It started with the posters. Old Town sprouted pictures of Canadian soldiers in WW1. The old flag. “Our people, our homeland” insignias. Poles around the Legion were especially targeted.

Then, more brazen, they showed up on Remembrance Day. A woman outstretched her arms to hold the Canadian Red Ensign. Beside her stood young men with signs. “Honour our fallen. Defend Canada’s future.” And this: “Remember their sacrifice. Preserve our nation.”

Behind them was that wall of hand-sewn poppies cascading down the front of the town’s most iconic stone building. Before them the cenotaph tower. Around them hundreds of the respectful, and the curious.

These are the warriors. The nationalists. They’re here to take the Dominion of Canada back.

NOTL resident Ken Jones is one of the three people now leading the Dominion Society, an overtly anti-immigration, white segregationist and patriotic group that claims a growing national following and a local swell of support.

Their presence here joins the Second Sons, an alt-right, male-only, martial arts, anti-foreigner bunch that held its national convention in Niagara and made headlines with military-grade manoeuvres around Brock’s Monument.

“There’s a huge appetite that has been fermenting for the past five years, getting increasingly radicalized by mass migration,” David Tyrie told me. “Canada really is a country with an identity crisis and we’re providing an answer in a way that resonates and in line with an accurate reading of Canadian historical identity.”

The Dominion Society, now with 1,700 members, is Tyrie’s baby. After being booted out of the People’s Party of Canada by leader Max Bernier (he was national director), Tyrie says the rise of Donald Trump and growing nationalist movements in Europe brought him to a moment of action. 

As he wrote on the group’s site: “In contemporary Canada, every foreign ethnic group has politically organized advocacy groups ensuring their interests are represented while Heritage Canadians remain atomized. This makes us easy to run over and ignore. It is time to get organized and make our voices heard.”

Heritage Canadians means white people. Tyrie, Jones and their supporters want immigration stopped. All of it. And then they want remigration. 

“Mass immigration is the most destructive policy ever imposed on the Canadian people. It has eroded our sovereignty, diluted our culture and crippled our sense of identity & community as a nation,” the group’s manifesto reads. “It’s devastated our education and health care systems, depressed wages in the workforce and made housing completely unaffordable, especially for young Canadians.”

Tyrie believes a replacement theory’s being enacted as policy by the federal government. Instead of finding ways to boost our declining birth rate, “they have decided to replace us with foreigners.”

“Remigration is the return of foreigners to their respective homelands. It involves robust public policy tools that will create the legal, economic and cultural conditions to reverse the tide of mass immigration and demographic change in Canada. This is the only way to preserve our nation.”

This, they say, is “sensible nationalism.” It’s an effort to save NOTL and other places from what Brampton has become. “Brampton is unrecognizable,” says the society. “It looks more like an Indian city than a Canadian one.”

Well, are these guys racists? Born of the white supremacy, neo-Nazi movement now gaining traction in the U.S.?

“I don’t consider myself a white supremacist. I consider myself a Canadian nationalist.” Tyrie says. “It’s not about racial superiority or that Canadians should enslave lower-value people. I’m saying Canada is the homeland of the Canadian people and should be preserved as such.”

The message, which he says is finding traction, is simple. The real Canada is gone. Our identity erased and history buried, as “our people” are replaced. The battle cry: “We will reclaim our homeland.”

I just read this piece to Dorothy. “Aren’t you worried,” she asked, “that you’re giving these wackos more oxygen?”

Yup, I do. But they’re here. They invaded November 11th. They stood among us. Being a tolerant, inclusive people, we let them. It’s what makes us Canadian.