Septuagenarian William John Beattie is no longer the enfant terrible of Canada’s racist movement.
But at a time when drunks, fraudsters and crack smokers can hold the highest municipal office, it is surely a public service to expose people like Beattie.
Driving along Highway 35 toward Minden in mid-July, my wife and I stopped to gas up the car. There, I spotted a copy of the Minden Times, and an article jumped out at me about Beattie running for deputy reeve in the quiet cottage country town.
Many won’t remember him, but back on April 20, 1965, only 20 years after the horrors of the Holocaust and on the anniversary of Hitler’s birth, the blond-haired, blue-eyed punk founded the Canadian Nazi Party (later renamed the National Socialist Party) and announced that he would be Canada’s new Führer. With few resources and a handful of soulmates, including partner David Stanley (who later renounced Nazism), he turned his dream into a frightening reality.
A hurricane of protest erupted.
Toronto in 1965 was home to some of the pitiably few who had survived Hitler’s brutality. The Canadian Jewish Congress at first tried to downplay the threat.
But as Beattie planned his first public rally for May 30 of that year at Allan Gardens, enraged survivors were unwilling to accept the quiet diplomacy of the CJC, which was working with city officials to stop the spectacle. They took matters into their own hands.
An anti-Nazi group had already been formed. Known as N3 (referring to Newton’s third law, that every action causes an equal and opposite reaction), its avowed aim to confront Beattie and Stanley and deny them a public platform. Reports from news sources of the day placed the crowd at close to 5,000.
Undaunted, Beattie arrived in full Nazi regalia, and despite the presence of dozens of Toronto police officers, was immediately set upon. Police rushed Beattie into a waiting police wagon and drove him away from the angry crowd.
A group of young people who had made the unfortunate fashion decision to wear leather jackets to the park that day were not so lucky. Such was the tenor of the times.
The CJC, fearing more such riots, took matters into its own hands, hiring private investigator John Garrity to infiltrate Beattie’s group. Garrity had already been hired by N3, but decided he couldn’t work with them because they were too extreme.
Thanks to Garrity, who became a trusted Beattie confidante, the Oz-like curtain shielding the Canadian Nazi Party was torn away. Garrity wrote an exposé for Maclean’s in October 1966 entitled I Was A Spy For The Canadian Jewish Congress.
Garrity describes Beattie as “unemployed, bereft of funds” and basically homeless. His supporters numbered fewer than 50. Beattie was a nobody who had captured a nation’s attention with his Hitler-loving antics.
In his book about postwar Canadian Jewry, Delayed Impact, Franklin Bialystok wrote: “The Nazis were ‘misfits’ but the most visible part of a growing right-wing movement in Canada which… could represent a threat to our national stability.”
Beattie didn’t totally disappear. He spent six months in jail for daubing swastikas on the gateposts of prominent Jewish leaders in Toronto, pursuing his charade well into the 1970s. He reappeared in the late 1980s in Minden, this time as the host of an “Aryan fest” on his property.
At the height of a resurgence of neo-Nazism, thanks to groups like the Heritage Front, he attracted over 200 Nazi skinheads and dozens of OPP officers.
That was the last of Beattie’s romance with public neo-Nazism – until he decided to run for deputy reeve because he’s angry about a water tower project that went over budget.
Bernie Farber is a former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
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