Second Sons is now the largest white nationalist organisation in Canada, and it is not operating in secret. It recruits publicly, trains publicly, and stages demonstrations in daylight with its face uncovered.
Founded in 2024 by Jeremy MacKenzie, a Canadian military veteran already well known in the country’s far-right scene, the men-only group describes itself in the language of brotherhood and national revival. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network recorded more than 2,000 sign-ups in a single month in late 2025. In a March 2026 report, Public Safety Canada grouped it with the Active Clubs, the international network of fascist fight clubs.
The tribe and train model
What makes Second Sons different from the older Canadian far right is the packaging. There is far less emphasis on manifestos and rallies, and much more on fitness, martial arts training and male camaraderie.
Members have been photographed holding a banner reading “Tribe and Train” over an overpass on Highway 2 near Okotoks, south of Calgary. Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue have described this as a deliberate model of mobilisation: bring young men in through the gym and the group, and let the politics arrive later, once belonging is established.
It is effective because the entry point looks harmless. A young man who would never attend a political meeting will attend a training session with people who treat him as though he matters.
What it has actually done
The group’s public activity has escalated through 2026. Members staged a demonstration on a bridge in suburban Halifax, which ended without arrests. In Sudbury on 31 May, the group installed a six-foot white cross at the Crosses for Change memorial, a site created to commemorate people lost to the opioid crisis.
That last act is worth sitting with. It was not a rally or a speech. It was the appropriation of a memorial built by grieving families for their dead, turned into a backdrop for someone else’s politics. The cross was later removed.
Running underneath all of it is a single message, repeated in the group’s own material: that Canada is being ruined by immigrants.
The people warning about it
The alarm is not being raised only by anti-racism organisations. A former neo-Nazi told CBC News that the group’s roadshow through northern Ontario was an attempt to normalise extremism — to make the presence of organised white nationalism in a small Canadian city look ordinary.
That is the strategy, and normalisation is a low bar to clear when nothing happens in response. A banner on an overpass that nobody removes becomes a banner that is allowed. A cross at a memorial that draws no charges becomes a precedent. A demonstration that ends with no arrests becomes proof, to the people watching, that this is simply a lawful expression of opinion like any other.
Who it is aimed at
The recruitment target is specific: young men, often in their late teens and twenties, frequently in smaller cities and resource towns where the economy has thinned and the social infrastructure that once organised male life — the union hall, the church, the hockey league, the mill itself — has receded.
That is not an excuse and it is not an explanation that absolves anybody. It is a description of an opening. A movement offering structure, physical training, older men who take an interest and a story that explains why life feels harder than it did for their fathers will find recruits, and the story it supplies is that immigrants are the reason.
Communities that want to compete with that have to offer something in the same space rather than simply condemning it, which is slower and less satisfying than a press release.
Where the line sits
Canada already has tools here. The Criminal Code covers the wilful promotion of hatred, public incitement of hatred, and mischief relating to property used for religious or memorial purposes. The federal cabinet has the power to list entities as terrorist entities, and has used it against far-right groups before, including the Proud Boys in 2021.
None of that requires new law. It requires prosecutors and police to treat organised white nationalist mobilisation as a public safety matter rather than a public order inconvenience, and to say so publicly when they do.
There is a real civil liberties argument on the other side, and it deserves to be stated rather than dismissed. Banning organisations drives them underground, complicates monitoring, and hands them a grievance to recruit on. Speech that is repellent is not automatically speech that is criminal, and a government that forgets that distinction eventually applies it to somebody else.
What a serious response looks like
The honest position is that the answer is not a single ban. It is enforcement of the laws that already exist, applied consistently: charges when a memorial is desecrated, charges when hatred is promoted, and a refusal to treat organised intimidation as ordinary protest.
It also means the political mainstream declining to borrow the group’s framing. When mainstream figures adopt the language of a country being ruined by immigrants, they are not competing with Second Sons for those voters. They are validating the premise and letting the group recruit off the endorsement.
Canada is in the middle of a genuine, difficult argument about immigration levels, housing and services, and that argument is legitimate. What is not legitimate is a movement that resolves it by dividing the country into people who belong by ancestry and people who do not. That question was settled here a long time ago, and it should not have to be settled again on an overpass outside Okotoks.
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