BURST
A Windsor judge on Thursday convicted a local man on a rare terrorism-related charge, finding him guilty of offering his “skill and expertise” to a violent, extremist white-supremacy group listed in Canada as a terrorist entity.
Seth Bertrand, now 22 but only 18 at the time he filed an online application in 2021 to join the since-disbanded Atomwaffen Division, faces up to 10 years in prison. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for October.
“I’ll certainly be arguing to keep my client out of jail,” defence lawyer Bobby Russon told reporters after Superior Court Justice Maria Carroccia delivered her hour-long decision.
The verdict came as “no shock” to him or his client, he said. But Russon insists the hateful views Bertrand once espoused as a teenager are in the past.
Bertrand was arrested in 2022 following an elaborate RCMP-led sting that included the use of undercover officers who gained their target’s trust by posing as like-minded individuals. In his online application to join Atomwaffen, later rebranded as National Socialist Order, Bertrand wrote of a “beautiful” future following a race war in which the white race wins and establishes an ethnocentric, heterosexual nation without gay people, Blacks, Jews and Hispanics: “They are the enemy.”
While not charged with any specific act of terrorism, Justice Carroccia referred to the “preventative purpose of the legislation” that makes it a crime for directly or indirectly “enhancing the ability of the terrorist group to facilitate or carry out a terrorist activity.”
The judge referred to Bertrand “boasting” to the group of previous hateful mischief acts in Windsor for which he would be convicted, including targeting the home and vehicle of a married gay couple and vandalizing the Windsor office of a trans support group.
Bertrand, using his high school computer account, said in his application he had “already proven myself worthy” by such acts, citing his acts of vandalism and the resulting news media attention. Asked by the recruiters what he could contribute to the organization, the former cadet said he had military skills — including ‘Russian fighting techniques’ — and that he was a self-taught auto mechanic. If imprisoned for his previous criminal mischief, he said he would use his time behind bars recruiting for the cause.
During the trial, the defence conceded Bertrand’s views on minorities might have been “problematic” and even “deplorable,” but Russon argued his young client was “an idiot, not a terrorist.”
But Xenia Proestos, one of the federal prosecutors in the case, told reporters after the judge’s “reasoned, thorough decision” that Bertrand’s crime was “not just holding deplorable views, but taking action.”
Fresh from the guilty verdict, Russon wouldn’t say whether an appeal is already being contemplated.
Justice Carroccia’s ruling, he told reporters outside the downtown courthouse, is “an interpretation of the law. It’s a novel area of the law.”
Bottom line, however: “Hate has no place in society. I do believe that’s how he (Bertrand) feels now. I believe he has changed his views,” said Russon.
Bertrand remains out of custody pending preparation of a pre-sentence report ordered by the judge and his sentencing hearing on Oct. 6.
Russon said Bertrand has completed his house arrest and probation sentence connected to his earlier conviction in 2022 on three counts of mischief and a charge each for inciting hatred and breaching a court order.
It was his arrest by Windsor police following attacks on a gay couple’s property and the W.E. Trans Support office on Tecumseh Road East that triggered the federal terrorism investigation.
Bertrand’s lengthy terrorism trial heard testimony from an expert on far-right extremist groups and from two undercover RCMP officers whose identities remain protected under a court-imposed publication ban.
Much of the trial that began last fall was taken up by voir dires — trials within trials to argue evidence admissibility — including whether to accept prosecution evidence gathered covertly during a ‘Mr. Big’ sting, in which an undercover operative poses as a fictitious big-shot criminal organization boss and that is designed to get an unsuspecting target to confess.
Bertrand didn’t know he was being secretly recorded, and Justice Carroccia in her decision pointed out how what Bertrand told an arresting officer was at odds with what he had earlier told the Mr. Big actors in secretly recorded conversations.
Related
In early September, a month before Bertrand’s sentencing hearing, a Superior Court judge in Ottawa is scheduled to announce the punishment for Patrick Gordon MacDonald, a terror propagandist known by the alias Dark Foreigner. He was found guilty in April of criminally inciting hate against Jews, and helping create racist and hate-fuelled terror recruitment videos.
MacDonald, only 20 when he began creating the videos in 2018, was convicted on three counts, including ‘facilitating terrorist activity” for supporting Atomwaffen Division and a neo-Nazi leader. The Crown is seeking a 14-year prison sentence for MacDonald, while the defence called for a six- to eight-year term.