in Surrey.

Their members had been at the event because they supported the message of anti-racism, Baxter said, claiming the Canadian chapters of Soldiers of Odin have distanced themselves from the original Finnish group.

A Canada Border Services Agency Intelligence Bulletin prepared in April 2016 also warned that the group were growing in popularity across the country and raised concerns of anti-immigration vigilantism.

“Members of the SOO are generally Caucasian males between the ages of 20 and 40 who adhere to right-wing politics and ideology — some members adhere to extreme right-wing ideology and are not afraid to use violence to achieve objectives,” the CBSA report stated.

As the march approached the tent city on Sunday afternoon, tensions rose and shouting matches broke out. Though most in attendance adhered to camp organizer Amber McGrath’s insistence on peaceful non-engagement, it was clear that the issue of growing homelessness in Nanaimo has divided many residents.

“I was accosted verbally yesterday by a gentleman saying I was an immigrant,” demonstrator Trevor Williams said, noting he felt he was targeted because he had “a beard and brown skin.”

McGrath said she has also been subject to harassment for her support of the camp.

“I’ve been spat on, I’ve had a bottle thrown at me. Just today, walking to the store, I had someone call me a ‘junkie lover’ and spit out their car at me,” she said.

On the other side of the street, Shawn Mawer said he was opposed to the camp because he had been accosted on the roof of Port Place Mall by a man he believed was from the camp, wielding two machetes.

“I’m only 18 but I do still pay taxes, and to see it coming here literally makes me want to puke,” Mawer said. “There’s so many resources and ways that you can get help, but if they don’t want to help themselves, nothing’s ever going to change…It’s just a massive strain on the tax system, the health system, everything.”

Few individuals exemplify the community’s divisions more than city councillor Gord Fuller, elected on a platform of advocacy for the homeless, whose position of opposition to the camp has attracted some controversy.

“I don’t support the tent city as it stands, because there’s no control over it,” Fuller said on Sunday, as he handed out flowers to demonstrators. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and people are now trying to say that I hate the homeless.

“But what they don’t get is that the people that are here are primarily street-entrenched addicts. Drug users. We need detox beds and treatment beds. Because you could house most of these people and they’d be right back out on the street within a month or two. It’s bigger than just housing.”

After a few hours outside the camp, the Soldiers of Odin’s decision to leave was met by cheers and chanting from the counter-demonstrators.

Police reportedly made no arrests and there were no reports of injuries or violent altercations.

Julie Chadwick

On Twitter: @JulieHChadwick

— Note to readers: This is a corrected story. Removes erroneous reference to a quote from researcher Yannick Veilleux-Lepage on the links between the Canadian SOO and their Finnish roots.