Heritage Front redux

The last few days has seen some discussion about the now-defunct Heritage Front, its associates, and its character.

It started with the latest instalment in a series about Marc Lemire by the ARC Collective (the earlier installments are: part 1, part 2, and part 3). The smoking-gun, as Dawg has called it, is a transcript of a relay chat that took place in Sept. 2001 between James Scott Richardson (who had the handle WPCANADA, presumably for "White Power Canada") and Lemire (who has chosen the handle "FdaJEWS" for "F*** the Jews").

Freedominion, too, has chipped in. Connie dismisses this all out of hand (here):

but recycling the same old lies doesn't get you any closer to proving Lemire somehow wrested control of the Heritage Front from CSIS when he was barely out of his teens.

This is a little confused. CSIS control of Heritage Front? Apparently the reference is to the CSIS infiltration of Heritage Front by Grant Bristow. Bristow, however, was exposed and went into hiding in 1994, seven years before the exchange in question. But by then Lemire could hardly be described, as Connie puts it, as "barely out of his teens". According to this Lemire was born in 1975, which will have placed him in his mid-twenties in Sept. 2001 when he called himself "FdaJEWS".

Nor was this the end of Lemire's association with Heritage Front. In June, 2002, Heritage Front's magazine, Upfront (archived here), profiled the activities of its Hamilton chapter, which had distributed 6000 copies of an anti-immigrant pamphlet. The profile included the following picture of Lemire holding the pamphlet in front of Hamilton's Henderson hospital. (Just in case you can't make out that logo see the blow-up on the right -- yes, this is Heritage Front literature.)

Here we have what Connie wants to deny: a fully-adult Lemire presenting himself as the face of a post-Bristow Heritage Front.

Nor is it hard to find other examples of this from these years. In May 2001, for example, Marc Lemire wrote an open-letter to the German-Canadian Congress in support of Helmut Oberlander. His letter was also published at the Heritage Front website (archived here) as a "Letter from the Heritage Front". Again, a fully-adult Lemire presents himself as speaking for Heritage Front.

Was he the leader of the HF? That's less clear, though some within the movement clearly thought so. But regardless of that it is clear that he belonged to the HF and was involved in its leadership.