BURST
An Ottawa man was sentenced to 10 years of prison on Monday after he was found guilty of helping produce video and imagery for a neo-Nazi group that called for violence against Jewish people and other visible minorities.
Patrick Macdonald , 27, was found guilty earlier this year of participating in the activities of a known terror group, facilitating terrorist activity through the production of propaganda films and promoting hate speech.
Superior Court Justice Robert Smith handed down the 10-year sentence on Monday.
He told the court Macdonald knowingly participated in an activity by the terrorist group by producing three propaganda and recruitment videos using his graphic designer skills as well as multimedia equipment.
In one of the videos, Macdonald could be seen wearing battle fatigues and carrying a machine gun, Smith said.
Smith also said Macdonald shared the recruitment and propaganda videos with other neo-Nazi groups, and thus helped terrorist activities by seeking to recruit additional members to a known terror organization. The justice added this encouraged the formation of “lone wolf cells” to commit violent terror against minority groups to accelerate a race war.
Macdonald also published propaganda images online under the alias “Dark Foreigner,” Smith said.
“Encouraging individuals to join a terrorist group and to participate in a terrorist activity is a serious event in a democratic country such as Canada, such conduct must be strongly denounced and encouraged by the court by imposing a lengthy total sentence of 10 years in prison,” Smith said.
However, Smith said Macdonald has apologized in court and has participated in Project ReSET for the last two years. Project ReSet is a five-year initiative by the John Howard Society of Ottawa to disengage people in Eastern Ontario from extremist-based violence.
Macdonald has also volunteered his time at organizations that helped minority communities, apologized in court and has renounced his hateful and violent ideologies, the judge said.
Throughout the trial, Crown prosecutors argued that Macdonald used his skills as a graphic designer to produce recruitment videos and imagery for the Atomwaffen Division, a group linked with spreading neo-Nazi propaganda. The Crown argued that Macdonald posted the videos and “violent images and statements” online, which promoted hatred against Jewish people and other minority groups.
Defence lawyers had said the evidence was circumstantial and did not connect him to the political recruitment videos for the group. The Atomwaffen Division is based out of the United States, and was labelled a terrorist entity in Canada in 2021.
The Crown had urged the judge to sentence Macdonald to 14 years, while defence lawyers said he should only be sentenced for six to seven years, with about 10 months credited for time served in custody.
Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, called the sentence “significant.”
“This was not just a slap on the wrist,” he said.
“I think Patrick McDonald got the sentence he should have. He was really responsible for creating this new visual language of the sort of modern-day terroristic neo-Nazi movements. So his work and his aesthetic will last much longer than his personal involvement did, as far as we know, and may continue to have an impact.”
He also said this could set a precedent for other hate-related court cases in the future. Seth Bertrand, 22, was recently found guilty of participating in the activity of Atomwaffen Division in Windsor. Kristoffer Nippak and Matthew Althorpe, two men accused of helping Atomwaffen Division, are set to have their judge-alone trial in Toronto next January.
But Balgord wants the Criminal Code to be reformed to acknowledge the severity of hate crimes and the impacts they have on minority groups across Canada.
Data from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation said one in six Canadians reported that they have experienced, possibly or definitively, a hate crime in the past year. However, only one of four of those who definitely or suspect they experienced a hate crime reported this experience to the police.
“Generally speaking, the system that deals with hate crimes doesn’t work very well at all,” he said. “In general, I’d like to see some changes to the criminal code to address what I’m going to call prevalent forms of hate crimes.”
Balgord urged Ottawans to fight against hate groups who are using their influence to create racist and hateful government policies, such as “re-migration,” a far-right concept of ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants.
Local anti-racist demonstrations and rallies in response to racist and fascist policies are an “excellent” way to do that, he said.
“People just need to be on the lookout for where these ideas live, where they’re coming from, who’s being influenced by them when they start making their way into mainstream politics, and to be responsive to them,” Balgord said.
With files from Aedan Helmer