Masked Group in Kamloops Sparks Alarm and Racism Fears

Kamloops residents are grappling with a disturbing gathering of an apparent white supremacist group in their city a few days before the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

“It just was creepy,” said a Kamloops man who saw the group of uniformed, masked men march to Memorial Hill Park Sunday.

“Especially after I looked into Second Sons afterwards — I don’t want these people in my neighbourhood, in my city, in my country.”

The man said the group marched down the street as a drone flew overhead and then stood in formation around the park’s cenotaph.

He said he was so disturbed by the group that he immediately called the RCMP.

The Tyee has agreed not to identify the man because the founders of Second Sons Canada have repeatedly talked about wanting to use violence to deport non-white people from Canada.

Evan Balgord, the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, identified the men as members of Second Sons Canada based on the uniforms they were wearing. The group engages in physical training and at some appearances they wear matching black uniforms and white pull-up masks that conceal their faces.

The Tyee compared the clothing worn by the men in Kamloops on Sunday with other Second Sons videos and confirmed that both the clothing and the flags matched those worn and carried by members of the group.

The group of about two dozen men were also seen downtown and unfurling a banner that read “Got Bones?” on the Pacific Way overpass above the Trans-Canada Highway, while a member pretended to dig in the ground below the overpass, according to photographs.

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said in a statement that members of the group were “seen and documented within our community” and the band has reported the incident to the Kamloops RCMP.

Kamloops RCMP Supt. Jeff Pelley said in a statement Monday that officers were called to Chief Eli Larue Way, near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School building, around 7:25 a.m. They engaged with the group before its members left the area.

“The posting of a banner bearing the words ‘got bones’ combined with the use of masks to conceal their identities while making such public statements is a cowardly attempt to avoid accountability for actions and messages that are clearly intended to intimidate, provoke fear and division,” Pelley said.

“We will continue to ensure that all offences are thoroughly investigated to support potential prosecution,” he said.

Researchers who have been tracking the rise of residential school denialism and the growth of white nationalist groups in Canada say the incident is a wake-up call both to mainstream politicians and to law enforcement.

“The far-right [residential school] denialist talking points are still being created and pushed out by a very small handful of people, but the reach that it has had is growing at an alarming rate,” said Sean Carleton, a historian and Indigenous studies scholar at the University of Manitoba.

“And I think we need to take this moment as an opportunity to take stock, rather than see it as some fringe thing.”

Balgord has been tracking the founders of Second Sons Canada for years. He said Jeremy MacKenzie and Alex Vriend should have been criminally charged with hate speech years ago, because their violent rhetoric — made in publicly available videos and social media posts — meets Canada’s high bar for hate speech prosecution.

“They have argued for the mass deportation of people who aren’t white, they’ve talked about it being at gunpoint, they've made many racist comments,” Balgord said. “They have described groups in Canada in ways that courts have previously found to be constituting hate speech.”

Balgord noted that Vriend and MacKenzie appeared to have a falling out recently and Vriend appears to have left Second Sons.

Political response

Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc has been a target for residential school denialists since 2021, when the nation reported that preliminary findings indicated the presence of unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

The issue led to turmoil inside the Conservative Party of BC. Vancouver-Quilchena MLA Dallas Brodie was ejected from the party’s caucus after she appeared to mock residential school survivors in a video interview. Brodie then went on to found OneBC, a party that has platformed denialists and produced a video that accused First Nations governments of deliberately lying about unmarked graves being found at former residential school grounds. The Union of BC Indian Chiefs called the film “racist misinformation.”

A video from an October town hall recently leaked to media shows Brodie responding enthusiastically to a suggestion about connecting with fans of MacKenzie and his organization Second Sons Canada. OneBC told The Tyee that Brodie was not aware of MacKenzie’s white supremacist beliefs at the time and that the party opposed his extremism.

Conservative Party of BC staffer Lindsay Shepherd was fired in 2025 after complaining about having to look at symbols commemorating the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Shepherd’s husband, right-wing media figure Cosmin Dzsurdzsa, was later hired by the party in the short-lived administration of former leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay. In a leadership debate this April, Findlay said that information about unmarked graves being found at the Kamloops residential school site was “presented as fact” in 2021 and that she has “been seeking the truth.”

Politicians moved quickly to condemn the Kamloops incident.

“The white nationalist gathering on Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc land this morning was hateful and meant to intimidate,” interim Conservative leader Lorne Doerkson said in a statement. “It has no place in British Columbia, and BC Conservatives condemn it completely. We stand with the people of Tk̓emlúps, and we expect the RCMP to investigate fully.”

The University of Manitoba’s Carleton said he finds that response “hopeful, but also disingenuous,” given the party’s record over the past few years and the fact that repealing B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act is still a top priority for the party.

NDP Leader David Eby said the demonstration was “just disgraceful, disgusting behaviour.”

“We have seen a rise in this kind of white nationalist behaviour in the province, and we’ve got to do more to fight it; that much is very clear.”

BC Green Party Leader Emily Lowan posted on social media that she was “disgusted by the appearance of white nationalists on the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc reserve.”

NDP MP Leah Gazan said the incident is one more example showing that Canada’s hate speech laws need to include residential school denialism, similar to the way denial of the Holocaust is already criminalized. Gazan started lobbying for this legislation change in 2024, but her proposal has not yet been successful.

Carleton warned that residential school denialists are adept at shaping their message in a way that doesn’t violate Canadian hate speech laws and called for continued education “on what denialism is and who's doing it for what purposes.”

Kamloops Coun. Dale Bass said her community is shocked and saddened, and a lot of anger is being directed at the RCMP.

But Bass said she first made the local RCMP detachment aware of the presence of a Second Sons chapter in the Kamloops area months ago, and she urged residents to “trust in our police and our first responders.”

The Kamloops resident who spoke with The Tyee said he waited to see if the RCMP would send a police car to Memorial Hill Park, but police never arrived. He shared with The Tyee a transcript of a voice mail message he later received, in which an officer tells the man police “looked all over downtown and we can’t find them anywhere, so we’re not sure where they went after that. They were protesting on the reserve this morning as well. So not quite sure what their issue was.”

Bass said she’s worried the group — whom she described as “angry, cowardly men” — may show up again at Truth and Reconciliation events Wednesday. But she said she hopes residents will come together with the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc community to show solidarity.

“And I wouldn’t be surprised if more people come, because it’s time to make a statement,” Bass said.