Who Knew? or How my horse and I unwittingly helped get our Canadian hate laws improved.

Last week while watching the images of the riots in Charlottesville emerge, my mind drifted back to June 19, 1966, when, along with twenty or so other members of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Mounted Unit, I rode my horse into Allen Gardens in Toronto.

We were there to put ourselves between the two groups: a neo-Nazi named John Beattie, who had come to speak, accompanied by his gang of brown shirts and the hordes of protesters that came to confront him. All hell broke loose the moment he started to speak. Young men from Israeli-backed organizations attempted to breach the lines of cops on the ground to get at the Nazis. Scores of older Jewish men and women began keening, screaming and exposing their concentration camp tattoos. There was chaos everywhere and individual fights started at different locations away from the main confrontation.  We, the Mounted Unit, were ordered to break ranks, spur our mounts off to deal with these isolated situations. As usual, it didn’t take long to quell the trouble once the horses appeared. There were a few arrests and until recently, I had stored that troubled day in my “Been there done that” file.

I didn’t realize it at the time but I have recently discovered, to my pleasure, that on that day in the park, my horse and I were a small part of an elaborate plot hatched by The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) to draw attention to the need for stricter hate laws. That’s right:  groups who were opposed to the Nazis had actually encouraged the event. They wanted to bring the issue of hate crimes to the forefront because it was being debated in Parliament at that time.

It turns out that an ex-cop named John Garrity had been hired as a spy by the CJC to infiltrate the Nazi Party and help John Beattie establish a prominence so that later he could be used as a dupe in their cause. He was a twenty-four year old unemployed clerk, a loser, who posed no real threat to anyone. The meeting in the park was just an elaborate ruse to highlight the need for improvement of the country’s hate legislation. Of course no one, least of all myself, realized that this wasn’t a real resurgence of Nazism. I give credit to those who devised the ploy because it worked. Canadians all over the country reaffirmed their stand against the Nazis and all they stood for and the CJC succeeded in getting the legislation they hoped for:

Section 319 (1) of the Criminal Code states that hate speech “incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace” and where the comments are made in a public place.