How the far-right’s big moment in Vancouver turned into a fiasco
‘So I’m lugging around this big suitcase. I’m by myself. It just wasn’t doable, right?’
By his account, Joey De Luca, president of the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam, was “livid”.
He’d just spent an uncomfortable 15 hours on a bus, racing to get from Calgary to Vancouver in time for what was promising to be a big moment in his nascent career as a right-wing provocateur. With just an hour or so to spare on Saturday afternoon before his group’s anti-Islam rally at City Hall was scheduled to begin, he met downtown with Vancouver’s best-known far-right activist, Brad Salzberg, who was running logistics for the event and was also billed as a speaker.
Media attention was overwhelming across Canada, in the wake of the deadly confrontation between white-supremacists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, just a week before. The Vancouver event was promising to put WCAI Canada and Salzberg’s anti-multicultural Cultural Action Party on the map.
Salzberg broke the news to De Luca. The rally was off.
I’ve done this Greyhound ride all the way to Vancouver and by the time I get there it’s ‘oh no, we’re cancelling it’
With thousands of anti-racism counter-protesters already massed at City Hall, Salzberg said he was too frightened to proceed, according to De Luca, even with the planned protection of the Soldiers of Odin, a leather-vested group that says it conducts anti-crime street patrols but are known in Europe as anti-immigrant vigilantes.