‘Freedom Convoy’ leader shared symbol of far-right hate group on TikTok

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This article was published 27/01/2022 (1065 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From the seat of his big rig, protest convoy leader Dave Steenburg regularly takes to TikTok to call for respect and calm.

If he has to, he will ask troublemakers to leave the protest.

“If someone gets out of line, please, don’t come,” he said Thursday as elements of the “Freedom Convoy” headed to the Vaughan Mills mall, north of Toronto.

Steenburg’s TikTok page is also filled with videos promoting conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines, pandemic denialism and videos promoting fictional war-crimes trials for those responsible for vaccine mandates.

In late December, he posted to a call-to-action video featuring the logo of a known far-right hate group, one that the Canada Border Services Agency once warned was willing to use violence in service of its aims.

“Calling all Canadians, it’s time to stand up and fight for our country,” reads the text of the video, over the Viking-head logo of the Soldiers of Odin — a defunct, anti-immigrant group which was involved in violent clashes with anti-racism groups — while a pagan-rock song about Vikings walking into battle plays.

“This isn’t about far-right or hate groups,” said Steenburg when contacted by Torstar on Friday afternoon. “Lots of people shared that video.”

Steenburg would not answer further questions about the video, the anti-vaccine content on his channel or if he had connections to the Soldiers of Odin. The press will twist his words, he said, but he welcomed reporters to come to Ottawa to ask him questions “where we can record the conversation.”

Soldiers of Odin, labelled as having violent members in a 2016 Canada Border Services Agency report, has been inactive for a few years and there are no signs it is involved in the convoy, said Evan Balgord, executive director for the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.

Balgord said the fact that figures such as Steenburg within the convoy’s leadership share that kind of content undercuts the message from convoy supporters that the Ottawa-bound motorcade is not linked to far-right groups or driven by anti-vaccine activists.

“That’s the point. This isn’t a few bad apples,” said Balgord. “Every single group we monitor is involved in leading or participating in this convoy. What is actually lost here are the concerns of the actual truckers.”

Steenburg is listed as Toronto leader of the convoy on the website of Canada Unity, one of the groups organizing the vaccine-mandate protest movement. In his videos, Steenburg provides updates on where the convoy is, what route it is taking, and the marshalling points along the way.

Other videos on his channel claim the novel coronavirus isn’t real and the pandemic is a plot to get people to take vaccines.

The convoy is to arrive in Ottawa on Saturday for what Canada Unity calls “operation bear hug.” The group has produced a “memorandum of understanding” calling for the end of all vaccine mandates in Canada or else the convoy won’t stop the protest.

Balgord said there was an attempt at a similar convoy in 2019 called United We Roll, but it did not attract the support this convoy has, including the more than $7.5 million in donations collected through GoFundMe.

When Ottawa announced its mandate that requires truckers coming back into Canada from the United States to be vaccinated to avoid quarantine, drivers had legitimate concerns they tried to voice, Balgord said.

“They were saying, ‘We are not doctors or nurses or front-line health care workers’ and they are mostly alone in their trucks. Canadians generally are not mandated to get vaccinated, so they were asking why were they,” Balgord said, noting around 90 per cent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. “But that has been completely taken over by the COVID conspiracy theory, far-right groups.”

The presence of those groups as leaders and supporters of the convoy means the concerns of Canadian truckers have been lost, he said.

“The federal government will never be able to address it now because it would appear they are capitulating to these groups.”

While the Soldiers of Odin are not active, other newer groups have espoused direct support for the convoy, including the Diagolon network, an anti-government movement that wants to see the creation of a secession state that extends from the Canadian Prairies across the United States into Florida.

Members of the Plaid Army, another group monitored by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, posted a YouTube video last week supporting the convoy. Several of the men in the video had the Diagolon flag — a black field with a white, diagonal stripe — hanging in the background.

One of the participants in the now-deleted video said he hoped the convoy would turn into Canada’s version of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and that it would be bigger than the Oka and FLQ crises, both events that saw people killed.

While some of these groups espouse violence, Balgord said the convoy might not devolve into violence. Where the Jan. 6 riots sought to disrupt the certification of the presidential election, Parliament is not in session, the prime minister is not in Ottawa and MPs have been told to stay away.

Balgord also stressed that not everyone involved in the convoy shares the ideology of groups like Soldiers of Odin or the Diagolon network.

Grant LaFleche is a St. Catharines-based investigative reporter with the Standard. Reach him via email: grant.lafleche@niagaradailies.com