Last Halloween, the hosts of a white nationalist podcast called The Ensign Hour discussed how to propel their ideology into the mainstream of Canadian politics. Although they pined for a “European homeland,” the co-hosts were all too aware of just how unappealing their movement remained to the political mainstream.“We’re not at the stage where we can have a straight up nationalist party and start winning seats,” lamented one of the podcasters, who went by the name “Cracker Jack.”What the country’s tiny cadre of neo-Nazis and the broader alt-right movement needed was a politician who could bridge the gap between the mainstream and the far-right fringe — someone who was an unabashed supporter of “Western values,” who would clamp down on immigration and multiculturalism. That person, they decided, was Maxime Bernier. Last August, after the long-serving Conservative MP denounced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “extreme multiculturalism and cult of diversity,” the Ensign Hour hosts perked up. When Bernier declared “the death of political correctness in Canada” to his more than 65,000 Twitter followers, it was heard as a dog whistle. “This sets a precedent. This is a huge step forward. This opens the conversation for our people — the Europeans, the settler class — to give us permission to speak our minds,” said “Cracker Jack,” who later identified himself as Tyler Hall-Kuch on the show after the Star reached out to him for comment. In September, about a month after quitting the Conservative Party, Bernier founded the People’s Party of Canada. Pundits and rival politicians dismissed it as a vanity project, the product of Bernier’s bitterness after having lost the Conservative leadership to Andrew Scheer in 2017. But in just four months, the PPC signed up more than 33,000 members and has become a thorn in the side of Scheer and ...
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