The Pariah of Pot: The Rise and Fall of Marc Emery
From 'Prince of Pot' to Accused Predator and Racist.
So there I was, scrolling through my facebook feed, as one does, and then I see a post from Marc Emery, which was weird, he’d blocked and unfriended me about ten years earlier. As I recall, we parted ways on social media after I’d called out a pervy post he had referring to the legs of 16 year old school girls, who were in their shorts and summer dresses. If memory serves me right, in the comments, he was defending porn featuring under age girls. I expressed to Marc, that underage porn is a continuation of the original assault and crime, repeated, over and over, and for that, and probably some despairing comments, he blocked me. Not long after, accusations of predatory behaviour started appearing in the press, and Emery was seemingly cancelled from the cannabis scene…. or so I thought.
The boosted or sponsored post I saw, showed me a side of Marc that only just beginning to take shape back when I knew him, his intense racism. His post was an effort to gain support for a Canadian White Nationalist Party.
Marc Emery enthusiastically backed Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada (PPC) starting around 2018 and ran as its candidate in the London North Centre riding in the 2021 federal election, finishing fourth with about 5% of the vote. I jokingly used to call it the White People’s Party, after seeing some of Emery’s schtick about it. little did I know this was shades of things to come. The PPC itself promotes a strongly anti-immigration platform, advocating sharp reductions in annual intake (to 100,000–150,000), and an end to mass low-skilled immigration. Although he remains listed as a PPC member on Wikipedia with no formal resignation announced, Emery has since distanced himself from the party and shifted toward launching a new, much more explicitly racist nationalist movement called “Restore Canada.” One thing about Emery is, he is no backbencher, and any organization he joins, he likely does so with aspirations of taking it over. In this case, he instead is starting his own, even more extreme, political party, as i suspect even by PPC standards he is too controversial a figure to take the lead and oust Bernier. Emery’s social media accounts are jammed full of his racist posts, and he has close to 300,000 on Facebook, 37,000 on Instagram and 63,000 on X, and he seems to be growing a base of North American racists daily. Here is an example of the sort of hate Emery is spreading.
“Dark skinned Invaders are no benefit to 🇨🇦. These scammer cultures from India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Africa, are swamping White Canada. In 50 years it’s going to be rare to find White families because we have marginalized White males.” Link:
In 2024–2026 social media posts, Emery has called for restoring Canada as a “British/French/European” nation, criticizing mass immigration and multiculturalism while urging policies that prioritize “Canadians born in Canada” and reject the “Third World” influx. Critics have described these efforts as an attempt to build a white-nationalist party, with some online reactions labeling it a “Make Canada White Again” platform. And it’s not just immigrants that have garnered Emery’s ire, as Marc posted on X April 20th, 2026, the international day of Cannabis Celebrations:
“The indigenous were roaming bands of savages raping, killing, warring, genociding other tribes... They were Stone Age people. Their land? Do Stone Age people own whole nations anywhere else on Earth?”
This marks a notable devolution from his earlier libertarian and cannabis-legalization focus. He has been boosting the following post with the following image and text, as well as other racist political propaganda, into unsuspecting Canadian’s social media feeds, which included mine. A recent Facebook message read:
No one in Parliament is speaking to the #1 issue for Canadians: the flood of MILLIONS of migrant workers, asylum seekers, so-called refugees from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Philippines, the Middle East (Gazans! [with ‘puke emoji]) Africa and Asia into Canada.
It has to end if we are to preserve Canada. They need to be deported and Canada stabilized.
I’m contemplating a national political party dedicated to restoring the Canada I grew up in. Canada was 97% White citizens from 1867 to 1970. It was a beautiful, safe, and exciting nation, with a prosperous future.
Then came the abomination,
the lie of Multiculturalism
I was shocked, and when I looked deeper into his page, and saw even more intense racism, and support for it, and a little worried. Some of the statements he has made may violate Hate Speech Laws, such as cracking the skulls of indigenous pipeline protesters with bludgeons to “finish what our ancestors started”; calling for the the segregation and lynching of blacks with comments like “Black Americans are seeds of the devil”; along with statements on immigrant groups like “Any country is putting all their women at risk by importing hordes of Muslims from Pakistan, India, Afghanistan... These vile men are obsessed with raping White women”.
Emery, in his state of narcissistic delusion, at first thought that cannabis consumers had somehow joined him into his descent into racism, posting on X “When the Liberals legalized it they thought we’d all be Trans and Gay and instead we’re all high thinking ‘I think we have an immigration problem! I must be getting paranoid, there’s one there! And there!’” (May 5, 2026). However, after I called out his racist bullshit, and he posted a response about me to his hundreds of thousands of followers. He was likely a little shocked to see the majority of comments agreed with me and not him, and had to write ““I will say that many of my former cannabis legalization allies are naive idiots. They are up there in some kind of cloud that they completely cannot see the Canadian ethnic landscape. White potheads are being replaced in real time & it’s not they don’t notice, they don’t care.” (April 22, 2026)
Emery can be a very charismatic figure, as well as an excellent organizer and magnetic attractor for issues he engages with. Him and his current wife, Lara Yates, who seems to share his racist views, already have a case in B.C. Supreme Court over her heckling of Indigenous Land Acknowledgements at her teenage daughter’s school, and a resulting ban she received for it. As an experienced activist, Emery is well versed in using court cases like this, for media coverage and political maneuvering. He has been featured on White Nationalist broadcasts, and has been endorsing and recruiting for racist organizations such as the Dominion Society and the controversial fight clubs of Second Sons.
Because of the potential threat Emery and his ilk, represent to the multicultural fabric of Canadian society, I have decided to do this deep dive into Emery, and catalog his racism. This is also personal for me, I knew and worked with Emery for decades. This association as also been used by various critics to attack my personal character. Laura Loomer Besty, and cracker of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Yaacov Apelbaum, did this in his article, Against the Claim of Cannabis Use In the Bible, as did ‘would be if he could be’ messianic claimant Wahid Azal, in a number of articles, such as the recent piece Chris Bennett has a public falling out with Marc Emery, which paints Emery in the more favourable light.
As such, this is also an opportunity for me to go over this stretch of my personal history and involvement with this horrible man. I helped to build the Emery up, and thus, I feel obligated to tear him down now, after seeing what he has become. Because of this, I want to go over his history, the rise and the fall, to explain my own connection to this despicable racist, and also examine his descent into that world, as it follows a pattern that can be seen with a lot of disenfranchised white males who have taken this same road of hate.
If you are already well familiar with the Emery cannabis activism story, before his descent into White Nationalism, feel free to bypass the biographical sketch of his history, and skip to the header, Marc Emery Discovers Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad, where in my opinion, his descent into racism begins. I have also organized Emery’s racist attacks on various groups, such as Sikhs and other Indians, First Nations, Black People, Islamic People, etc for easier access and to act as a sort of data base for these comments, which are all hyperlinked to Emery’s original posts. Feel free to cut and paste and use this information and imaging as you see fit. The article ends with a petition that Emery be investigated for potential hate crime violations, which I encourage you to sign and share. Here is a list of the various topics covered in the article, hyperkinked to their sections.
-The Marc Emery Story (Background story of his years in. Cannabis activism)
-Marc Emery Cancelled by #MeToo
-Marc Emery Discovers Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad
-Marc Emery’s Anti-Woke Campaign and White-Privilege Denial
-Women’s Liberation and the Decline of Western Culture According to Marc Emery
-Marc Emery’s Framing: Racism as “Protection of White Women”
-Emery consistently misrepresents stats, and news stories to enhance his Racist Agenda
Emery’s Extreme Racism
-Emery calls for the Segregation of Black People, a return to Jim Crow and Lynchings
-Emery calls Sikhs, “scammers” and “Flotsam and Jetsam”
-Marc Emery on Jewish People and Israel
-Marc Emery’s Racist Colonial Views on First Nations
-Emery on the Threat of Multiculturalism
-Marc Emery’s Political Aspirations for a White Nationalist Party
-Emery has been growing his connections to White Nationalist groups
-Marc Emery Calls for a White Male Canadian Military
-Emery Broadcasting Hate Speech?
-Has Marc Emery Violated Canadian Hate Speech Laws? (Petition)
I don’t want to give Marc more credit than he is due in regards to reshaping Canadian views on cannabis, but I also don’t want to play it down. As my intention is to tear down his legacy, I want to show the seriousness of that, and what he has lost as a result of the path he has taken. That said, Canadian marijuana legalization was the result of the herculean efforts of many activists who contributes in all sorts of ways. Certainly court cases like David Malmo-Levine’s, Chris Clay’s Terry Parker’s, Owen Smith’s and others, including myself, helped to pave the way, as did conferences, people opening cannabis shops despite the illegality, rallies along with news and media coverage generated by these things. As well, my focus here is on the Vancouver scene I was a part of, there is a whole other story that took place in Ontario, with figures like Matt Mernaugh, Christopher Lawson, Allison Myrden , Emery protege and loyal minion, Chris Goodwin, and many others there. Likewise Montreal had its own scene, led by Marc-Boris St-Maurice, Alain Berthiaume and others. Indeed, in every Province across Canada as well, there are activists that all contributed to the cause of Legalization, so I don’t want to be dismissive or ignore the contributions of the many activists that contributed and give too much credit to any single individual or group . So with that said, Marc did play an important and even pivotal role in all this, and it’s sad to have witnessed from a position that travelled alongside him, how Emery went from the once called ‘Prince of Pot’ to the biggest Pariah in the world wide cannabis scene.
The Marc Emery Story
I’d known Marc since the early 90s, and for a time, worked with him towards cannabis Legalization. Back in those days, he came to be known as the ‘Prince of Pot’ and was truly a force of nature. His “retail activism” was a major factor in reimagining cannabis in the mind of the Canadian public, a key step towards legalization in a Democratic country.
Emery, was one of Canada’s most prominent cannabis rights activists, if not the most prominent. He was a born entrepreneur, and money quickly became a tool for being a political provocateur as well. Born on February 13, 1958, in London, Ontario, to working-class English immigrants Alfred and Eileen Emery, he grew up in a household that encouraged ambition and self-reliance. His father worked at a 3M factory, but young Marc was already wired for business and politics. By age nine, he launched his first venture, Stamp Treasure, a mail-order stamp business run from his parents’ home. Two years later, he parlayed those earnings into Marc’s Comic Room, a mail-order operation selling used comic books that netted him about $120 a week—a significant sum for a pre-teen in the late 1960s.
Emery’s entrepreneurial drive led him to drop out of high school in 1975 at age 17. He sold his comic-book business and used the proceeds to buy a struggling used-book store in downtown London, which he renamed City Lights Bookshop (inspired by the famous San Francisco bookstore). For the next 17 years, City Lights became far more than a retail outlet—it served as Emery’s personal laboratory for civil disobedience, free speech, and libertarian ideals. The store stocked a wide range of literature, including controversial titles, and quickly earned a reputation as a hub for independent thinkers in conservative southwestern Ontario.
Emery’s activism at City Lights began with battles against what he saw as government overreach. One of his earliest and most sustained campaigns targeted Ontario’s strict Sunday shopping laws, which prohibited most retail operations on the Sabbath. Starting in the mid-1980s, Emery repeatedly defied the ban by opening City Lights on Sundays. He was charged eight times over an eight-week period, employing creative tactics each time—such as giving books away for free while still technically “operating.” In 1988 he spent three days in jail for his defiance. The prolonged legal pressure, combined with similar actions by other merchants, contributed to the eventual liberalization of Sunday shopping laws in Ontario by the early 1990s. Emery framed the fight as a defense of free enterprise against “oppressive” state control.
Censorship became another flashpoint. In 1990–91, Emery took on Ontario’s obscenity laws after a local record store owner was convicted for selling 2 Live Crew’s album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, which contained explicit lyrics including the track “Me So Horny.” Emery stocked the banned CD (and later the video) at City Lights as an act of principled protest. In 1991 he was convicted of selling obscene material and received one year of probation. Undeterred, he immediately pivoted to another taboo: cannabis. Shortly after sentencing, he began selling marijuana-related literature, grow books, and High Times magazine—materials that violated a 1988 federal ban on publications promoting drug production or use. Emery publicly invited London police to arrest him at the store, but officers declined to lay charges, perhaps sensing the shifting cultural tide or the futility of the exercise.
It wa around this time that Emery also sponsored speaking tours by prominent U.S. cannabis activists such as Jack Herer, Ed Rosenthal, Steven Hager, and Paul Mavrides, using the bookstore as a platform to normalize discussion of hemp and marijuana reform.
Emery’s political journey during these years reflected his evolving libertarian philosophy, heavily influenced by Ayn Rand’s writings (he described himself as “Howard Roark personified”). He had begun in left-leaning politics, volunteering for the New Democratic Party (NDP) in the 1968 and 1979 federal elections in London East. By the early 1980s he had shifted rightward, running for the Libertarian Party of Canada in the 1980 federal election (finishing fourth with 197 votes) and later becoming deeply involved with the Freedom Party of Ontario as its “action director” from 1984 to 1990. He ran unsuccessfully for London city alderman in 1982 and 1985, for the provincial legislature in 1987, and opposed the city’s bid for the 1991 Pan American Games and a garbage strike in 1986 (even hiring replacement workers at his own expense). These experiences honed his skills as a media-savvy agitator who thrived on publicity and confrontation.
By 1992, Emery had sold City Lights and briefly left Canada for Asia with his then-partner, seeking new opportunities. The venture ended in financial disappointment, but it reinforced his determination to build a movement. In March 1994 he relocated to Vancouver, British Columbia—a city already developing a countercultural reputation.
By that time, I had already been a cannabis activist for a few years, in fact, when I started out in BC, there was not really anyone doing much in that regard, but it did not take long for others to jump on the cannabis/hemp legalization train. A big factor was the recently rediscovered uses of industrial hemp, which paired well with the Growing environmental concerns in British Columbia about deforestation from over logging. hemp building products and paper seemed like a great solution for the jobs vs the environment equation.
I’d read about Marc’s efforts at City lights bookstore in Hightimes Magazine, so when he showed up to one of our rallies in Vancouver with a box of books and other goodies, I recognized him, and invited him to share some space on my table and booth. I detailed this encounter, and my own introduction to Marc, in a 1995 letter to his new Magazine, Cannabis Canada, that helps fill in some of the history between us. It was written in response to an article Marc wrote about himself, about his first Vancouver cannabis shop, The HempBC Story, where he basically tried to take credit for starting the Vancouver cannabis movement. I wrote a letter, Marc Emery, the Essential Asshole? to fill in the blanks on that history, which Marc left out, and I think my younger self, really nailed much of what was to come afterwords.
In imitation of Marc’s wonderfully honest and sometimes brutally to the point style, I would like to reply to his article from last issue, The HEMP BC Story (CCM&H). In it, he gives the impression that there was no hemp movement or distributors of hemp information and products prior to his arrival in 1994. It’s all very well to toot your own horn, but Marc’s article is clearly misleading, as I am sure both Dana and Emery’s own Left-Lieutenant Ian Hunter could attest, as both had been prominent activists in the hemp movement prior to Marc’s arrival from India in March of 1994.
Marc’s statement concerning the sale of hemp products prior to his arrival in B.C. is also clearly untrue. He wrote that “None of these items were currently handled in British Columbia or most of Canada because there was a $100,000 fine for doing so.” As many B.C. residents and smokers are well aware, my wife and I have been producing Mama Indica’s Hemp Seed Treats in Canada since 1991, a product which is sold by a number of B.C. retailers and is also exported world wide.
Our small West Coast company managed to garnish nationwide attention on CBC News, Marketplace and countless newspapers and radio shows both here and abroad, all before Marc came to B.C. We also imported cases of The Emperor Wears No Clothes into Canada, and sold hemp clothes and paper, all under the threat of a $100,000 fine. This was all done while living in the small west coast town of Ucluelet, one of the most renowned redneck communities in Canada. Monday Magazine (a Victoria newspaper) once compared Ucluelet to Salma, Alabama.
I remember first finding out about Marc and his fight against censorship in his home province of Ontario, in an article that appeared in a 1992 edition of High Times. I was impressed with the article and Marc’s gutsy approach, but heard little else of him until the April 23rd Hemp Rally in 1994.
I was invited to the rally to speak and sell my hempenwear by the organizers of the event, which included Leeroy James & Jan Campbell (publishers of the now defunct Hempfest Times), Kris Laing, Dana Larsen and Ian Hunter. Kris Laing had organized a successful rally in Vancouver in 1992 (250 people) and had also helped organize the original April 23rd Rally in 1993 at which about a thousand people turned up.
There was at least three thousand people at the 1994 April 23rd Annual Smoke-In, [later the April 20th date would replace these April 23rd events] and I remember Marc walking up to my table with a bag of books. I recognized him immediately from the High Times article, introduced myself to him and invited him to sell his books at my table. I was very pleased to meet him and looked forward to working with him in the future. I passed Marc’s phone number around to many of my contacts in B.C.’s hemp community, and I told him about an upcoming B.C. event, an event which I believe inspired his inflammatory article Where, oh where are the hemp professionals?
I think Marc’s article may have stemmed from his experience at the Comox Valley Plant In, a sad weekend for the B.C. hemp movement. The event was almost a complete failure, but not completely the fault of the organizers, who worked very hard at staging it. Rainy weather and an unavoidable police roadcheck at the bottom of the mountain where the event was held didn’t help.
I remember the many upset phone-calls I received after Marc’s inflammatory article came out, and thinking to myself, “Marc Emery is an asshole.” When my good friend Ian Hunter called me and told me he was going to work for Marc, I asked him “Why would you want to work for that guy? He’s an asshole.” Shortly after Ian’s call, and my angry condemnation of both him and Marc, I received a call from Marc, with an order for our hemp seed treats. (He buys lots of them, and has given our company tremendous support.)
I asked Marc about his article, which I had not yet had the opportunity to read, and his answer about it seemed to comply with the comments I had heard from the different people that were offended by its publication. I pointed out to Marc that prior to his arrival the populace of B.C. was more informed about hemp than any province in Canada, including Ontario where he had originally been living, and possibly including any State in the U.S.A. as well, and who was the B.C. public educated by before the arrival of Marc Emery and HEMP BC? Grassroots activists and non-professionals, that’s who! A group I was proud to be a member of.
These non-professional, grassroots activists like Norm Chollette, Don Hogan, Leeroy & Jan Campbell, Kris Laing, Marius Soska, the Fluid Druid, James Dure, Rob Rippengale, Ian Cooper, Paul DeFelice, Guy Charles (organizer of both of Nelson’s Hempfests), the many members of the Fane of the Pscilocybe Mushroom Association, Victoria’s Anti-Prohibition League (with its many hard workers like Henry Boston, Judy Smith and others), the Comox Valley Hemp Coalition (especially the work of members Ernie Yacub, Darren Hollinger, and Ralph Schultze), students at UVic and UBC, SFU’s League for Ethical Action on Drugs (of which editor Dana Larsen is a founder and past president), and countless other B.C. activists, along with the many smoke-ins, courthouse protests and rallies at the Parliament Buildings in Victoria, all laid the prepatory groundwork that was necessary to create such a welcome environment for Marc Emery to come into and open his very successful store and activist centre, HEMP B.C.
I ranted and raved at Marc on the phone for a while, pointing out that if his method was so good, then why wasn’t hemp legal in Ontario? I even called him an asshole. But Marc had made some very valid points, and he said that if he offended anybody, then that was good because that was what he intended, and he wasn’t out to make friends, and furthermore that the B.C. Hemp movement was becoming cliquish…
After I got off the phone and cooled down a little, I had a chance to reflect on my conversation with Marc. I thought about what had offended me most about his comments, and I had to admit to myself that it was his comments about “unprofessionalism”, mostly because in my own case it was somewhat true. My newsletters and information sheets (when I was able to get them out) were never anywhere near as nice as the slick print jobs Marc offered, and lack of money kept us very low budget.
When I asked Marc what he had done, he told me, along with the rest of the offended egos: “Just watch me.” Well, here it is some time later, and I have to admit that Marc and the staff of HEMP BC have done an excellent job of turning what was once a funky grassroots movement into a slick mainstream organization. I can really appreciate Marc’s in your face style and his radical approach to retail activism. Many of us in the hemp movement can learn alot from Marc and his stir it up style.
When all is said and done, I like what Marc’s done for the B.C. hemp movement, and what’s more, I like Marc Emery himself. But then again I like my own asshole, for I realize that just as the hands and the feet serve a purpose on the body of man, so does the asshole. In a similar way, perhaps the body of people that make up the hemp movement needs an asshole for the movement to move through.
Bottoms up, Marc!
Good luck to you in 1995.
Chris Bennet
On July 7, 1994, he opened Hemp BC at 324 West Hastings Street, a store dedicated to cannabis paraphernalia (bongs, pipes, and accessories that were effectively illegal to promote or sell under existing Canadian law). The shop quickly became ground zero for Vancouver’s emerging “Vansterdam” scene.
Late in 1994, after attending the High Times Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam and visiting the legendary Sensi Seeds store, Emery began selling Dutch cannabis seeds. What started as a small sideline exploded into Marc Emery Direct Marijuana Seeds. By 1995 the business was featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. That same year he launched Cannabis Canada magazine (renamed Cannabis Culture in 1998), which grew into a bimonthly print publication with a circulation reaching 60,000 copies per issue, many distributed in the U.S. heartland.
Throughout this time, Marc bought my hemp products, and published my articles in his magazine. His store hosted me book signing of Green Gold the Tree of Life: Marijuana in Magic & Religion when it came out in 1995. I spoke at rallies he sponsored and was invited to after parties by him. At some point, he told the following story to me, about a women having a vision about him in front of his store, and as I had my own powerful religious experience that started me on the cannabis activism path, I took this then, as indicating my path may somehow be aligned with this asshole….
I had a very profound experience one day in 1977. An old woman and her husband walked in front of my store, and she dropped onto the sidewalk in the middle of this beautiful sunny day, and she fell into a coma. The ambulance came and hauled her away.
Three months later she called me up to say she had just gotten out of the hospital, and it had been a very traumatic time.
She said that her whole experience was because of this tremendous vision she had as she walked by, that involved me. She said she felt my incredible energy and aura come towards her and drop her literally dead on the spot.
She said “Mr Emery, I’ve never met you, but I know a lot about you, and I got a fabulous jolting sensation that something really important is going to happen to you.”
She told me she had seen three important symbols, and that the first was the dollar sign. Well, three years later I was to become a convert to the Ayn Rand philosophy of individualism and objectivism. The dollar is the major symbol in her book Atlas Shrugged, the symbol of John Gault’s sanctuary for all the world’s escaped geniuses.
Then she said “the second symbol looks like a maple leaf, but it’s not a maple leaf, it’s got ridged edge. I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to be one of the most important things in your life.” We all know now that the leaf is the cannabis leaf. But I didn’t smoke pot until 4 years after this.
She told me the third thing was “you’ll always have a mind like a steel trap, and it will be your most valuable asset in the battle over the leaf.” I’ve always had a remarkable memory, with retention of all the information and details that I pick up. Despite the mythology about pot causing memory loss, when I play Jeopardy I can still answer about 90% of the questions. I don’t know why I’m like that.
So that’s what she said to me, 21 years ago, and she spent three months in the hospital from that vision so I take her seriously. - Marc Emery, 1999
Later on, Mac would reinterpret the “mind like a steel trap” as being enclosed in a prison for 5 years, as would be his fate.
Marc was amazing to watch in those early days. His seed desk would be always surrounded by a crowd, hinging on his every word, watching every transaction, or waiting in line to speak to him, as the Prince of Pot held court. He had to have a security guy with him right at the desk, as there was so much merchandise and cash flowing around. Although he liked to live rich, money for Emery, was an energy, not to be saved and stockpiled, but to be used. He was undeniably a man dedicated to a cause, and freely spent his cash in efforts to promote cannabis legalization not only in Canada, but around the World. That is not to say, there was no ego involved. As well known cannabis activist David Malmo-Levine, who organized many cannabis events and fought for legalization in court, has noted of this time period, and his own history with Emery:
“How could everyone – myself included – have worked with Marc if he had been this power-hungry creep? Well, he hid the power-hungry thing well. He spent money on educational campaigns, and court campaigns, and tonnes of activities… Marc donated more money to important causes than the rest of my associates, peers and friends combined. Times 100.”
[For David’s full statement on Emery, his accusations of being a sexual predator and his descent into extreme racism, see his article Shart Empathy.}
By the late 90s my Hemp seed treat business, Mama Indica’s was failing, I’d had various struggles importing and exporting and having stock tied up for months in limbo, along with my own lack of business acumen. As well, my first marriage was falling apart, Tracy had justifiably grown tired of my costly endeavours and the stress they brought us, along with other issues. and we ended up licensing the hemp seed business out, where it struggled on for a few more years. By this time, real money was investing in hemp, companies with capitol, and the sort of hippy grassroots element we represented, was being quickly pushed out. I started making these things to fund spreading hemp information, not to become the CEO of a hemp food business. I was more interested in writing my books and activism than that, so it was really destined to fail.
Hemp BC faced relentless legal pressure. The store was raided multiple times in 1996 and 1997; Emery was fined, briefly jailed on an assault charge for spitting on a cop during one confrontation, and banned from the 300 block of West Hastings, vancouver’s ‘Pot Block’. Mayor Philip Owen publicly declared in 1998 that the business would be “toast by September.” Emery simply pivoted to mail-order seed sales and kept publishing Cannabis Culture. His willingness to pay taxes and operate semi-openly frustrated authorities but also highlighted the absurdity of prohibition.
In early 2000, living in exile from Vancouver a ferry ride away on the Sunshine Coast, Emery founded Pot TV, an online video channel broadcasting cannabis news, activism, and interviews, and it was here are paths became more closely connected. I was hired by an ex-girlfriend to work at pot tv. At first I refused the job, I was living on a boat and working on the water, moving docks around and other things, and was starting a career that way. The job at pot tv would mean a move away from my Island home, surfing and major drop in pay. I had been finishing my second book at that time, and still writing articles and things, but did not want to end up poor and Iiked working on boats. But then I felt the pull of being more involved with cannabis again, and took the job, which I am glad I did.
My ex girlfriend assured me Marc knew she was hiring me, but when I arrived, and he saw me in the studio, he asked what I was doing there! Over time, as I was dedicated to the cause and have a good work ethic, Marc warmed up to me, and I eventually became manger of Pot TV from about 2001-2005. At that time I had little computer experience, never even had the internet before, so it was a challenging learning curve to say the least!
Marc had been banned from having a shop on Vancouver’s Pot Block, but not from having the offices of a political Party. He helped establish the British Columbia Marijuana Party (BCMP) in 2000–01, serving as its president and later leader, and opened offices at the same address as his banned store. (This was a move I suggested while working at Pot TV, but like a lot of things with a guy like Marc, it became his idea, and to be fair, I was on the dime, and he had the dimes to pay for it all).
It did not take long for the Political offices to return to retail, and it was here at the ‘BC Marijuana Party and Cannabis Culture Bookstore’ that things really began to take off. By this time, Marc was becoming known as the ‘Prince of Pot’, and to see him hold court was a wonder to be hold. A non stop, unfiltered stream of consciousness pouring forth from his mouth took over the minds of anyone within an earshot, filled with everything from cannabis strains, Ayn Rand to butt sex (Marc was a sort of Larry Flynt of pot in a lot of ways). He also gathered together a pretty hard core group of activists to work in a lot of key positions, like David Malmo-Levine, Dana Larsen, Michelle Rainey, Greg Williams and others and funded activists in other areas in Canada and the USA as well. This spread of information was a major factor in reconditioning the Canadian mind to consider more favourably legalization.
Emery’s seed-selling operation became extraordinarily lucrative—estimates placed annual revenues in the millions—yet he treated the profits as “seed money” for the global legalization movement rather than personal wealth. From 1998 until his 2005 arrest, he paid nearly $600,000 in provincial and federal taxes, openly declaring himself a “marijuana seed vendor.” He channeled millions into activist causes: funding court challenges (including the 1994 Ontario case that overturned the ban on cannabis literature), ballot initiatives in U.S. states such as California, Nevada, Alaska, and Arizona, rallies, lawsuits, and political parties.
In 2003, cannabis prohibition in Canada was in a state of legal limbo. A key trigger was a July 2000 Ontario Court of Appeal ruling (related to R. v. Parker and subsequent cases) that struck down aspects of the federal cannabis possession laws, at least for medical use in some interpretations. The federal government did not appeal the core decision at the time and appeared to abide by it initially. Emery argued this made simple possession “not an offence known to law” anywhere in Canada.
At the same time, the federal Liberal government (under Jean Chrétien and then Paul Martin) was debating decriminalization bills in 2003–2004, but progress stalled and the bills ultimately failed. Emery saw this as an opportunity to force the issue through direct action rather than waiting for politicians.
In response to this situation Emery launched the “Summer of Legalization” an idea which i suggested to him, again, in my role as manager for Pot TV. The tour’s basis was straightforward civil disobedience—Emery argued that marijuana possession was effectively not an offense known to law, and he aimed to prove it by openly smoking in public while encouraging locals to join him. Over roughly two months, he and supporters traveled to about 18 cities from coast to coast, staging high-profile “smoke-ins” directly in front of police stations in places like Halifax, Toronto, Calgary, Regina, Moncton, and Vancouver. He was arrested roughly six times, spent short periods in custody, but all charges from the tour were eventually dropped, generating widespread media coverage and keeping cannabis legalization firmly in the national spotlight.
During one of his brief stints in custody on the tour, Emery fired off a blistering jailhouse statement that landed like a grenade. From behind bars he branded then–Justice Minister Irwin Cotler a “Nazi Jew,” calling him a disgrace to his Jewish roots for presiding over aggressive marijuana prosecutions, and the persecution of people in the ‘cannabis culture’, comments he would repeat when Cotler later signed off on his extradition for charges in the USA in 2005. The remark ignited a fierce backlash, drew condemnation from Jewish groups and mainstream media alike, and briefly threatened to overshadow the tour’s message of peaceful civil disobedience.
[On a sidenote: This caused an investigation into the wider organization, and some entripid Jewish reporter, called me on the phone for a comment I had made in a forum post. In the post, as I recall, I had written something to the effect of, that the passages of many texts from the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, if they were written today, would likely be considered hate literature and banned. The reporter asked me what I meant, and I gave examples of some of the crueler laws of the Old Testament, killing homosexuals, adulterers, and other barbaric laws, slavery etc.. he said good bye, then called again, after contacting a jewish authority of some kind, and said, soemthing to the effect of “none of those laws come into effect till the coming of the messiah” and I responded with “WTF, are you saying it is OK then?” he was stumbled for an answer. A short while later I received a call from a Lawyer with the B’nai Brith, and we repeated the whole conversation, I felt rather intimidated, it ended with the lawyer telling me “Mr. Bennett, you are an enemy of the Jewish religion”. Which may in a sense be true, but I swear on my heart of hearts, that I am not an enemy of the Jewish People themselves. This interpretation is about ‘Yahweh’ and the current political State of Israel, not the Jewish people en masse.]
This all added to Marc’s fame and notoriety. By this time, celebrities, news media, film crews etc, were a regular feature at 307 West Hastings, which housed the Store, Seed Business, Pot TV, Cannabis Culture Magazine, the Political Party and more. In my opinion, this was Ground Zero for Cannabis Legalization in Canada at that time and an Internationally recognized hub of cannabis culture globally.
And it was by no means all work. Marc threw great company parties, when times were good, cannabis flowers were given to staff freely. There were other benefits as well, so I don’t want to deny his generosity, and his funding and support enabled Vancouver activists like myself, David Malmo-Levine and Dana Larsen to pursue many projects, conferences and protests. Marc funded groundbreaking psychedelic conferences like the 2 Entheogenisis in the early 2000s, the Iboga Therapy House, and incredible parties like the Tokers Bowl, a cannabis connoisseur cup, full of elaborate parties, boat cruises, fancy dinners etc. All though those were ideas which I came up with, I never could have made them real like Marc did, with his ability to create money. Ideas are worthless if you can not actualize them, and Marc was very accomplished at actualizing ideas. I’m noting my contributions here, not to toot my own horn, I have never brought it up publicly before, but because I know Marc is currently angry at me and feels resentful considering all the things he did for me, I’ve decided to include it here. This is the exchange between employer and employee, and I feel I was a good employee, so I want to be clear, this relationship was a two way street. But undeniably, he did do things, like pay for the wedding to my second wife, which was very big and elaborate, and those years at pot tv were an exciting period of my life at the time. Actually, writing this article is the first time I really let myself wander down memory lane with all this, as I feel like Marc would later come to take a huge, greasy shit on everything we did together.
Back then, I can’t say I say any real indications of what I would call racism, from him. I recall a well known celebrity swinging by through the studio, and filming a clip with him and Marc, and the celebrity made a derogatory comment about First Nations women. This was almost a quarter century ago, I don’t recall exactly what he said, but I do recall Marc looking at me from his desk and saying, “we are going to edit that one out”. The celebrity seems to have evolved a lot since then, and I have never seen anything like that from them since, so I’ll just leave it at that.
I do recall filming a controversial episode of the ‘Prince of Pot’, where Marc drew all of prohibition back to the White man’s fear of “Big Mandingo Cocks”. leading to the Reefer madness of the Jazz age, and fears of whites and blacks fraternizing. But I suspect that is more of a stereotyping and penis envy thing, rather than any sort of overt racism. He hired people of all cultures, both men and women occupied the key positions in the organization and I can not recall any sort of issues of racist complaints. His later co-defendant, the late Michelle Rainey, who started as his housekeeper on the Sunshine Coast, really took care of a lot of the day to day business affairs,
Now, in regards to the future accusations of sexual predatory behaviour that would come around 2016, which I will get into later, I think I did see some indications of that sort of thing, which I admittedly let slide in a way, that in hindsight I should have then addressed. I did not witness anything like the pedophilia or rape, that some of the later accusations against him have claimed. Certainly though, Marc’s endless stream of consciousness chatter, often turned to sex, and not always to eager ears, it shocked some people. And I saw him talking like that while giving bong hits at 420 protests, or in the shop, to groups which included young women. It’s not like I was taking people’s ID, but I am assuming some of these girls were minors, and Marc would often turn to topics like anal sex, and his various exploits, despariging personal sex tales etc. I would cringe a little inside, but the crowd usually seemed rather enthralled to me at whatever poured forth from his mouth, and this more often than not, turned to the topic of sex. There was also bits of what would now be deemed inappropriate work place behaviour, like back rubs, etc, but this seemed consensual to me, and this was a far from conventional sort of work place we are dealing with. Large amounts of cannabis were being consumed all day, every day.
In regards to this, I think its also important to remember, that across cultures, cannabis has a long held reputation as a sort of aphrodisiac. Emery was not the only activist called out for predatory sexual behaviour, Rob Kampia of the MPP comes to mind, along with less known accusations of others. Similar problems arose in MAPS studies of MDMA between therapists and patients. These are sensual substances in both cases, I am not making excuses here, but saying, handle with care.
I think I can safely say, as well, that Marc hit on every wife and girlfriend I introduced him to, it was sort of a joke to me. Relationship Fidelity was never one of Marc’s attributes while I knew him, but it’s something that I accepted in him, rather than ignored, it was just who he was. As Richard Cowan, a former NORML president, who did the Pot TV news once related to me in regards to Marc, “Great Men, are often Bad Men”. I think there is some truth to that, narcissistic assholes can in some cases, get things done, and it’s something I suppose I used to justify my working relationship with Emery in some of the more distasteful moments.
Marc had an electrifying aura about him, and had reached a ‘celebrity’ type of fame in the early 2000s. Watching him walk through a crowd at 420, you could visibly see the buzz as people swarmed him. As manager of Pot tv, my job often included things like following Marc around at protests and parties with a camera, so I saw it all very up close. My job at Pot TV, was largely based around filming, editing, uploading the various cooking, comedy, news, history, medical and activist shows for pot tv, which in the years before youtube had garnered millions of views. This was a very expensive endeavour for Marc, streaming costs in those days were astronomical, thousands a month. And as much as I am going to be critical of Marc, I don’t want to ignore his contributions or commitment to the cause in those days.
Emery did have his haters though, even back then. A lot of well known seed breeders, were angry about the free for all genetics that were created by the seed sale boom Marc initiated at Hemp BC in the 90s. Names of well known strains were freely used by inexperienced and less scrupulous breeders, and there was little control on what is what. Breeders who had spent years creating strains, were rightly pissed. The popular cannabis growing and breeding site Overgrow.com was a hot bed of anti-Emery activity. There were also warnings about his predatory behaviour floating around, but nothing that amounted to much more than rumours at that time.
A big difference between those growers and breeders and Marc was, however, his financing of legalization efforts. Many underground growers liked it illegal. One of the bigger projects Marc helped fund were the various Marijuana Party campaigns.
In the early 2000s, the Marijuana Party of Canada and its provincial counterparts, most notably the British Columbia Marijuana Party, were launched as single-issue political vehicles whose real aim was never to win seats or form government but to force cannabis legalization into the centre of every election campaign. By fielding dozens of candidates federally in 2000 and a full slate of 79 in British Columbia in 2001, the parties guaranteed that major politicians and the media could no longer ignore the issue; every debate, every all-candidates meeting, and every news cycle became an opportunity to spotlight prohibition and demand reform.
Marc Emery became the financial and organizational backbone of these efforts, using profits from his seed business to bankroll entire campaigns, cover candidate costs, and turn the BC Marijuana Party’s headquarters into a high-visibility campaign office at 307 West Hastings Street in Vancouver—the heart of the city’s famous “Pot Block.” That storefront location didn’t just serve as party nerve centre; it pulled Emery back into full-time, street-level cannabis activism, transforming the block into a bustling hub of rallies, media hits, and grassroots organizing that kept the legalization message loud and visible throughout the election cycles.
Yet Emery ultimately undermined much of the momentum he had created with a string of extreme libertarian outbursts. During the 2004 Saskatchewan campaign swing he suggested the province’s seniors should be “set adrift on ice floes,” and in other remarks he argued that people over seventy should refuse further medical intervention and simply “die with dignity” to stop draining public resources. These ageist provocations alienated even sympathetic pot activists and left-leaning voters, distracted from the core legalization message, and handed critics an easy way to dismiss the Marijuana Parties as fringe and unserious. As well, those of us out on the campaign trail, were getting asked questions like, how did we feel about cutting old folks off health care and sending them out on ice floes to die! This is a classic example of the sort of crazy talk he could bring to the table and what prevented him from ever becoming a serious politician, which is still one of his life long goals.
Here are some pre-2005 news videos and stories about the Marijuana Party of Canada and the BC Marijuana Party. These capture the early formation, the 2000 federal and 2001 BC campaigns, and the provocative moments that made headlines. :
News Videos (Pre-2005)
CBC Archive (July 2000): “Marijuana Party becomes Canada’s newest federal political party” Classic launch coverage with the famous slogan “God made grass. Man made booze. Who do you trust?” → Watch here
CBC (April 2001): “B.C. Marijuana Party’s popularity growing” Report on the party planning a full slate of 79 candidates for the BC election. → Read article
News Stories (Pre-2005)
CBC (July 2001): “Marijuana Party moves north” Coverage of the party expanding beyond BC. → Read here
The Tyee (September 2004): “Pot Martyr No Hit in Saskatoon” Detailed story on Marc Emery’s Saskatchewan campaign, including his controversial “ice floes” comment about seniors. → Read here
CBC Archives Sales (April 2001): “MARIJUANA PARTY” segment Footage of Marc Emery as party president during the BC campaign. → Details here
I think the real turning point for legalization in Canada, came in the 2003 with the endorsement from the popular and charismatic NDP leader Jack Layton on Pot TV. I’ve been a life long NDP voter, (although last election I voted for Liberal leader Marc Carney, as I felt he was the person to best deal with Trump). I saw Jack’s rise to the head of the NDP, and for some reason I had a hunch he was on board with legalization, and I contacted his office.
Layton’s campaign office was well aware of Pot TV and were eager to reach out to our audience. Initially I was going to get David Malmo-Levine to do the interview, but we could not come to an agreement (a good friend and colleague I am still having heated debates with). When I was discussing this with Dave recently trying to recall what exactly happened, this was after all 22 years ago, he said in regards to age limits "If you have an age limit, people (mostly black people) will keep dying from police encounters. Smoking pot doesn't make people crazy and/or harms children or teens any more than drinking coffee does", which is along the lines of what I recall him indicating back then. I felt that sort of thing would be too much for Jack, so I asked Marc to do it. I did not ask him initially as he was more of a Ron Paul type Libertarian and did not think he would be interested in an NDP leader, but the leader of a federal party endorsing legalization was enough to win Marc’s and his organization’s support.
Jack ran the best Federal NDP campaign, to date. He took the NDP to forming the official opposition for the first time. His support of cannabis helped the party, but also came with a lot of controversy as well. As many thought it was political suicide, as did thought it was a brilliant move. The Pot TV segment got National attention, and it took away the need for fringe parties like the Marijuana Party, and made it so every major political party had to define their stance on cannabis. Sadly Jack was taken from us by cancer, and no NDP leader had the charisma Jack had, or enthusiasm for legalization. Eventually the Liberal Party, which had been at its lowest point in popularity, took up the issue and this revived their dying campaign, and eventually led to them forming Government again, and Legalization. This was a major international step in regards to Cannabis legalization and a bold move for Canada, despite the UN and International condemnations against it.
Around 2004, 2005 Marc and I had a clash. I began collecting drug antiques and memorabilia. eBay in those early days, was an incredible source of pre-prohibition antique cannabis medicine bottles and other artifacts, like African Dagga pipes, centuries old Hookahs, movie posters and newspaper spreads from the days of prohibition, etc, etc. I began collecting artifacts, and buying some for Marc as well, in the hopes of putting a Museum together. We planned on putting a Museum together in the basement of the Cannabis Cultures HQ and Pot TV studio, and charging people. This was an opportunity for me to increase my income a bit, as I had a young family at that time. One day, after much preparation, signs being painted, cabinets sets up with displays etc, Marc came down and announced that they Museum would be free and just used as a promo for the shop. I told him, that’s not what I was doing with my collection, and we got into a huge fight. My second wife was present. Marc fired me from pot tv, I was pissed and reminded him of all the things I’d done for him, and he said he’d never needed any help with promoting himself, which was not untrue. This was all not too long after the Irwin Cotler “Nazi Jew” comments, and the suggestion we cut old people of Medical and set them adrift on ice flows during the Marijuana Party campaign. I think my words there have been proven true, as we shall see, it is Marc’s own words which have completely obliterated his legacy, In the fight Marc grabbed me by the shirt and ripped it, I thought about kicking his ass, but figured that would just make things worse. He later rehired me that day, turning to my then wife and saying “See, that is how it is with Men, we can have a fight like that, and just never talk about it again.” Which we never did.
One of the more influential projects at that time was the conference Marc largely funded, Beyond Prohibition: Legal Cannabis in Canada, a one-day policy forum held on May 8, 2004, at the Wosk Centre for Dialogue in Vancouver. This began with something myself and Lawyer Kirk Tousaw talked about. Tousaw, who would later represent my own cannabis freedom of religious use case, was then new to the Vancouver cannabis scene but since then has played an important role in legal policy formation. It is probably worth mentioning, that a religious defence was also considered in Emery’s case initially, as noted in the Georgia Straight story Religion could save Emery (2005)
If I recall correctly, I introduced Kirk to Marc in regards to the conference idea, and Kirk then went on to organize an excellent and influential event. Tousaw was at that time Policy Director of the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) and the event brought together lawyers, economists, politicians, law enforcement reformers, and activists to discuss practical models for legal, regulated cannabis in Canada—including taxation, safety standards, personal cultivation, public health, and moving beyond prohibition.
Marc Emery played a key funding role by providing the primary seed money (approximately $18,000 from his Cannabis Culture seed business proceeds) to the BCCLA to make the conference possible. He was actively involved as a major backer and described the event as one he helped put on through that funding. The gathering featured notable speakers such as Senator Pierre Claude Nolin and helped advance public and political conversations that contributed to Canada’s eventual path toward cannabis legalization. Vancouver Mayor Larry W. Campbell (a LEAP advisory board member) famously used the platform to publicly call for ending prohibition and regulating/taxing cannabis. other notable speakers included:
Philippe Lucas (Vancouver Island Compassion Society) — Discussed issues with Health Canada’s medical cannabis program.
Jeffrey Miron (Boston University economics professor) — Spoke on the economics of prohibition vs. legalization.
Walter McKay (former Vancouver Police Department drug squad officer) — Shared experiences on the harms of prohibition.
Dr. Brian Emerson (BC Ministry of Health Services consultant) — Advocated treating drug use as a public health issue.
Dr. Tod Mikuriya (pinch-hitter for Steph Sherer of Americans for Safe Access) — Discussed the California medical cannabis model.
Rielle Capler and Hilary Black (BC Compassion Club Society, [both had worked for Marc Emery at Hemp BC in the early 90s]) — Presented on standards for medical cannabis distribution and a “Roadmap to Compassion.”
Professor Peter Cohen (Centre for Drug Research, Amsterdam) — Covered the Netherlands’ cannabis policy and usage data.
Wendy Little and Eric Nash (Island Harvest Certified Organic Cannabis) — Discussed safe, legal cannabis cultivation.
R. Keith Stroup (NORML Executive Director) — Addressed U.S. reform efforts and international treaties.
Eugene Oscapella (Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy) — Argued for full legalization over other options.
Senator Pierre Claude Nolin (keynote) — Chaired Canada’s Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs and endorsed legalization.
By 2004-2005, Emery’s notoriety had reached the White House, and his organization became a major target, even listed above the Hell’s Angels and Mafia. John Walters, Bush Jr’s Drug Cszar, even visted Vancouver’s ‘Pot Block’ too see for himself the centre of cannabis depravity, calling “BC Bud” the “Crack of Marijuana” .
Marc did a number of episodes about John Walters visit, and we gave the American Drug Cszar a Royal welcome with the “John Walters Project”. The Local politicians and Mayors sided with the cannabis community, much to Walters shock.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) eventually targeted Emery as a major threat. On July 29, 2005, Vancouver police raided his operation at the DEA’s request, seizing assets and arresting him on charges of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana, distribute seeds to American customers, and money laundering. I was downstairs working at Pot TV at the time. I was on the phone in a heated conversation with a landlord, when 2 undercovers showed up and told me to hang up the phone. I wresponded with “Who the fuck are you guys?” and they opened their jackets to reveal badges, one of them was an American DEA. I had a huge sac of cannabis in my front pocket, and was eager to get out of there. I said “Am I under arrest? Because if I am not under arrest I want to get the fuck out of here, right now!” So they grabbed me and walked me out to the back alley door and pushed me outside, there was a cop car there, and I was kind of surprised when they did not put me in it and I was left free to go and rally the troops and media and start filming. Marc was off in Ontario as I recall, and was arrested there separately.
This put a huge dent in so much of what we were doing. Jobs like mine, at Pot TV, were the first to be cut. Luckily I had back up and my second wife and I had started a little entheobotoanical shop in the back of the Cannabis Culture Bookstore, the Urban Shaman, and I was able to transition into that. I lost my job due to the massive cut in funding that the arrest and closure of the seed sales, which funded everything, led too. Luckily for me, the drug artifacts I had been collecting for the Museum, saved my ass, as I was able to sell the items to psychedelic book collector, Michael Horowitz, and David Malmo-Levine, who was building a collection for his own Museum project by then. I reinvested the money into the our then struggling shop the Urban Shaman, which became a very successful endeavour for me. Marc made it clear he liked having my shop in the building and wanted me to stay there. For my part, without a proper business license, (I was selling rare ‘entheobotanicals’ so hard to get) and with a store full of controversial plants, it would have been hard to find a place to rent, or where I could operate, outside of Vancouver’s very liberal ‘Pot Block”, so it really helped me out as well. This again was an exchange, I paid rent, and I offered financial donations to Emery’s cause as well as other support.
The U.S. government called the arrest “a significant blow” not just to trafficking but to the legalization movement itself, citing the millions Emery had funnelled to activists. From there a highly publicized court cases for extradition took place over several years. Throughout this time, although I no longer worked for Marc, I continued to write the odd article for the magazine, rented a space from him for my shop, and supported his cause as well as the wider fight for legalization.
Pondering Marc’s current extremely racist views, I data crunched some of his statements from that period forward, to remind myself that he was not a racist back then.
2006 (Globe and Mail debate/statement): “The law against cannabis was founded on racist fears and has never had anything to do with protecting Canadians or their health.” He elaborated that cannabis was criminalized in part because “it was used by Mexicans and black Americans in the jazz community. Marijuana was made illegal so white people would have a greater fear and risk of associating with the then emerging black music cultures and Hispanic cultures.” He also referenced Judge Emily Murphy’s role in pushing early Canadian prohibition laws, tying it to racist/eugenics views.
In his well researched 2009 article, Rastafari: The Secret History of the Marijuana Religion he detailed the “racist history of US cannabis prohibition targeting Black people/’Negroes’” and quoted historical figures like Marcus Garvey while noting overlaps with white racist groups like the Klan on certain policies (while presenting it as part of Black empowerment history in the context of marijuana’s cultural roots). He described early prohibition efforts as involving “white domination” and racial war rhetoric in some Rastafari offshoots. He references “white man’s slave practices,” Garvey’s struggles against virulent U.S. racism, and FBI targeting of Black cannabis users. (He did give a justifiably critical account of Rastafarianism’s inherent homophobia and sexism)
In the 2010 Maclean’s Article by Marc Emery, criticizing Emily Murphy’s racism/eugenics, The Secret Shame of Maclean’s (September 23, 2010), he wrote about Murphy’s “lurid, racist” views and white-supremacist ideology in detail:
“Murphy’s reflections on ‘Marijuana—A New Menace’ are... lurid, racist, sexually pathological... that openly pre-empts the whole notion of evidentiary support.”
He ties it to her “white-supremacist race-hygiene ideology” and broader eugenics views. As 2010 Emery explained, early Canadian prohibition “was substantially influenced, if not determined, by Murphy’s white-supremacist race-hygiene ideology. And she was not merely typical of her time in that regard: she was an unrelenting extremist, someone who could hardly write twenty consecutive words without expressing fear of Anglo-Celtic ‘degeneration’ or remarking defensively upon ‘the superiority of the Northmen. It may be timely to observe that new laws are normally midwived by terrors such as these, and that, in general, we have to live with those laws long after the terrors are dispersed and forgotten.”
The authors of theAcademic Paper Historical Narratives and the Defense of Stigmatized Industries (Smith, Wong, Sørensen, Jones , and Coraiola, 2022) a study that “examines how managers and entrepreneurs in stigmatized industries use historical narratives to combat stigma”, noted:
In the course of attempting to legitimize the cannabis industry, Emery referred to the racist historical foundations of Canada’s cannabis legislation. Writing in 2006 in the country’s most influential newspaper, the Globe and Mail, he declared that the 1923 “law against cannabis was founded on racist fears. . . Cannabis was made illegal in 1923 because it was used by Mexicans and black Americans in the jazz community.” Emery added that “Marijuana was made illegal so white people would have a greater fear and risk of associating with the then emerging black music cultures and Hispanic cultures” (Emery, 2006). Emery used a similar historical argument more than a decade later, when he declared, “the war on cannabis, began as a racist and ignorant effort to eliminate Chinese people and other racial communities from Canada. That’s how it started. There’s no question about that” (Emery, 2017). Although the ethnic groups mentioned in Emery’s historical narrative had changed between 2006 and 2017, the core idea, which is that the existing ban on cannabis is racist because the original supporters of the ban were racist, has remained the same. (Smith, Wong, Sørensen, Jones , and Coraiola, 2022)
Ironically now, Emery is even more racist than the prohibitionists he was rallying against.
After a lengthy extradition battle (during which he remained free on $50,000 bail), Emery was sent to the United States in May 2010. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in September 2010 to five years in federal prison. He served just over four years (with good-conduct credit) at facilities including SeaTac and Tensas Parish Detention Centre in Louisiana, enduring periods in solitary confinement. Supporters launched a “Free Marc Emery” campaign with posters, T-shirts, and vigils; his case became a rallying cry for cannabis reformers on both sides of the border.
I gained a lot of respect for Marc throughout this period, I thought the way he made sure it was him alone that went to prison, and not his co-conspirators Michelle Rainey and Greg Williams, was honourable. He did have a martyr complex going on at the time, he would delusionally refer to himself as the ‘leader of the world wide cannabis movement’, and all things considered at the time, it likely helped him face what was coming.
Several people have suggested that it was likely in prison, that Marc began to develop his severe case of racism, but that is not what happened. There are several direct references from Marc Emery’s own US Prison Blog (published on cannabisculture.com in 2010–2011) where he describes helping immigrant and “deportable alien” prisoners. These facilities (especially D. Ray James Correctional Facility in Georgia) housed mostly non-US citizens facing deportation after drug-related sentences. This is a large private facility operated by The GEO Group under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It acts as a major federal immigration detention center with capacity for over 1,800 detainees, focusing on processing individuals apprehended at U.S. borders. The last thing this private prison wants to see is inmates getting out, and Marc was eventually moved in with the American population, as he was aiding foreign language immigrant inmates with their paperwork. In Prison Blog #20 – D. Ray James Correctional Facility (December 16, 2010) Emery described working in the prison library at a facility designated for INS “deportable alien” inmates (overwhelmingly Mexican, Central American, and other immigrants with limited English). He wrote:
“I type up legal letters for inmates and help them do requests and fill out job forms. Most of them have limited English skills, so there’s a lot to do.”
He also ordered Spanish-language books, dictionaries, Mexican history books, and resources on “how to write letters, formal business, etc.” to assist the mostly Spanish-speaking population.
In Prison Blog #25 – Newsletter #2 (February 3, 2011) He described personally arranging for a Vietnamese immigrant inmate (named My, who spoke very little English) to receive an English-Vietnamese dictionary:“An acquaintance I made in Sea-Tac… named My, a Vietnamese gentleman, needed an English-Vietnamese dictionary… My is such an excellent fellow and I put it to Dana that he could really help my friend My out, and lo, My thanked me today for his dictionary that arrived yesterday in the mail here. He was elated…”
These accounts show Emery consistently used his library job, education, and connections (e.g., friends mailing books) to support non-English-speaking immigrant prisoners in a system he described as discriminatory toward foreigners. His blogs repeatedly highlight the poor conditions for “deportable aliens” compared to US citizens.
Emery was released from U.S. custody on July 9, 2014 (sentence completion date), after which he spent additional time in a deportation holding facility before returning to Canada on August 12, 2014. Unrepentant, he told reporters he had a “relaxed four and a half years in prison” through reading and crosswords and was eager to resume the fight. By then, two U.S. states had legalized recreational cannabis, public opinion had shifted dramatically, and the “seed money” he had sown over two decades was visibly sprouting into a burgeoning reform movement.
I ran into a bit of an awkward situation just before Marc got out of Prison and returned to Canada. Numbers of documentaries were filmed about our activities on the Pot Block and some of these focused specifically on Marc. One of these was, ‘Citizen Marc’, which was directed and produced by Roger Evan Larry. I was interviewed a couple of times for this, and discussed Marc’s exploits extensively. One of the questions I was asked about was in regards to Marc’s known abrasive and confrontational nature. I related the story about my 1995 letter discussed earlier, “The Essential Asshole”, and when the film came out, the short bit about the Asshole was all that made it into the film from my interview, and all the props I then gave Marc were left out! Marc was pretty upset about it, and at the time, I was too. I told Roger Larry off about it when I saw it, but now, in hindsight, I get a chuckle out of it. I explained to Marc what happened, and like other things that had transpired between us, it was able to slide at the time. You can catch my clip about Marc being an Asshole at 1:28:30 in the video below. Just before me, Dr. Lester Grinspoon talks about Marc’s challenging personality> One time I was out for dinner at the Vancouver hotel, with Michelle Rainey, Emery and his then wife Cheryl, and Dr. Grinspoon and his wife, where Emery took the delightful dinner conversation down the dark path to anal sex, and I’ve wondered if Lester’s comments related to that event!
When Marc first returned from prison, I initially saw him as a changed man. Like he had been to soul school. I think that this period was as close to being actual mutual friends as we ever were, without him being the boss, and me a figure in his menagerie of activists, and in his mind I’m sure ‘Leader” along other dynamics at play. I had gained a lot of respect for him through his prison journey and it was easier for me to ignore his personality flaws and foibles. He would come and hang out with me in my shop, and we would have real mutual conversations.
As well, there was still no indication of racism. In a 2016 commentary in Vancouver’s Georgia Straight, Justin Trudeau’s Reefer Madness, Emery wrote “Marijuana was made illegal in 1923 after Emily Murphy went on a racist and religious crusade calling marijuana immorality and sin. That has never stopped and remains the underlying motive of police to arrest you and politicians to demonize you to this day.”
By this time, the cannabis landscape Emery had helped transform was on the cusp of historic change, and all sorts of new players had come onto the scene while he was away in an American Prison. In the final years leading up to Canadian Legalization in 2018, Marc played much less of a role in that cause than he did prior to going to prison. I think this was in part due to the wider public starting to recognize some of the less tolerable aspects of his personality.
Another thing that changed while Marc was away, was our culture’s attitude towards sex, and the rise of the “Me Too” movement. What many men were getting away with, and behaviour that society largely ignored, before Marc went to prison, had drastically changed, and many men were being called for predatory behaviour, using status to manipulate, inappropriate work place sexuality, grooming and other abuses of power dynamics.
Marc Emery Cancelled by #MeToo
Before his return from jail, I did warn some people about Marc’s tendency to take conversations sexual, his desire to shock people, touchiness like shoulder rubs and hugs, etc. If there were events of pedophilia, or sexual abuse and grooming, before this period they were not directly brought to my attention and I did not know about it. I urge anyone who does have firsthand knowledge of such events to take these to authorities. More recently, someone who I know, respect and trust the word of, did relay her personal experience to me, about her relationship with Marc while she was a minor, and I do think it falls into the category of “grooming”.
At the parties and shop, pre 2010, people seemed to me at that time, to have been willing participants. The heyday of the store, magazine, pot tv, did have. a sexual charge to it, no denying that. Pretty girls adorned almost every magazine cover, as Marc noted the few issues that did not, failed to sell. Marc liked to hire attractive people. Models were hired for events and parties as well. it was by no means the typical office work environment. People were smoking grass all day, music was playing, and the pleasures of life were all present.
The Cannabis scene always had a sexual charge to it is after all, across cultures, a well know aphrodisiac. The Playboy Mansion hosted NORML gatherings. In fact, Hugh Hefner and Playboy were among the earliest and most influential supporters of marijuana legalization. When NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) was founded in 1970, Hefner quickly stepped up through the Playboy Foundation with an initial $5,000 grant in 1971—becoming its primary funder throughout the 1970s, often contributing around $100,000 annually at its peak.
He also opened the Playboy Mansion for numerous NORML fundraisers and parties (including a notable 1978 event), and later hosted similar events for the Marijuana Policy Project, helping bring visibility and credibility to the cause at a time when most Americans still bought into “Reefer Madness” propaganda. Hefner publicly advocated for legalization, comparing it to the failures of alcohol Prohibition.
Just as Marc was being sent off to prison, in 2009–2010, Rob Kampia, co-founder and longtime executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), became embroiled in a major workplace sex scandal that exposed a toxic office culture of crude sexual comments and inappropriate behaviour. Former staff described Kampia repeatedly making lewd remarks, including guessing a female employee’s breast size, scheduling time with a woman he was “trying to bone,” and—most notoriously—telling colleagues that “the breast massage will happen” with another woman he was pursuing. The tipping point came after a staff happy hour at Union Pub in D.C., when an intoxicated young female subordinate left with Kampia, went to his house, and had consensual sex; several employees, including department heads, resigned in protest shortly afterward. The explosive exposé “The Breast Massage Will Happen”: Inside the Culture of Sexual Harassment at the Marijuana Policy Project (Washington City Paper, January 2010) laid out the details and triggered widespread coverage, including a Washington Post story on Kampia temporarily stepping aside for “hypersexualized” behavior therapy. A 2017 Washington City Paper follow-up revisited the wounds amid the #MeToo movement, and Kampia ultimately left MPP that year. The scandal remains one of the more infamous episodes in the cannabis policy world. I know of other accusations as well in the cannabis scene.
A similar situation also happened with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies – MAPS studies on MDMA, another substance known for its highly sensual effects. In the mid-2010s, MAPS faced a major ethics scandal in its MDMA-assisted psychotherapy trials for PTSD when participant Meaghan Buisson accused her married therapists, Richard Yensen and Donna Dryer, of serious sexual misconduct. Video from 2015 sessions in Vancouver showed the therapists cuddling, spooning, and physically restraining Buisson while she was under the influence of MDMA. After the formal trial ended, Yensen began a sexual relationship with her, which she later described as exploitative. MAPS acknowledged the clear violation of its ethics rules, cut ties with the therapists, and provided Buisson limited support, but the case drew heavy criticism after it became public and added to broader concerns about safety and oversight in the organization’s psychedelic research. Much of this is covered in the NY Magazine Cover Story, Power Trip.
Just as Marc was getting out of jail, the whole cancelation of Canadian celebrity Jian Ghomeshi, was in full play. Jian Ghomeshi was a Canadian musician and broadcaster who first gained fame as the vocalist and drummer for the quirky, politically satirical folk-pop band Moxy Früvous (1990–2001), known for hits like “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors.” He later became a major CBC Radio star as the host and co-creator of the popular arts and culture show Q (2007–2014). His career imploded in late 2014 when he was fired by the CBC amid allegations of sexual assault and harassment from multiple women; the scandal became one of the earliest major Canadian precursors to the #MeToo movement. Ghomeshi was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault and choking but was acquitted in 2016 after a high-profile trial.
We actually filmed a sort of pot smoking party with Ghomeshi in 2004 for CBC’s ‘Play goes to PotPlay Goes to Pot at the Cannabis Culture Bookstore and Pot TV. A one-hour documentary-style program that explored the widespread use of marijuana in Canada, the confusion around its legal status, and the broader debate on cannabis policy. It featured interviews with figures like comedian Tommy Chong and then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, along with discussions on incarceration for pot offenses and shifting public attitudes. Ghomeshi hosted while we all partook of and talked cannabis. He seemed like kind of a lecherous jerk then. Marc should have paid more attention to all this, and also his own words and actions.
I do recall once incident of racism around 2015-2016, we were out at a dinner with Marc, and he made some despairing comments about the State of First Nation reserves. I think I responded with what I saw was huge progress in indigenous communities, many young people pursuing secondary education, that sort of thing. I see this now as being around the time he started to begin his journey into Far Right thinking.
I was not actually around the shop much back then, I probably worked less than 20 hours a week in my store, as I was usually working on books, other projects, and being a hedonist. I had employees to do that stuff. So I did not see a lot of what was going on at the Store locations and Lounge with Marc at that time, myself. But I certainly heard about and had to take affirmative action.
By around 2016 or so Marc inappropriate language and behaviour was starting to become more visible, problematic and impossible to ignore or deny. He commented on one of my employees breast size, creating an awkward and troubling situation for me, as I rented a space from the Cannabis Culture Bookstore, which he founded. However, through Marc’s arrests and conviction, he had years before, giving up control of his businesses, and his soon to be ex-wife Jodie, was now in control of the shop. So I had to ban Marc from my shop, but he still had access to the wider area of his former business. My employee was so upset by this, she left, but beyond moving the business, which would be tough and held all sorts of potential challenges, I was in a difficult spot. Although, this situation did not last for long. Shortly after this event, Marc’s bad behaviour continued, and he was banned from the whole Building. By this time, talk was spreading in the cannabis community as well. As Mac recently noted in an X post:
I haven’t been to the 307 West Hastings Street Cannabis Culture lounge in nine years. Last time was February 2016 -when Jodie exiled me for offending her woke staff with stories of drug addicted prostitutes in the neighborhood! (2025)
Shortly after he was banned from the Pot Block, Marc and i got into it online. He had a very inappropriate Facebook post, which i think was this one below, showing a group of young girls and Marc making comments on their legs. As I recall, in the comments Marc was taking a stance against the illegality of pornography featuring underage girls, and as I was firing back on how that amounted to repeated abuse and everyone who watched it for pleasure was exploiting the under age victim again and again. Whatever was said, it got heated and he blocked me. That was about a decade ago.
The sex abuse and grooming accusations against Marc Emery first surfaced publicly in early January 2019, ignited by a series of Twitter threads from Toronto journalist Deidre Olsen (who uses they/them pronouns). Olsen detailed their own experiences from 2008, when they were 17 and considering a job at Emery’s Cannabis Culture store in Vancouver. In the threads, Olsen described how Emery, then around 50, had initiated months of flirtatious online contact before an in-person meeting where he allegedly placed an oversized bong between his legs, invited Olsen to sit on his lap to take a hit, put his arm around them, and later gave them a pipe he called “red flaming balls” while saying, “smoke out of my balls.” Olsen framed this as part of a larger pattern of grooming vulnerable teenage girls and young women at the store.
These initial social-media posts quickly drew in other accounts and were amplified by mainstream outlets. On January 17, 2019, HuffPost Canada published an article quoting an anonymous former Toronto Cannabis Culture employee who worked there in early 2017. She described Emery repeatedly grazing her shoulders for long periods, greeting her with kisses on the cheek that landed “very close to my lip,” and one incident where he grabbed her arm, dragged her toward a vape display, shoved her into it, and yelled at her in front of customers and staff. “It was kind of alarming, and I became conscious of, ‘How far can this go?’” she told the outlet. Another former employee, Heather Bryant, recounted working at the Vancouver store around 2005–2010 and hearing Emery, in front of customers and staff just before his U.S. extradition, declare he wanted to have sex with her, “humiliate and ‘debase’” her before he went to prison. Bryant said the environment attracted “innocent and vulnerable” young people, and she realized Emery viewed her as “meat to humiliate.”
A deeper investigation by VICE News, published January 29, 2019, expanded the picture with on-the-record accounts from seven former Cannabis Culture employees and four other individuals. The story described a toxic workplace where Emery allegedly touched people without consent, spoke openly about his sexual exploits, hosted MDMA-fuelled “lotion parties” with teenage girls, and berated staff. Former employee Melinda Adams, who started at age 17 and saw the Emerys as parental figures, said she witnessed unwanted touching and the drug-fueled parties. Other claims included Emery giving LSD and ecstasy to underage girls, inviting teens as young as 15 to sit on his lap and smoke marijuana, and making graphic comments about anal sex or employees’ bodies. One woman alleged he flew her to Vancouver in 2004, got her high in a hotel, and licked and pawed at her; another said he masturbated violently next to her while she slept after a 2003 rally. The VICE piece noted the pattern spanned the 2000s into 2017 and was enabled by Emery’s “cult status” in the cannabis community.
Emery responded publicly on Facebook and to reporters, denying any sexual aggression or harm. In his statements he insisted, “I’ve never had sex with anyone under 19 ever, so this idea that I’m grooming young women is not true,” and “It is my sincere belief that I have never harmed anyone, or sexually aggressed anyone.” He admitted to being a “touchy guy” who gave back rubs (sometimes to employees with scoliosis) and occasionally discussed his sex life in the close-knit 40-hour workweeks, but he rejected the lotion-party claims outright: “I have never heard of a ‘lotion party’, nor did I even know what that would be… This never happened.” On the specific Bryant allegation he called it “just nuts,” and he denied the hotel masturbation incident with “Absolutely not true.” Emery said any discomfort was unintentional and expressed regret only for possibly bringing shame to his wife.
In response to Emery’s disclamer here, one woman I know who was closely involved with the scene on the Pot Block and Bookstore has stated:
I always found his public proclamations that he’s never touched anyone without consent or ever assaulted anyone to be...fucked. A lot of the young women who happened to be geographically close to him IRL know better… Talking to the women who hoped to never ever hear about him again would be, I’m sure, very enlightening and deeply disturbing. He told me soon after meeting him that “women with daddy issues or without father figures have always gravitated to him”. What a thing for a predator in his 40’s to tell a 20 year old woman. He apparently didn’t realize I had a good relationship with my father, and was not nearly as vulnerable as the women he preferred to spend his time grooming. I’m so not at all surprised that he’s a white supremacist. He’s always had fucked up ideas about other people, and it wouldn’t at all surprise me if he’s always been a closeted white supremacist. He’s been a box of red flags since the day I met him in 2006. Maybe even a red flag factory.
Searches of contemporary sources from 2000–2016 yield no news stories, employee complaints to authorities, lawsuits, labor board filings, or public posts detailing such behavior. Emery himself stated in 2019 responses that “In 40 years as an employer not a single complaint to a labour board, police, or any kind of authority,” and no contemporaneous evidence that I could find contradicts this claim. One detail sometimes referenced in 2019 coverage is that Jodie Emery reportedly “banished” or limited Marc’s presence in Cannabis Culture stores around 2016 (or earlier in some accounts), partly due to staff discomfort with his behavior, including occasional sexual remarks or stories. This fits with my recollection of events as well.
The allegations, which Emery has consistently denied, led to immediate professional fallout: he was dropped as a keynote speaker from cannabis events in Argentina and Vancouver, and organizations distanced themselves. No criminal charges resulted from the public claims, but the stories painted a consistent portrait—across multiple women and more than a decade—of a workplace and activist circle where power and charisma, allegedly masked grooming and repeated boundary violations against young female employees and fans. The coverage in HuffPost, VICE News, High Times, and others remains the primary public record..
High Times - Canadian Cannabis Activist Marc Emery Accused of Chronic Sexual Misconduct
Huffpost - Marc Emery, Canada’s ‘Prince Of Pot,’ Accused Of Sexual Harassment By Former Employees
Vice - ‘Prince of Pot’ Marc Emery responds to VICE News investigation on sexual misconduct
Vancouver is Awesome - The ‘Prince of Pot’ Marc Emery is allegedly a creep
Toronto City News - Prince of Pot Marc Emery faces allegations of sexually inappropriate behaviour with teen
Canada Legalizes Cannabis, Emery Left Behind
In the final stages of Legalization in Canada, Marc Emery came to only play a marginal role. At one time a tour de force of the cause, the controversy over the predatory behaviour, largely saw him cancelled, and numerous controversial and offending statements from his own lips, had led to him not to be taken as a serious figure. Claims Emery made in the press about smoking a joint with Justin Trudeau while cannabis was still illegal, did not help Emery’s standing with the Liberal Party that went on to legalize either.
In the early days of his political ascent, Justin Trudeau approached marijuana legalization with noticeable caution, expressing concerns that it could disconnect people from the world and harm public health, even as the Liberal Party itself surged ahead with a bold 2012 convention resolution endorsing full regulation. The issue, once a fringe debate had become increasingly popular, and as the Liberals languished as the party hit rock bottom in the polls—desperate for a fresh, youth-appealing platform to revive its fortunes, they decided to add it to their platform. Trudeau, sensing the political winds pivoted dramatically: by 2013, he was championing legalization as a smart, revenue-generating way to tax and control a failed prohibition system, transforming it into a signature Liberal promise that helped propel the party back to power.
Yet in those final, delicate stages of crafting the policy, Trudeau had every reason to keep Marc Emery at arm’s length. Emery’s public claim of having shared multiple joints with him years earlier—later clarified to one smoky 2003 evening—created an awkward personal shadow that Trudeau flatly denied, insisting he had never partaken with the activist. Associating too closely with the outspoken “Prince of Pot” risked turning a carefully calibrated political win into a tabloid distraction, especially when Emery’s vocal support and cross-country campaigning threatened to paint the new legalization effort as radical rather than responsible governance. Trudeau’s distance was less about rejecting the cause and more about protecting the polished narrative he had so skillfully embraced.
Justin Trudeau says jailed pro-pot activist Marc Emery was “flat out lying” when he said he smoked a few joints with the now Liberal leader.
“I only met Marc Emery once in my life — so that’s a lot of smoking with him that I apparently did,” Trudeau said in Trois-Rivieres, Que., Friday.
“I’ve never done it except with people I know and trust. And Marc Emery was someone I met but certainly not someone I ever thought of smoking with.” (Toronto Sun, 2013)
Marc Emery Discovers Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad
I think Marc’s descent into racism, bigotry, transphobia and sexism really took off with his discovery of the controversial Canadian pseudo intellectual Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, bestselling author, and former University of Toronto professor who became a global polarizing icon after skyrocketing to fame in 2016 by fiercely opposing Canada’s Bill C-16 over compelled speech and gender pronouns, positioning himself as a staunch defender of free speech, individual responsibility, and Western values while drawing intense criticism for his rejection of white privilege, identity politics, and what he calls woke cultural Marxism.
Jordan Peterson’s claim that Bill C-16—which simply added “gender identity or expression” to the protected grounds in the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code—would compel speech by forcing people to use transgender individuals’ preferred pronouns and that even accidental “misgendering” could land someone with criminal hate-speech charges and possible jail time. His dramatic stand against what he called government-mandated language turned an obscure University of Toronto psychology professor into a culture-war lightning rod almost overnight. Yet the core of his argument rested on a misunderstanding of Canadian law: Bill C-16 did not create any new criminal offence around pronouns, and legal experts, fact-checkers, and the broader legal community made clear that isolated misgendering would never meet the high threshold required for criminal prosecution under the hate-speech provisions; at most, repeated and malicious refusal to use someone’s chosen pronouns might factor into a civil human-rights complaint in workplaces or services, but even then it would not trigger criminal charges. Those claims were widely rejected as a misrepresentation of both the statute’s text and its real-world application, yet the controversy itself gave Peterson the platform that launched his meteoric public career. See Gender identity, gender pronouns, and freedom of expression: Bill C-16 and the traction of specious legal claims, for the details on this I see similar sort of misrepresentations of facts in a lot of Marc’s rhetoric.
Peterson built a significant portion of his public brand on a fierce denial of “white privilege,” repeatedly insisting in lectures, interviews, and bestselling books that the concept is little more than a Marxist sleight-of-hand designed to shame individuals for their skin color while ignoring the far stronger predictors of success such as intelligence, personality traits, and personal responsibility; he argues that focusing on racial advantage distracts from universal human struggles and that any statistical disparities between groups are better explained by culture, family structure, and geography than by systemic racism. This stance flows seamlessly into his self-declared war on “woke” culture, which he portrays as a totalitarian ideology—rebranded as “postmodern neo-Marxism”—that threatens free speech, meritocracy, and Western civilization itself through DEI initiatives, identity politics, and cancel culture. Critics, however, point out that Peterson’s blanket rejection of white privilege sidesteps robust sociological, economic, and historical evidence of lingering racial disparities in wealth, criminal justice, and opportunity that persist even after accounting for class and education, while his sweeping attacks on wokeness often reduce complex social reforms to cartoonish authoritarianism, amplifying culture-war outrage far more effectively than they illuminate genuine policy shortcomings.
Marc Emery has repeatedly praised Jordan Peterson as one of Canada’s few modern philosophical giants, calling him “worthy” amid the country’s cultural decline, while strongly aligning with his critiques of compelled speech, gender ideology, and woke identity politics. He has defended Peterson against transphobia accusations, shared his classic debates on pronouns and free speech, and celebrated the restoration of Peterson’s Twitter account alongside other gender-critical voices silenced by what Emery labels “TransFascists.” Emery has criticized policies that affirm youth gender transitions without parental knowledge, warned against compelled speech for teachers, and backed Peterson’s broader resistance to identity-based victimhood and censorship.
Once celebrated as a no-nonsense self-help guru whose 12 Rules for Life offered directionless young men a path to responsibility and order, Jordan Peterson has faced sharp criticism for peddling what many regard as intellectual quackery and toxic gender essentialism. Canadian magazine The Walrus famously dubbed him the “Professor of Piffle,” arguing that his selective readings of psychology, mythology, and evolutionary biology amount to little more than pseudo-scientific justification for rigid hierarchies and traditional patriarchy, likening his commitment to IQ determinism to the work of “quacks and scientific racists.” Scholars and outlets like the American Psychological Association’s blog have accused him of promoting “intellectual misogyny,” while The Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey described his arguments as “riddled with ‘pseudo-facts’ and conspiracy theories,” claiming his message resonates with young men by framing feminism and “postmodern” ideas as existential threats—thereby exacerbating resentment and fueling a broader cultural backlash against gender equality. Critiques in The Conversation (2017) and Crikey (2021) describe his influence as promoting “toxic masculinity” and acting as a gateway to resentment and the men’s rights movement.
After skyrocketing to fame, Peterson’s own life unraveled when he became hooked on benzodiazepines, triggering a brutal withdrawal that left him physically and neurologically shattered; since then he has appeared as a broken man, plagued by ongoing health crises, fad diets (like the all-beef carnivore regimen he and his daughter Mikhaila heavily promoted), emotional fragility that leaves him easily sent into tears or despair, and what looks like a very public breakdown. His daughter Mikhaila has attributed part of his recent (2025–2026) neurological torment and apparent unraveling to “demonic elements” and spiritual attacks, adding a layer of mystical drama to the once-rational psychologist’s decline.
I wonder if Emery will end up following a similar path.
Gad Saad
Gad Saad, a Lebanese-Canadian evolutionary psychologist, marketing professor at Concordia University, popular YouTuber (”The Saad Truth”), and author of books like The Parasitic Mind (2020), has built a prominent public profile as a fierce critic of “woke” ideology, political correctness, postmodernism, and what he calls “idea pathogens” that he argues are undermining Western values, science, and free speech
Emery credits Saad’s framework as explaining the “national version” of how woke empathy is destroying Western civilization, using it in dozens of recent posts about immigration, female judges, and progressive politics.
Saad, like Peterson, makes a poor guru. He has drawn sharp criticisms from academics, journalists, and commentators for what they describe as oversimplifying complex social issues, blending evolutionary psychology with partisan culture-war rhetoric, and displaying selective outrage that often targets progressive causes while downplaying nuance. Reviewers like physicist Alan Sokal have praised the spirited defense of reason in works such as The Parasitic Mind but called it a “disappointing screed” weakened by vagueness, lack of rigorous evidence, and an irritating polemical style rather than deep illumination. A frequent flashpoint is his concept of “suicidal empathy” (expanded in his 2026 book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind), which argues that excessive, misdirected compassion—particularly toward out-groups, immigrants, or perceived victims—overrides rational self-preservation and leads to civilizational self-harm; critics, including Tim Hjersted on Films for Action, contend this reframes empathy as weakness in a culture-war narrative that stigmatizes compassion for marginalized groups, Muslims, or refugees while ignoring data on policy outcomes and risking dehumanization. Relatedly, Saad has faced backlash for invoking gendered dimensions of this idea—sometimes termed critiques of “suicidal female empathy”—suggesting that heightened female empathy, amplified by certain feminist influences or liberal policies, contributes to misguided societal choices on issues like immigration, criminal justice, or open borders. Detractors also highlight his negative commentary on aspects of women’s liberation and radical feminism, which he portrays as promoting anti-scientific ideas (e.g., denying evolved sex differences, pathologizing “toxic masculinity,” or social constructionism that ignores biology), arguing these have harmed family structures, mate preferences, and societal health; such views have drawn accusations of misogyny or selective antifeminism from outlets and forums that see them as conflating legitimate equality goals with ideological excess (e.g., Reddit discussions and broader feminist critiques). Additional controversies include accusations of Islamophobia for his critiques of radical Islam, strong pro-Israel positions post-October 7. While supporters view him as a bold defender against academic cowardice and “woke” pathogens, detractors argue his work prioritizes provocation over balanced scholarship. Key sources include Sokal’s review above, the Films for Action debunking, Neil Bendle’s analysis, and coverage of his empathy thesis in outlets like National Review and The Guardian.
Critics argue that both Peterson and Saad have amplified the most incendiary elements of their anti-trans and anti-feminist stances—while also fiercely dismissing white privilege—framing gender ideology, modern feminism, and racial equity concepts as existential threats to biology, order, merit, and civilization itself. Peterson rose to fame by declaring that compelled pronoun use under Bill C-16 left society with only two paths forward: “silent slavery with all the repression and resentment that that will generate, and the other is outright conflict,” while bluntly rejecting non-binary identities with the statement, “I don’t know what ‘neither’ means because I don’t know what the options are if you’re not a man or a woman.” He has dismissed core feminist narratives as “an appalling theory” and attacked the very concept of white privilege as “absolutely reprehensible,” adding that “the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group? There is absolutely nothing that’s more racist than that.” Saad has taken an equally provocative tone, tweeting “Trans people deserve respect. F**k those whiny biological females. Suicidal Empathy: read my next book,” while repeatedly weaponizing “suicidal female empathy” to argue that feminist-driven compassion and support for transgender inclusion are actively destroying justice systems, borders, and Western societies by denying evolved sex differences and elevating ideology over biology; he has similarly mocked white-privilege indoctrination in schools as part of the same parasitic woke framework that sacrifices truth and individual responsibility for group guilt. Together, these positions have drawn accusations of reducing transgender lives to delusions, feminism to a civilizational poison, and racial disparities discourse to reverse racism, offering Marc Emery a ready-made intellectual framework to justify his own escalating rhetoric on gender, race, and decline.
Although we see the toxic masculinity influences of Saad and Peterson more on young men, Emery is a classic example of how even older White Males, swayed by talk that rejects “white privilege” and “woke” empathy, and desire a return to a more patriarchal culture, can find themselves on a fast track train into racism and bigotry of all sorts as a result.
Marc Emery’s Anti-LGBQT Hate
Prior to 2017, I think it would be fair to say Marc was an LGBQT ally as far as I could tell. From accounts I heard from himself and others, when he was younger he had experimented with all sorts of sexuality. Cannabis Culture hired trans and gay people, and there were such people working in the shop when he got out of jail, and gay employees before he went to jail. Being LGBQT was not a problem for anyone in that scene, that I can recall. This was Vancouver, a very liberal city, lots of people were exploring kink, polyamory and other aspects of sexuality, nothing I’m judging, and as long as it’s between consenting adults, usually a topic I leave alone in discussions about other’s lives. Former Cannabis Culture staffer William Austin recalls the following
In 2016 was Managing Cannabis Culture on Davie St. I asked to put a rainbow sticker on our front door. This sticker indicated a place is safe for LGBTQ2SIA people. [There were both Trans and Gay staff at that time] He [Marc Emery] told me no because he didn’t want people to think it was a “gay lounge.”
I pushed back that it absolutely should be because we were in perhaps the gayest neighborhood in Canada [West End, Davie Street, Vancouver]. He said he didn’t want to alienate “normal people.”
I went over his head to Jodie and Jeremiah [co-owners of the shop and lounge] who told me to just put it up - I would have anyways.
I don’t remember if this is the first time I saw him get defensive over being homophobic, but I remember him saying “I couldn’t be homophobic because I have been fucked in the ass.”
Emery’s earliest known public anti-trans statements surfaced in 2017, amid controversy over a Toronto Cannabis Culture store in the Church-Wellesley Village. In January 2017, the store faced accusations of attracting homophobic and transphobic customers; Emery met with critics, agreed to add LGBT signage, improve security, and provide sensitivity training, and expressed surprise at the claims. This event was detailed by Xtra Magazine in the article Cannabis Culture accused of attracting anti-LGBT clients to Toronto’s gay village.
Later in June 2017, Emery posted on Facebook: “If you’ve got a dick, you’re not a woman. Period”, a statement that made it into a Now Toronto story. He doubled down in follow-up comments (e.g., suggesting trans people start their own spaces and criticizing self-identification in women’s sports/spaces) before apologizing, saying he had been “insensitive and kind of a jerk.
Since then, his anti-trans rhetoric has only gotten stronger, as can be seen in a recent campaign post.
Some examples of anti-trans quotes and statements from Marc Emery:
On biology and women’s spaces (June 2017): “If you’ve got a dick, you’re not a woman. Period.” Now Toronto article (includes context and follow-up comments where he doubled down on concerns about biological males in women’s sports/spaces).
Opposition to gender ideology in schools (April 2026): Running for local office with a platform explicitly “OPPOSED TO ALL THE WOKE SHIT INCLUDING: Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity (SOGI) in school curricula [and] Gender neutral bathrooms.” His X post announcing his platform.
On transgenderism generally: He has repeatedly referred to trans activists as “TransFascists” and shared content criticizing “trans-identifying” complainants receiving preferential treatment over biological women. Recent examples: X post on trans complainant.
Trans Hate Tweets “TRANS is a narcissistic, porn inspired, mentally broken state of mind. Filled with hormones, chemicals, and seething resentment & entitlement, TRANS will be violent sooner or later. They are ALL ticking time bombs ready to go off and damage others.” (Sept. 19, 2025)
Emery has been particularly critical of Canadian PM’s trans child, writing “Prime Minister Mark Carney let his daughter mutilate herself in some identity delusion” in a May 17th Tweet about the Liberal Party’s support for LGBQT issues.
By 2023, Emery completely seems to have rejected his support for Pride and LGBQT people altogether, And considering his own past exploits, this was enjoined by a rather puritan take on sexuality.
“I was an ally to legalize same-sex marriage. I walked in Pride parades. I had weekly adult Drag Shows for 19+ at my Cannabis Culture in the Gay Village in Toronto. Now men are invading the spaces of young girls & women. The opponents were correct after all. I was wrong.” (March 6, 2023)
…Why do we have 4 months of celebrations about all the ways people have sex? Why do I have to witness 4 months of kink, perversion, deviance, brainwashing, child endangerment, women-erasure & have all governments encourage & finance this offensive hedonistic exhibitionism? (May 8, 2023)
“Why doesn’t the @liberal_party just state: “On this International Day of Affirming cocksuckers, cross-dressing autogynophiles, and greedy sex pigs, we stand proudly with the Schizophrenic split personality Indigenous & every other sexual preference not heterosexual.” (May 18, 2026)
“An abomination that North Vancouver City Hall puts up flags to validate cocksuckers, cross-dressing deviants, greedy sex pigs, indigenous schizophrenic hallucinations, and with those 3 sex pennants they replace the flag representing tax-paying citizens of North Vancouver.” (May 17, 2026)
Emery’s Anti-Woke Campaign and White-Privilege Denial
Emery frequently uses “woke” as a catch-all for identity politics, compelled rituals like land acknowledgements, gender ideology in schools, and progressive policies he sees as harmful, while framing his own views around protecting women’s spaces, children, and opposing other “woke” policies. Most of his commentary appears on his X account (@MarcScottEmery) and past Facebook posts.
Here are direct quotes from Marc Emery on “woke” with links:
Definition of woke (May 2026): “Woke is the making sacred of historically marginalized groups to the degree that they are immune from criticism or accountability.” X post and follow-up
On school policies (May 2026): “Our 4 girls attended the local Chatelech high school here in Sechelt. Lara has objected to many woke policies that insidiously pervade the school system here…” X post
Campaign platform (April 2026): “I’m running for Sechelt District Council October 17 to oppose all the woke shit.” X post
On parents and gender issues (April 2026): “Parents in Nova Scotia must have abandoned their children to this woke cabal of degenerates…” X post
On schools and identity: “Our Woke Transloving schools and deluded Woke parents create these tragedies.” X post
Marc’s racism seems to have begun with a Jordan Peterson influenced rejection of “white privelege”, which is viewed as “woke apologism”:
On school curriculum (October 2025): “One of our girls is in grade twelve English class today. Not a single English classic is on the curriculum, but today she had 30 questions to answer about her ‘white privilege’. Teacher would say a statement out loud & students would write 1 (not applicable) to a 5 (very true).” X post
On school indoctrination (November 2025): “None of our girls have been required to read a whole book in the most recent year at Chatelech High School. But lots of time for ‘exploring white privilege’, ‘land acknowledgement essays’ and classes like yoga, wellness.” X post
Remembrance Day sarcasm (November 2025): “On Remembrance Day we honour those 100,000 teenage boys & young men whose ‘white privilege’ to fight for liberation of oppressed peoples in Europe in 2 wars brought their early death.” X post
On historical hardship (January 2025): “These are whites building a nation as coal miners only 120 years ago. ‘White privilege’ indeed.” (replying to an image of impoverished white workers) X post
On personal family experience (October 2025): “Our girl was amused to hear that being one of four siblings raised by a single white mom in relative poverty was the pinnacle of privilege.” X post
Emery consistently mocks or rejects the concept of white privilege as Marxist indoctrination pushed in schools, often tying it to broader critiques of woke ideology and identity politics. All quotes are from his X account (@MarcScottEmery). This view has led to extreme racist takes.
Fascist Emery hates ANTIFA
Marc Emery is strongly opposed to Antifa, frequently describing them as violent Marxists, thugs, and part of a broader radical-left coalition that includes pro-Palestinian activists, Indigenous extremists, and trans-rights supporters. This again aligns with views he has picked up from Peterson and Saad.
Gad Saad:
“Yes. Antifa are just seeking a better utopia for the rest of us misguided fools. Similarly, ISIS and Stalin’s gulag brigade were merely trying to guide people on the right path.” (Mocking a Teen Vogue defense of Antifa.) Source: X post by @GadSaad, June 2020.
“In real life, you cannot hide your identity (unless of course you are a keffiyeh-clad person, an Antifa protestor...)” Source: X post by @GadSaad, Sep 2025. He forgot ICE!
“I’m in Seattle. I’d like to attend a Queers for Palestine ANTIFA-sponsored protest. Does anyone know where I need to go?” (Sarcastic.) Source: X post by @GadSaad, July 2025.
Gad Saad often refers to Antifa in the context of violence, anonymity, and hypocrisy on his X (@GadSaad), Instagram, and podcasts.
Jordan Peterson:
From the Andy Ngo Podcast (2022)
“They’re worse than animals... They’re worse than animals because animals, they just kill to eat. Human beings, they have a twist in them that makes them far worse than animals once they really get going.” (Referring to Antifa violence) Watch the full episode here
“Imagine that you are so virtuous in your pursuits that you are entitled to do anything to anyone whenever you want... It’s this moral license that goes along with this claim of virtue that really scares the hell out of [me].” (On Antifa’s self-justified violence) Full episode
From Jordan Peterson’s X Posts
“Canadians: @JustinTrudeau and @theJagmeetSingh Support the Antifa thugs.” Direct link to post (Sep 2023)
“The president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees... Has aligned that organization With ANTIFA Against parents.” Direct link to post (Sep 2023)
“Antifa doesn’t really exist” Sincerely @TheDemocrats And of course Satan. (Mocking denial of Antifa) Direct link to post (Jul 2024)
“Equity fascism And Eco fascism Where is Antifa When you need them Oh yes Fighting in their deluded manner For the true fascists.” Related post (Sep 2023)
Marc Emery’s Key Quotes and Views:
He often refers to them as “Antifa miscreants” and links them to intimidation and violence against conservatives and free-speech events.
On the unholy trinity:
“I was at the University of British Columbia campus today dealing with the unholy trinity: Indigenous, Palestinian, Antifa ‘students’.”
→ Direct post (Jan 23, 2026)
At protests:
“The Palestinian reps and Antifa are here on behalf of Trans Rights.”
→ Direct post (Feb 28, 2026)
On police response:
“Antifa/Gazaliberation/indigenous hoaxers are emboldened by police punishing only the truth-telling good guys.”
→ Direct post (Jan 23, 2026)“The police have to keep a lid on this miscreant ANTIFA shit or there will be counter-Antifa militias formed to deal with them. I’m not saying I endorse that, but there’s plenty of patriots that have had enough of the Marxism that’s overrunning the streets.” (Nov. 30, 2024)
“ I’m not saying I endorse that” is just another way of saying “ I’m not saying I don’t endorse that”. I think his references to cracking indigenous skulls of First Nations, and Lynching Blacks, as well as his alignment with groups like Second Sons shows where he really sits on such issues.
Emery consistently portrays Antifa as Marxist street enforcers who have co-opted universities and public spaces, working alongside the causes (pro-Palestine, trans activism, residential school “hoax” defenders) that he also attacks. This fits his broader narrative of cultural and demographic decline in Canada.
Women’s Liberation and the Decline of Western Culture According to Marc Emery
Although Marc certainly sexualized women of all ages, and often spoke inappropriately in front of them and is an accused predator, I do not recall him playing the chauvinism card much in his organization. Numbers of women, acted as manager and in key positions, and Michelle Rainey, his co-defendant, bless her heart and may she rest in peace, pretty much ran the Organization, while another powerhouse lady ‘T’, who probably wants to be left out of this drama, took care of the cash and expenditures. His ex wife Jodie, ran the company while he was in prison, and became the owner.
Marc’s descent into racism is paired with misogyny. Marc Emery frequently blames women — particularly “woke” White women, female judges, and female politicians — for Canada’s immigration crisis and the broader collapse of Western society. He argues that excessive female empathy, combined with feminist and progressive influences, has led to suicidal policies that prioritize outsiders over native-born (especially White) Canadians.
He repeatedly invokes the concept of “suicidal female empathy” (borrowing from Gad Saad, who coined the phrase popularized by Musk, the ‘woke mind virus’) as a driving force behind open immigration and lenient treatment of criminals. In one post he wrote:
“The destruction of Canada for the benefit of Third World invaders in one poster… It’s a national version of Gad Saad’s theory of suicidal female empathy. Canada has become so feminized in the Trudeau-Carney era.” (Emery, 2026)
Influenced by the rhetoric of figures like Peterson and Saad, Emery claims female judges are especially destructive because their default setting is “Suicidal Female Empathy on eleven.” He accuses them of giving light sentences and blocking deportations for “racialized or indigenous criminals,” thereby endangering the public. He has stated:
“Female judges are destroying justice in Canada. Their default setting is ‘Suicidal Female Empathy’ on eleven. Pay attention to those racialized or indigenous criminals & how female judges in Canada bend over backwards to ameliorate their guilt with absurdly low sentences.” link (April 25, 2026)
He extends this criticism to female politicians and “liberal university educated women,” accusing them of enabling mass immigration, pandering to ethnic lobbies, and marginalizing straight White men. According to Emery, these women — influenced by decades of anti-White, anti-male messaging — have become “race traitors” who support policies that allow “cultures of rapist men” to migrate to Canada while undermining white families and institutions.
In Emery’s view, this feminization of society and government is actively coddling the country to extinction. He argues that woke White women and female leaders have opened the borders, weakened the justice system, filled institutions with DEI hires and non-citizens, and destroyed the viability of White families — all while showing more compassion for invaders and criminals than for their own people. This, he believes, is a primary reason for Canada’s declining safety, trust, and cultural identity. “Canada has become so feminized in the Trudeau-Carney era.” (May 9, 2026)
Some of Marc’s X posts about Women (@MarcScottEmery) in 2026.
“The ultimate in suicidal female empathy. Actually it’s more like homicidal female empathy.” link (May 9, 2026)
“Female judges are a disaster. They sympathize with criminals & thus undermine justice & safety for women.” link (May 3, 2026)
“You can coddle a society to extinction. Thats what Woke has done to the White community. Suicidal female empathy is destroying the courts, letting criminals out on the street, letting cultures of rapist men migrate to Canada. Woke has marginalized straight white men in favor of the Alphabet Mob, natives, coloured foreigners, liberal university educated women.” link (April 21, 2026)
“Female judge always means a light sentence for criminals… Female judges always want to find some reason, ANY reason, to ameliorate the guilt of clearly violent or miscreant criminals and let them out earlier to terrorize civilians. Female suicidal empathy is killing justice.” link (April 17, 2026)
“Woke White women will be the death of our once great civilization. This woman is the ultimate race traitor.” (about a female politician suggesting children wear hijabs) link (April 11, 2026)
“White women, instead of contributing to Canada’s enrichment, drag it down into a bog of socialism, bleeding hearts, wokism, transgenderism, multiculturalism & anti-male initiatives.” link (April 11, 2026)
“I wish these bleeding heart affluent woke White women with their suicidal empathy would get a clue.” link (April 9, 2026)
“Women as police, judges, jurors & voters are a disaster.This is why we have socialism, wokism, transgenderism, leniency with rapists, murderers, violent foreign miscreants & marginalization of real men.University educated women have been ruinous for Canada, USA & Europe.” link (April 11, 2026)
“No she’s not. She is a Canadian woman who grew up through decades of anti-white anti-male messaging, who like most modern women, are a bit spoiled, a bit entitled, and don’t realize they have destroyed the viability of white families in Canada.” link (April 19, 2026)
“It’s nuts we have female soldiers.” (in context of military issues and risks to women) link (April 29, 2026)
“Females corrode, corrupt our institutions by their presence as judges, jurors, elected officials, human resource officers, police, firemen, soldiers. Same as men should never be caretakers for the elderly, the vulnerable, children, day care; taking care of people IS women’s work.” (April 12, 2026)
Marc Blames women for what he views as a decline of “white” Canadian culture on Instagram:
Marc Emery’s Framing: Racism as “Protection of White Women”
Taking a cue from the sort of propaganda that led to Marijuana prohibition in the 1930s, Emery routinely frames his racism, as concerns for white women, and his teenage step daughters. One can only wonder how he would have felt about his daughters meeting a man such as he was in earlier days…. From a Facebook comment:
.if you are a White man or woman in Canada and you aren’t racist, you aren’t paying attention. They are replacing us in real time. In 15 years Whites will be the minority in Canada. Can you imagine White women a minority in a nation filled with millions and millions of Muslim “newcomers”, millions of Pakistani, Indian, Sikh newcomers, millions from Syria, Gaza, Iran, Sudan, Nigeria.
I’m raising 4 girls/young women. I love how you educated White women who endured the last 20 years of anti-white anti-male messaging in every media and government get to set the table for the women of tomorrow in Canada. (Emery, FB comment 2026)
Marc Emery frequently presents his explicit racial hostility — including calls for mass deportation, exclusion of non-white immigrants, and nostalgia for a “White Canada” — as a chivalrous defense of women, particularly “White women,” from sexual violence, cultural destruction, and demographic replacement by non-white men. He portrays non-white immigrants (especially Muslims, Pakistanis, Indians, Sikhs, Africans, and “dark-skinned” men) as inherent threats to women’s safety, while positioning himself and other White Canadians as protectors.
Here are the key ways he constructs this narrative, with direct quotes and links:
1. Direct Claims That Non-White Men Are Obsessed with Raping White Women
“Any country is putting all their women at risk by importing hordes of Muslims from Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, and the other wretched Islamic ‘nations’. These vile men are obsessed with raping White women.” (April 18, 2026)
“All those rapey dark Third World degenerates watching White women porn all day wondering when it’s their turn to rape a White girl or woman.” (April 2, 2026)
“These invading foreigners have a mission to kill & rape as many whites as is necessary for a morale collapse in each western nation. The effect of dark-skinned mass migration to Canada, Australia, England, Ireland, USA is to terrorize the local population into a slow surrender.” (May 15, 2026)
“The mission of these dark-skinned male invaders is to rape & kill as many whites as possible in order to demoralize our people into a slow surrender. You see this kind of atrocity against Whites every hour of every day. Using our own kindness against us with daily violence.” (May 15, 2026)
2. Celebrating or Amplifying “Pakistani Rape Gangs” Stories
“In England now, no cigarettes for you but Pakistani Rape Gangs, have at her.”
— Marc Emery (@MarcScottEmery), (April 22, 2026)
3. “For the Sake of Our Women” – Blocking Non-White Men
“This is the scariest conversation you will hear today. Please, I beg of you, for the sake of our women, men like this one must never be permitted into Canada.” (May 3, 2026)
“Please strip that CANADA jersey off him before beating the hell out of him, please. This dark skinned degenerate from Pakistan is not nor ever was Canadian. 🤮” (April 18, 2026) (reacting to a Pakistani grooming/rape suspect)
4. Linking Immigration to Sexual Danger for White Women and Daughters
In a recent Facebook comment, Emery ties demographic change directly to the safety of White women and his own daughters:
“...if you are a White man or woman in Canada and you aren’t racist, you aren’t paying attention. They are replacing us in real time. In 15 years Whites will be the minority in Canada. Can you imagine White women a minority in a nation filled with millions and millions of Muslim ‘newcomers’, millions of Pakistani, Indian, Sikh newcomers, millions from Syria, Gaza, Iran, Sudan, Nigeria. I’m raising 4 girls/young women. I love how you educated White women who endured the last 20 years of anti-white anti-male messaging in every media and government get to set the table for the women of tomorrow in Canada.” [Facebook Post by Marc Emery (posted around early May 2026]
Overall Pattern
Emery repeatedly:
Frames mass non-white immigration as an invasion that turns Canada from a “high-trust” White society into a dangerous one filled with rapists and “scammer cultures.”
Presents opposition to immigration and multiculturalism as necessary protection for White women and girls (“for the sake of our women”).
Claims he “became racist” only after observing these supposed threats (“I wasn’t a racist until millions of the flotsam & jetsam of India rolled up…”).
Uses his role as a father of daughters to add emotional weight to the racial protection narrative.
This framing allows him to repackage overt racial animus — “dark skinned invaders,” “flotsam & jetsam,” “Third World mercenaries,” calls for remigration, and explicit preference for a White majority — as common-sense concern for women’s safety rather than racism. In reality, it relies on broad racial stereotypes and collective guilt assigned by skin color and origin.
Emery consistently misrepresents stats, and news stories to enhance his Racist Agenda
In a Twitter post, Emery gives a false state on Canadian concerns about immigration:
“9 in 10 Canadians have noticed Canada has been invaded by dark skinned foreigners taking our jobs, stressing our housing, overwhelming our hospitals, changing the character of Canada from high-trust to low-trust society, carnage on the highways, fentanyl production, sex crimes…” (April 28, 2026)
The original WPP Canada survey (April 2026) found that 87% of newcomers (recent immigrants) reported experiencing discrimination in Canada. Emery took that same “9 in 10” statistic and reversed its meaning in his post. Instead of framing newcomers as victims, he claimed it proved that 9 in 10 Canadians have noticed Canada is being “invaded by dark skinned foreigners” who are taking jobs, destroying social trust, and changing the country. In short: He turned a “poor immigrants are being discriminated against” narrative into a “Canadians are being replaced and harmed by mass immigration” narrative. It’s a classic rhetorical flip.
Marc Emery took a real Toronto Police Service “Most Wanted” list of fugitives (primarily for homicides, shootings, and other serious violent crimes) and turned it into a sweeping racial claim. On April 24, 2026, he replied to a Toronto Police sexual assault alert with: “Not a single white man in Toronto’s 50 Most Wanted. Just sayin’.” The next day he clarified: “Sorry, I meant 50 Most Wanted Shooters. In any case, White boys trafficking drugs we are used to because this was a White country before the Invasion. We definitely don’t need foreign miscreant drug traffickers exploiting Canada & Canadians to add to our woes.” (April, 24, 2026)
After a comment calling out his mitake, he explicitly admitted the original “50 Most Wanted” claim was inaccurate and clarified that he was referring to Toronto’s Most Wanted Shooters (or killers/murderers) list instead. He then doubled down on the racial framing anyway. In reality, the list is a small, hand-picked selection of the worst unsolved violent offenders at that moment — not a representative sample of all crime in Toronto or Canada. Emery used the absence of white faces on that specific list as “proof” that non-white immigrants are responsible for the city’s violent crime wave, generalizing it to entire racial and cultural groups.
Emery similarly misrepresented a situation with indigenous parking for elders, and used it to mock Indigenous achievements and suggested they revert to primitive means of travel: “The indigenous hadn’t even developed or ever used a wheel until the White man came... now they get preferred car parking... Make ‘em get there by canoe.” (April 25, 2026)
→
This isn’t “anti-white” or “special privilege” the parking is at the Low Horn Gathering Centre (First Nations Studies) and the Elders in Residence Program. Its made so that when the school has guest speakers that are elders they have parking near the facility so they don’t have walk far to the entrance. Marc is here manufacturing ‘outrage’ against First Nations.
This is a clear pattern with Emery. He routinely seizes on mainstream news or official statistics — like the WPP survey showing 87% of newcomers experienced discrimination — and flips them to argue the opposite: that Canadians are the real victims of an “invasion” by “dark-skinned foreigners.” Whether it’s Pakistani groomer cases, Muslim crime updates, or the 50 Most Wanted list, he consistently uses stories of individual or minority-group crimes as a launch pad to attack whole races, cultures, or immigrant communities rather than addressing the specific criminals or underlying data.
Emery scans daily news for stories involving non-White or non-Western immigrants committing crimes (or even facing discrimination), then uses them as a springboard to argue that entire races/cultures are incompatible, dangerous, or part of a deliberate “replacement” of White Canada. He rarely discusses root causes like poverty, failed integration policies, or that most immigrants are not criminals — instead treating the worst examples as the norm. This mirrors exactly what he did with the 87% newcomer discrimination survey and the Toronto Most Wanted list.
Emery’s Extreme Racism
Emery calls for the Segregation of Black People, a return to Jim Crow and Lynchings
“Black Americans are seeds of the devil. They can’t be around civilized humans. Every minute of every day we read these atrocities against Whites by blacks in Europe, USA, Canada. How are we going to stop it????” (April 8, 2026)
As I noted earlier, Marc Emery has actually written about the role racism against blacks played in cannabis prohibition, he has had black employees, and was friends with black Vancouver cannabis activist Leroy Campbell.
However, Marc seemed to begin to single out blacks as early as 2015, which I was unaware of until now. in a 2020 Reddit video that was filmed at some sort of Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy event, he takes the opportunity to deny white privilege and smear black people. The event was the 7th Annual National CSSDP Conference (”A Rising Revolution: Drug Policy Reform Around the Globe”), held February 27–March 1, 2015, at the University of Toronto. Reddit video highlights it as Emery “blaming black people for not fighting against prohibition,” noting claims like “black people don’t show up to rallies” and denying white privilege. The video is also posted on X. Oddly, at the time, this drew little attention, but it was shades of what was to come.
Since then, Marc’s racism against blacks has increased considerably Marc Emery has repeatedly expressed overtly racist views about Black people, portraying them as inherently violent, savage, and incompatible with White society. He frequently uses crime videos as a springboard to make sweeping generalizations, and calling for a return to Segregation, Jim Crow and Lynchings!
He has written statements such as: “with black Americans, nothing is too grotesque or savage for them.” He described a family raiding a kitchen after a murder as typical behavior, adding “White Lives Matter.” (April 8, 2026); “Our White women will continue to be slaughtered every day we tolerate dark-skinned savages roaming our streets… Nigerians are unnecessary to every White Americans way of life. Fraud, rape & murder is what they have to offer.” (Apr 14, 2026). In response to a tragic video of a psychologically disturbed man stabbing a woman on a train, he posted: “Can you imagine 5 White people sitting still & passive on a train while a homicidal Black savage kills a White woman with a knife? I can’t. They aren’t like us, we aren’t like them” (April 5, 2026). Emery selectively picks stories of murder and crime, to frame them as race issues.
“Black American youth are an existential danger to white girls, women & boys. They should be segregated into their own all black communities. ... white women, need to be protected from the savages who prey on whites.” (Dec. 13, 2025)
“I’ve researched this, it’s all verifiable and correct. Black males are a threat Whites, Chinese, Japanese, and candidly, a threat to other blacks, everywhere on Earth. Something has to be done.” (April 18, 2026)
Emery has made multiple explicit calls to “Bring back Jim Crow. A few appropriate lynchings and this shit would be over” (April 6, 2026) arguing that segregation was necessary to control Black people’s alleged violent nature. One representative post states:
“Bring back Jim Crow! White girls & women didn’t get raped by savage Black young men every single hour of every day in the USA when Jim Crow laws (1877-1964) kept the violent impulses of the Black man under control.” (March 23, 2026)
“Bring back Jim Crow. The 61-year old experiment of giving Blacks unrestricted access to white society was an enormous historical error.” (March 8, 2026)
“Black Americans must be segregated away from whites. The 60 years since the Civil Rights Act was passed ending Jim Crow has proven to be a colossal error by the well meaning white community. Every few minutes a black American attacks a white man or woman unprovoked. Savages!” (December 20, 2025)
“Bring back Jim Crow. White women aren’t safe around Black men. White women are not safe around Muslim men. White women are going to miss the days of assertive White men. Soon if not already. During 88 years of Jim Crow, black men on white women violent shit did not happen!” (March 5, 2026)
He has extended this to Black women as well:
“Bring back Jim Crow. Young black American women are as undisciplined and savage as the males. Dozens of videos out there of gross black women trashing restaurants, drive-thru’s, and fast food outlets.” (March 8, 2026)
Emery has also endorsed the idea of lynching as a deterrent, writing:
“I hate to say it, but if there was still [such a] thing called lynching, black Americans would be way better behaved. … The decline in civility & mentality of black Americans over the last 75 years has been breathtaking because there are no consequences for their violence.” (October 21, 2025)
These statements form a consistent pattern in which he depicts Black people as inherently savage and dangerous to White society, praises the era of Jim Crow segregation as a golden age of safety for White women, and openly calls for its return along with violent historical punishments and vigilante justice like lynchings. He frames post-1960s integration as a catastrophic mistake that has unleashed Black criminality on White populations.
The continual accusations that Black men are perpetual rapists, and tirade against Black culture, is ironic, not only considering the many accusations Emery himself for predatory behaviour, but also this is a man who in 1990–91, took on Ontario’s obscenity laws after a local record store owner was convicted for selling 2 Live Crew’s album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, which contained explicit lyrics including the track “Me So Horny.” Indeed, the racism of reefer madness era figures like Harry J. Anslinger and Emily Murphy, that Emery once himself condemned, seems mild in comparison to the racial hate Emery is now perpetuating.
Black people have been part of Canada’s story since the earliest days of European settlement, with the first recorded Black presence dating back to explorer Mathieu da Costa in the early 1600s. Thousands more arrived as enslaved people under French and British rule, but larger free communities formed after the American Revolution when over 3,000 Black Loyalists — many of whom had fought for the British in exchange for freedom — settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the 1780s. Later, between the 1820s and 1860s, an estimated 30,000 escaped enslaved African Americans reached safety in Canada via the Underground Railroad, establishing vibrant farming communities in Southern Ontario and Nova Scotia.
They faced harsh conditions, broken land promises, discrimination, and segregation — exemplified by the destruction of the historic Black community of Africville in Halifax in the 1960s. Black Canadians also served as soldiers in the War of 1812, World War I (including the segregated No. 2 Construction Battalion), and World War II, while generations of Black men worked as sleeping car porters on the railways — often the only stable job available to them — and formed the first Black labour union in North America in 1917.
Despite systemic barriers, Black Canadians have made enduring contributions to Canadian agriculture, military service, music and jazz (shaping Montreal’s scene), sports, politics (with trailblazers like Lincoln Alexander and Michaëlle Jean), civil rights activism, and culture, helping build and enrich the nation from its earliest foundations to the present.
Emery calls Sikhs, “scammers” and “Flotsam and Jetsam”
Marc Emery has expressed intense hostility toward Sikhs and East Indians, frequently portraying them as incompatible with Canada, exploitative invaders, and sources of crime and cultural destruction.
“They don’t just come here to take our jobs, these carpetbaggers from India take our businesses, fire the whites, hire their own, changing the character of 🇨🇦. We allow them to do this at great peril to the future of 🇨🇦 & the generations of white citizens who built this country.” (Oct. 31, 2025)
He repeatedly uses terms like “flotsam & jetsam” and “Third World invaders” to describe them. In one post he wrote:
“The primary driver of Canadian unemployment is the flood of flotsam & jetsam of the Third World (read India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, et al) arriving by the millions… Take our jobs, housing, fill our hospitals, change the character of Canada…” (April 29, 2026)
“Sikh/Indian Scammer culture strikes again… 25 lashes. Then DEPORT!” (Apr 24, 2026)
Emery often singles out Sikhs for organized crime, scamming, and dangerous behavior. He has stated:“Every day I read of new Sikh crimes & criminals in Canada. Every. day… Why do we allow any Sikhs to come to 🇨🇦?”And: “Sikh/Indian Scammer culture strikes again. These people are not compatible with Canadian values. For defrauding the elderly, 25 lashes. Then DEPORT!” (April, 24, 2026)He has also claimed:
“Organized crime contributions by Sikhs in Canada are remarkable. ‘Assassination, murder, weapons distribution, chop shops…’ Mostly 2nd & 3rd generation Punjabis. They. Don’t. Integrate.” (Aug. 4, 2025)
Sikhs make up the largest organized crime gangs in Ontario and British Columbia. Sikhs corrupt every trade & profession they enter: policing, trucking, border security, politics, drug trade, smuggling. Why do we put up with it? Why are bringing millions more Sikhs into Canada? (Dec. 1, 2024)
“…SIKHS ARE DANGEROUS DRIVERS WHO KILL CANADIANS. Sikhs are also big scammers, lousy drivers, amoral transients who landed in Canada to exploit it…” (March 13, 2026)
“The Sikhs are a menace to Canada and Canadians. This details their infiltration and corruption rotting Canada’s institutions, from police, border security, Parliament, immigration, vote banking, drug trafficking, extortion.” (April 20, 2026)
Amplifying false American rhetoric about fentanyl exported from Canada, Emery writes: “If you get laid off after the US imposes a 25% tariff on Canada because fentanyl goes from Canada to the USA, blame the Sikhs of western Canada. They are making huge quantities to smuggle.” (Jan. 31, 2026)
Emery frames Indian immigration as a deliberate takeover that harms White Canadians. He has written:
“These foreigners can go to hell — the one they came from & intend to replicate in Canada. Our nation is being destroyed by white patsies who allow Indians/Sikhs into the country, an Indian diaspora looking for a welcoming host country they can exploit and destroy.” (July 4, 2026)
He regularly ties them to broader replacement fears, calling for mass deportation and an end to immigration from these groups.
“They don’t come to Canada to be Canadians. They come to Canada to be Indians IN Canada. They keep all their customs of their country of origin; form enclaves for purposes of power & old country morality reinforcement, and bring in as many members of their clan as they can.” (Jul 28, 2025)
In his view, immigrants represent “scammer cultures” that lower trust, increase crime, and destroy the original character of Canada. This rhetoric appears consistently across dozens of his posts, often accompanied by calls to prioritize “White Canada” and remove these communities.
South Asian immigrants, primarily Punjabi Sikhs from India, began arriving in significant numbers in British Columbia in the late 1890s and early 1900s, drawn by opportunities in Canada’s booming resource economy. They took on demanding, often dangerous work in the lumber and sawmill industries along the Fraser River and Vancouver Island, in logging camps, farming in the Fraser Valley, and helping construct sections of railways and other infrastructure. Facing severe racial discrimination, low wages, exclusionary laws (including the continuous journey regulation), and violent anti-Asian riots, they endured harsh working conditions, family separation, and political disenfranchisement for decades. The infamous 1914 Komagata Maru incident symbolized this hostility: a ship carrying 376 mostly Sikh passengers was denied entry in Vancouver and forced to return to India, resulting in tragedy and further hardship.
Despite these obstacles, early East Indian pioneers became foundational to British Columbia’s lumber industry, transitioning over time from labourers to mill owners and entrepreneurs. They cleared land for agriculture, established thriving farming communities, and built strong cultural institutions. In later generations, South Asian Canadians expanded into business, education, healthcare, technology, politics (producing federal ministers, provincial leaders, and mayors), and the military, with thousands serving in both World Wars. Today, their contributions — from transforming BC’s forests and food production to enriching Canada’s multicultural fabric — are visible in vibrant communities across the country, from Surrey to Brampton.
Marc Emery’s Islamaphobia
“Islam is the worst curse upon humankind. Worse than mosquitoes, who have killed 12-15 billion humans since mosquitoes & humans have co-existed.” (Feb 25, 2026)
Marc Emery expresses strong hostility toward Arabs and Muslims, frequently portraying them as dangerous, incompatible “invaders” who threaten White Canadian (and Western) society through violence, rape, terrorism, and cultural destruction.
“Keep them out. Please, please, please, do not encourage or allow Islamists into Canada. Decisions like this will bring lifetime’s of regret to Canada and Canadians. There are 32 majority Muslim countries, they all have universities. Let them handle this, if they dare.” (Nov. 13, 2025)
He often groups Muslims and Arabs with Pakistanis and other Middle Eastern immigrants, using terms like “Muslim Invaders,” “Pakistani Rape Gangs,” and “Islamic miscreants.” He repeatedly highlights crimes committed by Muslim men, especially sexual violence against White women and girls. In one post he wrote:
“It’s genuinely shocking to see these Pakistani male rapists (a redundancy) beat up this young WHITE GIRL because she won’t go along with their depravity. I capitalized WHITE GIRL because that is what these Muslim Invader males are all about, RAPING YOUR WHITE DAUGHTERS.” (April 17, 2026)
Emery frames Muslim immigration as an existential threat. He has posted about “Pakistani groomer” cases and sex trafficking rings involving Muslim men, and refers to them as “The vilest, most reprehensible men on planet Earth -Islamic sex criminals from the most corrupt, backward culture- are Pakistani men. Disgraceful. Celebrate a land of Jihadi rapists who still stone women to death, kill non-Muslims as Blasphemers, old men marry girls?” (March 23, 2026)
He questions the loyalty of Muslims in Canadian institutions, particularly the military:
“Who do you think Sikhs/Indians/Muslims are loyal to?” when discussing non-citizen recruits. He responds to a Mosque shooting, with unfiltered Islamaphobic hate.
Emery sees all Muslim men as potential murderers and rapists of white people. “Muslim miscreant kills Christian Italians because killer Salim El Koudri is a good, devout follower of the Prophet Mohammed, following his holy book The Qu’ran. All Muslims believe as he does.There are now 2,000,000 Muslims in Canada” (May 19, 2026). “This is Islam. Once they have the numbers these vile orcs will be gang-raping white girls and women en masse here in Canada. And guess what demographic welcomes them with open arms? White liberal women” (May 17, 2026)
Emery sees Islam as fundamentally incompatible with Western values and ties it into his broader anti-immigration worldview. He includes Muslims in lists of groups that should be excluded or deported, alongside calls to “repel the Invaders” and stop pandering to them. His rhetoric consistently presents Arabs and Muslims as violent, backward, and predatory toward White populations, especially women, and argues that allowing them into Canada endangers native citizens and erodes the country’s original European character. “I’ve lived in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco and never seen a Muslim pray in the middle of a commercial enterprise. This is a form of political intimidation” (Dec. 13, 2024)
Emery applies the same lens to the Israel-Gaza conflict, consistently framing Palestinian causes and Gaza-related immigration as extensions of the Islamist threat to Canada. He has repeatedly highlighted pro-Palestinian activism in Canada as proof of failed multiculturalism and demographic replacement. In one post he wrote: “Why has Toronto seen so much militant support for the Palestinians? 35% of candidates in the 2025 federal election in the 59 greater Toronto area ridings were Muslim… Are Muslim values Canadian values?” (March 31, 2026). He has mocked the NDP for waving Palestinian flags instead of Canadian ones at their convention and frequently lumps “Gaza refugees” together with other groups he wants excluded from Canada, including in critiques of National Defence hiring practices. Emery portrays Palestinian solidarity protests as part of the same “unholy trinity” of Indigenous, Palestinian, and Antifa activism that he believes has co-opted Canadian institutions. These views serve as a natural extension of his broader anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric, reinforcing his argument that non-Western immigration — including from Gaza — endangers Canada’s original European character.
Muslim communities have been part of Canada since the mid-19th century, with the first recorded Muslims appearing in the 1850s–1870s, including early settlers like James and Agnes Love and peddlers/entrepreneurs from Lebanon, Syria, and other parts of the Ottoman Empire who worked as merchants, fur traders, and farmers across the prairies and North. Small numbers of Muslim labourers from Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere helped build sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway, while pioneers like Ali Abouchadi and Peter Baker (Bedouin Ferran) explored and traded in Alberta and the Northwest Territories. The first Canadian mosque, Al-Rashid, opened in Edmonton in 1938.
Larger waves arrived after the 1960s immigration reforms, bringing highly educated professionals and refugees from South Asia, the Middle East, Africa (including Ismailis from Uganda in 1972), and elsewhere. They faced discrimination, exclusion, and periods of heightened Islamophobia, yet rapidly established mosques, community organizations, and businesses.
Today, Muslim Canadians have made major contributions in medicine, engineering, technology, academia, business, sports (e.g., NHL players), politics (multiple MPs, ministers, and mayors like Naheed Nenshi), the arts, and public service, while building vibrant, diverse communities that have helped shape modern multicultural Canada.
Marc Emery on Jewish People and Israel
Marc Emery has made several comments about Jewish people, often mixing admiration for Jewish cultural contributions with criticism of Jewish influence, lobbying, and specific individuals/organizations. His tone has become noticeably more negative in 2025–2026.
Key Quotes from Emery:
On Jewish influence (April 22, 2026):
“I’m beginning to see that Jews do cause a lot of bad shit in the world. I have always admired Jews and have enjoyed many fine films, books, plays, musicals, by Jews. But in banking, investment houses, hedge funds, politics, advocacy groups; I see Jewish influence as negative.”
→ Direct Post
On B’nai Brith and censorship (April 3, 2026):
“B’nai Brith — leading the fight for Censorship across Canada since the 1970’s. Jews aren’t alone in seeking to censor Canadians legitimate right to criticize…”
→ Direct Post (multiple similar versions)
On Israel:
Emery is generally pro-Israel in the sense that he opposes pro-Palestinian activism in Canada and sees it as part of the “invasion” problem. However, he has also criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza (e.g., calling aspects of the war “I despise Islam and do not want devout Muslims in Canada, but that is ethnic cleansing and genocide that Israel is doing to 1,000,000 children and 1,000,000 adults in Gaza. Destroying EVERY building and every aspect of infrastructure & denying food is a crime against humanity.”(May 20,2025)
Additional Context from the Same Thread (same day):
“We never know ALL the facts, but we know enough to know that the US supplies the weapons and taxpayer largesse to Israel to finance their recent genocidal ethnic cleansing.” (May 20,2025)
“You can’t eliminate HAMAS. HAMAS was established by Israeli to be an acceptable alternative to the Arafat oriented Palestinian liberation groups. Hamas did exactly what Netanyahu wanted and allowed to happen, a pretext for a complete ethnic cleansing of & permanent occupation.” (May 20, 2025)
This was posted in May 2025. Note that Emery has expressed contradictory views on this topic over time (earlier in 2023–2024 he rejected the “genocide” label).
His rhetoric often treats “Jewish influence” as one negative force among many (alongside Muslim, Sikh, Indian, etc.), but he has increasingly highlighted it in discussions of finance, politics, and censorship. My view here, is that Emery takes legitimate criticism of Zionism and Israel, into the area of antisemitism, with his statement “I’m beginning to see that Jews do cause a lot of bad shit in the world”. You don’t have to look too far into my Substack to see multiple articles on the Zionist and Israeli Goverment influence on Politics, Mainstream Media, Social Media and the repression of Freedom of Speech. If you include a rejection of Zionism and the Apartheid State of Israel’s policies and expansions, in your definition of antisemitism, in the same way that Netanyahu likes to conflate these issues, then you would likely consider me an antisemite. However I would point out many Jewish people reject these things as well, and I do try to separate antisemitism from antizionism.
Emery on Asian People
Marc Emery has expressed strong anti-Asian racism, frequently lumping together people from India, Pakistan, China, the Philippines, and other Asian countries as part of a destructive “invasion” that is ruining Canada for White Europeans.
Emery calls for an outright ban on further Asian immigration. A representative statement reads: “No more Africans, Asians in Canada. Out with invaders… scammers, Chinese klepto-millionaires…” He groups Chinese people with other Asian nationalities as opportunistic exploiters and demands mass deportation.
While he sometimes makes a slight distinction with Filipinos (calling them “more honest & relatable” than Indians), he still includes them in his broader rejection of Asian immigration and complains about Asian workers dominating service jobs. He portrays Indian and Sikh communities in particular as non-integrating scammers and criminals, but extends the same hostility to Chinese “klepto-millionaires” and other Asian groups who, in his view, take jobs and housing from “real” (White) Canadians.
“White people were priced out of Richmond, Vancouver & suburbs because the Chinese were laundering several $Billion$ dollars in untaxed & largely illicit money thru British Columbia real estate and casinos, the RCMP found, in the 2000 to 2019 period. Yet, no prosecutions.” (Aug. 4, 2025)
“My view is we stop immigration for 5 years, prohibit foreign ownership of Canadian residential property, require audited income statements to purchase anything in Canada with Chinese income. Do not renew foreign worker visas, reject the asylum process. Deflation. Housing prices crater. Rents come down. Wages rise. (Apr 2, 2025)
Overall, Emery frames Asian immigration as an existential threat that turns Canada into low-trust enclaves, overwhelms public services, and erodes the country’s original White European identity. He consistently advocates stopping all Asian immigration and removing those already here to “save” Canada. However, the reality is, Chinese people helped to build Canada, and paid for it with countless lives.
In the early 1880s, more than 17,000 Chinese labourers were recruited — many from southern China and California — to build the treacherous British Columbia section of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the engineering marvel that physically united Canada from coast to coast in 1885. They performed the most dangerous work: blasting tunnels through mountains, scaling cliffs with nitroglycerin, and carving roadbeds along the Fraser Canyon, often in brutal winter conditions with little safety equipment. Paid just $1 a day (roughly half what white workers earned) and forced to buy their own food and tools, they endured malnutrition, scurvy, exposure, explosions, rockslides, and cave-ins. Estimates of the death toll range from 600 to over 4,000, with the grim saying that “for every mile of track laid, three Chinese workers died.” Their backbreaking labour was essential — they made up the vast majority of the workforce on the western leg — yet after the final spike was driven at Craigellachie, thousands were left destitute, many unable to return home.
Beyond the railway, Chinese immigrants made other foundational contributions: they were among the earliest non-Indigenous settlers in British Columbia (arriving in 1788 to help build a fur-trading post at Nootka Sound), played a major role in the Fraser River gold rush of 1858, cleared land for farming, established vibrant Chinatowns and market gardens that fed growing cities, and later built thriving businesses, restaurants, and communities that helped shape modern multicultural Canada despite facing head taxes, exclusion laws, and discrimination.
Emery on Latinos
Marc Emery has expressed far less frequent and intense racism toward Latinos, Mexicans, and Latin Americans compared to his voluminous attacks on Indigenous people, Black people, Sikhs/Indians, and other “dark-skinned” groups. When he does address them, it is usually in the context of crime, cartels, drugs, and cultural incompatibility rather than blanket personal attacks.
He has highlighted violence in Mexico and portrayed it as a place where “life is cheap.” In one post about cartel violence he wrote:
“On that note of Mexican people. Yeah, they’re ‘friendly’ but there’s no doubt life is cheap there. 475,000 Mexicans killed since 2006 by cartels, with 110,000 ‘missing’ & presumed dead. 30,000 killings a year. Canada? 2,600 dead from gang/cartel violence in same 20 years.” (Feb. 23, 2026)
Emery frequently ties Mexicans to the fentanyl crisis and cartel activity. He has posted:
“98.9% of fentanyl in the USA is from Mexico” and criticized Mexican leadership for weakness against cartels, calling a female Mexican president “naive” and a “socialist cartel captured leader.”
He occasionally lumps Latin American immigration into his broader “Third World invaders” rhetoric, though he rarely singles out Latinos as aggressively as he does South Asians or Black people. His general stance remains that non-European immigration — including from Latin America — harms White Canada/Europe by increasing crime, lowering trust, and altering demographics.
Overall, while Emery does not appear to fixate on Latinos or Mexicans to the same obsessive degree as other groups, his comments fit his consistent worldview: non-White, non-European immigrants bring violence, drugs, and cultural degradation, and should be kept out or removed to preserve White-majority nations. His rhetoric on this topic is present but secondary to his primary targets
Marc Emery’s Racist Colonial Views on First Nations
Marc Emery, has in recent years faced strong accusations of racism toward First Nations and Indigenous peoples.
Critics highlight a series of public X posts in which Emery portrays pre-colonial Indigenous societies as primitive and inherently violent, argues that European conquest was justified under a “might is right” logic, rejects special benefits or income supports for Indigenous people, downplays or denies the severity of residential school abuses, and calls for violent suppression of Indigenous protests (especially those involving pipelines or infrastructure blockades).
Marc Emery’s Views Indigenous People as “Stone Age” and “Ripe for Occupation”
Emery repeatedly describes First Nations as “Stone Age people” who lacked basic technologies and lived in barbarism, implying they were unfit to control land or that colonization represented civilizational progress. Even trying portray the prehistoric migration of their ancestors as indicating they themselves are immigrants.
“There’s 620 recognized First Nations in Canada. Why do native populations that average 1,260 people on the typical reserve get to be called “Nation”? 1,260 is a village, not a Nation. If they all came from Siberia-Asiatica, then at most, aren’t they one nation or common culture?” (May 11, 2026)
“Where did the First Nations come from? Why does their DNA at http://ancestry.com say “Siberian Asiatic”? My DNA says 100% English-Irish-Welsh-Scottish, born in Canada, the same as every founder of Canada at Confederation. Canada was intended for those like me.” (May 9, 2026)
A statement he has repeated in other variations:
The Ancestors of the First Nations People first migrated to the Americas via the Bering Land Bridge (Beringia) roughly 20,000–16,000 years ago, with genetic and archaeological evidence pointing to initial crossings during or shortly after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ~26,000–19,000 years ago). By Emery’s logic, you just need to trace his European DNA back far enough and you will find his ancestors came out of Africa, as all of our ancestors did.
Direct quotes:
“If Canada was left to the natives, the whole country would look like the Cowichan reserve -eww! 🤮 Can you imagine the telling of history & science by natives? They didn’t have the wheel, music, books, written language, mining. Stone Age people.” (February 17, 2026)
“Indigenous people roamed the land in perpetual conflict, raiding, warring, genociding other tribes, taking slaves, raping the women, with no private property, no wheel, no written language, no books. That sordid barbarism is no logical grounds for ownership nor a legacy.” (April 20, 2026)
“Indigenous people roamed the land in perpetual conflict, raiding, warring, genociding other tribes, taking slaves, raping the women, with no private property, no wheel, no written language, no books. That sordid barbarism is no logical grounds for ownership nor a legacy.” (April 20, 2026)
“They conquered this land and built it to what it is from the Stone Age people that were here.” (February 24, 2026)
“If it weren’t for whites that came to Canada to civilize this place, the whole country would look like this ‘Indigenous’ wasteland amidst paradise.” (November 9, 2025)
“The natives live 100% like the Europeans who conquered them because it’s a vastly better way of life.” (Nov. 9, 2025)
“The Musqueam natives did not even have the wheel they were so Stone Age, never had metal, never had books or a written language, but here they are celebrated flying airplanes as an all-indigenous crew. Would you fly with an all indigenous crew?” (April 30, 2026)
Emery condemned the burning of Churches in response to Residential School abuses: “In Canada, 103 churches burned since May 2021. No synagogues. No mosques. No one convicted. No one held accountable. All urged on by Prime Minister Trudeau who lied inferring there were 215 murdered indigenous babies buried in Kamloops. Never happened, doesn’t exist. 103 gone. (Aug 8, 2024)
“Might Is Right,” Violence Against Protesters, and “Finishing the Job”
Emery frames historical conquest as legitimate and calls for forceful completion of colonization against modern protests.
“Any indigenous band that blocks railroads or any infrastructure should be dealt with by truncheons cracking their skulls within 24 hours. When you seize railroads you are going to war. Time to finish the job our ancestors didn’t.” (November 22, 2025, in response to a rail blockade)
This statement likely qualifies as hate speech under Canadian law, specifically potentially violating section 319 of the Criminal Code (public incitement of hatred or wilful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group). This isn’t protected “free speech” in the absolute sense under Canadian law—it’s the kind of rhetoric that hate speech provisions were designed to address. This rhetoric aligns with his broader “might is right” view: “It really doesn’t matter who was here or there first. It’s who can hold on to what they have now and repel the Invaders.” (April 25, 2026)
Rejection of Benefits and “Legalized Bigotry”
Emery opposes targeted funding, rights, or accommodations for Indigenous people, calling them unfair privileges and criticizing reserve conditions while rejecting support systems.
He has highlighted per-capita funding figures and argued against “legalized bigotry” via ancestry-based rights. He also criticizes race-based policies like relaxed gun licensing for Indigenous people.
“Indigenous ancestry is a legalized bigotry against Canadians that must be repealed. It’s legalized natives as citizens with numerous rights and privileges that supersede those of actual Canadians.” (April 20, 2026)
“Natives can get a gun at age 12 no course or test required. Adult natives can bypass tests or training to own a gun.” (April 17, 2026-criticizing race-based gun licensing, in regions where many First Nations people survive off the land)
In reference to a major 2025 B.C. Supreme Court ruling in the case Cowichan Tribes v. Canada (2025 BCSC 1490), which recognized Aboriginal title for the Cowichan Tribes (part of the Quw’utsun Nation) over a portion of land in Richmond, B.C.) Emery responded:
“The Cowichan, ‘caretakers of the land’ that are trying to seize upwards of thousands of properties in Richmond, BC., were once the largest slavers in the northwest as recently as 1846. Then the white man had the slaves freed and introduced peaceful trade with the Cowichan.” (Nov. 1, 2025)
Residential School Views (Denialism/Skepticism)
Emery rejects the dominant narrative of systemic abuse and genocide, instead portraying the schools as beneficial or life-saving compared to reserves. He calls compensation efforts a “scam” and identifies as a “Residential School skeptic.” On the purpose: Questions why schools would be built if the goal was obliteration, citing shelter, food, skills training, and language preservation efforts. He has criticized “censorship” around the “Residential School compensation scam” and expressed skepticism about claims like the Kamloops unmarked graves.
Here are some direct quotes from his recent X posts:
On the purpose and benefits of the schools: “If the objective of the Canadian government and religious leaders was to obliterate Indigenous people, why were Indian Residential Schools built in the first place, providing shelter, clothing, medical care, food and practical skills training?” (Jan. 24, 2026)
On saving lives and skills: “Why did missionaries create syllabic ‘alphabets’ & dictionaries to maintain aboriginal languages? When all were poor, Indian Residential Schools saved the lives of thousands of orphaned Indigenous children & provided skills for all to prepare for entry into a changing society.” (Jan .24, 2026)
Comparing reserves vs. schools: “Reserves were vastly more dangerous to children & youth. Residential Schools saved them from a dismal fate.” (In a post comparing photos of native children at residential school vs. on reserves.) (Sept. 27, 2025)
On skepticism and “denialism”: He has referred to himself and others as “Residential School skeptics“ and criticized efforts to intimidate them (e.g., in the context of a proposed debate at UBC on the Kamloops claims).
“Looking forward to seeing my Red Guard cadre Sabrina Tong leading her http://Marxist.ca Red & Orange Thug Squad in intimidating the Residential School skeptics like me at a debate at UBC.” (Feb. 1, 2026)
On compensation: “I would add the Indigenous also call for censorship, they don’t want you to be permitted to criticize the Residential School compensation scam. Every vested group craves censorship to evade accountability for their insidious influence & actions..” (April 4, 2026)
“Reserves were vastly more dangerous to children & youth. Residential Schools saved them from a dismal fate.” (September 27, 2025)
Emery’s stance aligns with what critics call “residential school denialism,” which he and supporters describe as seeking historical accuracy, transparency on death records, and questioning claims (e.g., mass unmarked graves without excavation). He has engaged with events and figures like Dallas Brodie pushing for more scrutiny.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) documented ~4,000 confirmed deaths from school records (mostly disease like tuberculosis, malnutrition, neglect). In the 1930s, the tuberculosis (TB) mortality rate in Canadian residential schools was approximately 100–157 times higher than in the general Canadian population. They estimated over 6,000 total, possibly higher. Many children died and were buried locally, sometimes in unmarked or poorly documented graves — a real tragedy from poor conditions in the system (which ran ~1880s–1990s).
Emery’s views have drawn strong backlash, with some accusing him of racism or denialism, while others see him as challenging a dominant narrative. These positions have alienated many former supporters in the cannabis community and drawn condemnation from Indigenous advocates, who see them as rooted in colonial supremacism. Emery’s defenders often describe them as “blunt realism” on history, law-and-order, or fiscal issues. The statements are primarily from his X account (@MarcScottEmery) between late 2025 and mid-2026.
Rejection of Land Acknowledgements
Land acknowledgements are formal statements made at the start of events, meetings, classes, or official proceedings in Canada. They recognize that the gathering is taking place on the traditional, unceded, or treaty lands of specific Indigenous Nations.
Their main role is symbolic: they publicly affirm the long history and continued presence of Indigenous peoples, serve as a low-effort entry point to reconciliation after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and signal institutional awareness of Canada’s colonial past. In practice, they are now routine in universities, governments, corporations, and cultural institutions, helping normalize Indigenous perspectives in public life while reminding non-Indigenous Canadians that the country’s foundations rest on Indigenous territories. Supporters see them as a step toward respect and relationship-building; critics often view them as largely performative when not paired with substantive policy changes.
For Emery, these events are an affront to the European domination of Canada. He has written things like “Land Acknowledgements have risen to the status of a quasi-religious ritual that is sacred. Woke is the making sacred of historically marginalized groups to the degree that they are immune from criticism or accountability” (May 1, 2026). He consistently describes them as gratuitous, humiliating, performative rituals, and woke indoctrination with no legal requirement, and has mocked them by posting what he sees as the European equivalent.
Recently, Emery and his partner Lara Yates, who he is raising 3 teenage daughters with him, has launched a court challenge over Land Acknowledgements with the Sunshine Coast School District 46 in B.C. Supreme Court over her ban from Chatelech Secondary School.
In December 2025, after privately raising concerns (including her daughter failing a course for refusing to write a land acknowledgement), Yates briefly heckled the ritual before her daughter’s drama performance, calling it “race-baiting”. The school banned her from campus for two months, the drama teacher allegedly identified her daughter to classmates (leading to bullying), and the principal reported the family to Child Protective Services. Social workers interviewed the children and quickly closed the file with no concerns, (one can only suspect that child services was unaware of the extreme racism the children were being exposed to via their step-father Emery.)
Yates pulled her minor children from school; one Grade 12 daughter had to homeschool and missed graduation. Supported by the Free Speech Union of Canada and lawyer Lisa Bildy, she argues the ban punishes protected political expression under the Charter and that mandatory land acknowledgements violate the school board’s duty to remain non-sectarian. The internal appeal was denied, so the case is now before the court.
For Emery, who through decades of activism knows how to manipulate a news story to promote a cause from decades of activism, this has served as an excellent launching pad for the further spread of his extremely racist views. In a X post he tagged and criticized teachers and school board trustees for “Calling the Ministry of Family & Children Services after having ostracized our girl... Our girl insisted the only problem was the drama teacher telling the class the fuss was her racist parents” (May 3, 2026)
Here’s a collection of news stories on Lara Yates’ case against Sunshine Coast School District 46, with dates:
“She heckled a land acknowledgement. Child services were sent after her” — National Post (Michael Higgins), May 1, 2026 Link
“BC Mother Seeks Court Hearing After Ban Over Opposing School Land Acknowledgements” — The Epoch Times (Paul Rowan Brian), May 1, 2026 (updated May 6) Link
“B.C. mom takes compelled land acknowledgment battle to Supreme Court” — Rebel News, May 3, 2026 Link
“Showdown over land acknowledgement reaches B.C. Supreme Court” — June News (Melanie Bennet), May 2, 2026 Link
“Lara Yates v. Sunshine Coast School District 46” (detailed case summary) — Free Speech Union of Canada, March 17, 2026 (updated) Link
“Showdown over land acknowledgement reaches B.C. Supreme Court” — Juno News (Melanie Bennet), May 2, 2026 Link
“BC Mother Seeks Court Hearing After Ban Over Opposing School Land Acknowledgements” — The Epoch Times (Paul Rowan Brian), May 1, 2026 (updated May 6, 2026) Link
“B.C. mom takes compelled land acknowledgment battle to Supreme Court” — Rebel News, May 3, 2026 Link
“Child protection services called over mother’s opposition to school’s ‘land acknowledgement’” - Rebel News, April 29, 2026 Link
Emery’s racist statements about First Nations people could prove highly damaging in the ongoing legal case involving his wife, Lara Yates.
If they were aware of them, Government or school board lawyers would likely introduce Emery’s public posts as powerful evidence in the dispute over Yates heckling a land acknowledgement at her child’s school. In one particularly inflammatory post, Emery wrote that any Indigenous group blocking infrastructure “should be dealt with by truncheons cracking their skulls within 24 hours” and that it was “time to finish the job our ancestors didn’t.”
These statements go far beyond policy disagreement. They express explicit racial contempt and violent fantasies toward First Nations people. Because Emery and Yates are common-law partners raising four children together, courts routinely consider the broader family environment when evaluating parental conduct and the appropriateness of school restrictions.
The posts are directly relevant to the core issue. They help demonstrate that Yates’ protest against the land acknowledgement was not a neutral act of free speech, but part of a household ideology that rejects Indigenous rights and reconciliation efforts. Lawyers could use them to argue that the school’s decision to ban Yates was reasonable and necessary to protect Indigenous students and maintain a safe learning environment.
Additionally, since child protection services became involved, Emery’s rhetoric strengthens arguments about the child’s best interests and the potential psychological impact of being raised in a home steeped in anti-Indigenous hostility. In a Charter challenge, this evidence significantly weakens any claim that the incident was simply about peaceful expression.
In short, Emery’s own words provide prosecutors and the school board with compelling, publicly available material that ties the family’s actions to a documented pattern of racial animus against First Nations people.
As of May 18, 2026, the case of Lara Yates v. Sunshine Coast School District 46 remains ongoing. Yates is proceeding with a judicial review in the B.C. Supreme Court, challenging both her two-month ban from Chatelech Secondary School (issued after she heckled a land acknowledgement in December 2025) and the school district’s mandatory land acknowledgement practice itself. She argues the ban violates her Charter rights to free expression and that the ritual breaches the School Act’s requirement for public schools to be “strictly secular and non-sectarian.” Coverage from early May 2026 described it as “heading to” or “reaching” the B.C. Supreme Court, with no updates on a resolution since then. When it reaches trial, we can be sure Emery will be in full form promoting the case and White Nationalist agenda.
Marc Emery’s Promotion of ‘Replacement Theory’ and Call for an end to Immigration and for Mass Deportations
“If you aren’t a White racist piece of shit these days then you aren’t paying attention. There won’t be Whites or a country for Whites in 50 years. The Muslims, blacks, Africans, Arabs & other Invaders will, once we are in the minority, rape our women & kill & intimidate the men.” (April 9, 2026)
Marc Emery has become increasingly blunt and unapologetic in his advocacy for turning Canada back into a overwhelmingly White nation. He repeatedly claims that Canada was 97% White from Confederation in 1867 until the early 1970s, describing that era as a “beautiful,” “modern paradise of peace, prosperity & White people working united.” In his telling, this White European (British and French) character was deliberate and legally enforced through restrictive immigration policies that kept out non-White “races” — policies he praises and wants restored.
He argues that Canada was intended by law and spirit to be a White majority nation, citing Sir John A. Macdonald’s 1885 restrictions on Asian immigration as proof. Emery calls multiculturalism and post-1960s “Third World” immigration a Marxist betrayal that dropped Canada from 97% White to roughly 62% today. He frames this demographic shift as an “invasion” that has destroyed the country’s high-trust, safe, and prosperous nature, turning it into a “mongrel Asian outpost,” crime-ridden enclaves, and a place where White men are marginalized and replaced.
“If I’m racist, it occurred organically. I wasn’t racist until this once lovely 🇨🇦 was flooded with Third World flotsam & jetsam, turning our cities into alien enclaves & every job for foreign workers. If we don’t prioritize White men there will be no White families in 50 years.” (March 31, 2026)
“I’m hella racist. If you are a White male in Canada and you aren’t harboring suspicions that Canada is being flooded with low IQ cheap sweatshop Labour from India then you aren’t paying attention.” (April 13, 2026)
“I wasn’t “racist” when immigration was 125,000/year (pre-2014),when there was no Foreign Worker Program (pre-2013) when housing, food, fuel were way cheaper, before a million new arrivals a year put a strain on everything, before Indian nationals took ovr EVERY.SINGLE.UNSKILLED.JOB” (Aug. 17, 2024)
‘Every retail business or unskilled job in my village of Sechelt, British Columbia is staffed by nationals from India who have student visas. A&W, McDonalds, Shoppers, IDA, the Independent grocery store, most retailers, Subway, road paving companies, construction, all of them hire migrants, they probably even receive subsidies to hire foreigners; but the fact is almost every service or construction employee is from India or the local indigenous population. I make $19 an hour. If 🇮🇳 migrants on student visas were not permitted to work here, I’d be making $25 an hour. That’s why 🇨🇦 is flooded with ONE MILLION unskilled migrants on student visas each year working two jobs while they get their MBA (or not) at our universities: to depress wages for working Canadians.’ (July 3, 2024)
Emery’s solution is radical and openly racial: stop all mass immigration, deport “invaders,” end multiculturalism, and implement policies that explicitly prioritize native-born White Canadians (especially White men) in jobs, housing, and culture. He has floated the idea of a new political party to “Restore Canada” to its former White majority status, warning that without empowering White males there will soon be “no White families in 50 years.” He openly embraces the “racist” label, saying his views developed “organically” from watching non-White immigration flood the country.
Critics rightly call this classic White nationalist rhetoric dressed up as patriotism. Emery’s nostalgia for a 97% White Canada ignores Indigenous peoples, historical racial exclusions, and the contributions of later immigrants. His rhetoric — “dark-skinned invaders,” “flotsam & jetsam,” “scammer cultures,” and calls to keep Canada White — goes far beyond mere policy critique into explicit racial preservationism. A person who was once a celebrated cannabis activist has fully pivoted to ethno-nationalism, demanding a return to a deliberately White Canada at the expense of everyone else.
“If you are a Canadian White Man or White woman and you aren’t yet racist, you aren’t paying attention.” (recent X post)
“Restore Canada to its former greatness & Whiteness. Canada was 97% white from 1867 to 1970, you have no idea how safe & wonderful it was.” (April 18, 2026)
Marc Emery holds strongly anti-immigration views, describing current levels of immigration to Canada as a deliberate “invasion” that is destroying the country. He repeatedly calls non-European immigrants “Third World invaders,” “flotsam & jetsam,” and “dark-skinned foreigners” who are swamping Canada, taking jobs and housing from native-born (primarily White) Canadians, and fundamentally changing the nation’s character.
He has written statements such as:
“Canada has been invaded by dark skinned foreigners taking our jobs, stressing our housing, overwhelming our hospitals, changing the character of Canada from high-trust to low-trust society, carnage on the highways, fentanyl production, sex crimes…” (April 28, 2026)
Emery argues that Canada was intended to be a White majority nation founded by Europeans and that mass immigration from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America has been a catastrophic mistake. He frequently states that he “wasn’t a racist” until this wave of immigration began, and now believes prioritizing native-born Canadians is essential.
On Deportation and Remigration
Emery is an enthusiastic advocate for large-scale deportation and remigration. He calls for:
An immediate halt to all immigration for at least five years.
Ending student visas, worker visas, asylum claims, and refugee programs.
Deporting all foreign-born criminals, visa overstayers, and non-citizens.
Mass removal of what he calls “invaders” who he believes do not belong in Canada.
Representative quotes include:
“First thing is to stop all Immigration for a 5-year period, end all student worker or foreign workers visas, end asylum and refugee claims, deport all foreign born criminals…” (April 20, 2026)
In Emery’s view, Canada should “repel the Invaders” and return to a policy that protects the interests of White European colonist, rather than continuing what he sees as national suicide through unchecked multiculturalism and open borders. His anti-immigration and pro-deportation rhetoric is a central, recurring theme across hundreds of his posts. Moreover, its not immigration, he envisions deportations of coloured people living here now.
“You would be surprised at how many black or coloured men have raped white women or killed white people in Canada since 2015. Immigration & multiculturalism to Canada are deadly to white folks.” (May 9, 2026)
“I called in & reported I had become ‘racist’ by seeing millions of dark-skinned Indians come to 🇨🇦 & completely alter culture, safety, complexion, affordability, accommodation.” (January 11, 2026)
“I wasn’t a racist until millions of the flotsam & jetsam of India rolled up on our shores… changing the character of white European Canada into a mongrel Asian outpost.” (October 2, 2025)
“You’ll notice this flood of flotsam & jetsam from the Third World to Canada came after 10-15 years of mass messaging by corporations & government that Whites are shit & deserve marginalization.” (April 22, 2026)
These sort of comments are an obsession with Marc: “9 in 10 Canadians have noticed Canada has been invaded by dark skinned foreigners taking our jobs…”; “The primary driver of Canadian unemployment is the flood of flotsam & jetsam of the Third World (read India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, et al)…”. He frequently uses terms like “Third World invaders,” “flotsam & jetsam,” “dark skinned,” “mongrel,” and frames Canada as originally a “White Majority nation” that multiculturalism has ruined. Many posts tie into broader complaints about crime, jobs, housing, and cultural change attributed to non-white immigration.
“This is a white country, so we can deal with the white miscreants of our own community. We don’t need millions of dark skinned foreigners to make our lives more miserable, less affordable, less safe, changing the character of 🇨🇦 because the flotsam & jetsam of 3rd 🌍 need ‘work’. (October 25, 2025)
“No more Africans, Asians in Canada. Out with invaders, miscreants, rapists, criminals, welfare addicts, Muslims, Sikhs, Indians, goondahs, scammers, Chinese klepto-millionaires, asylum cheats...” (December 12, 2025)
“These foreigners can go to hell -the one they came from & intend to replicate in Canada. Our nation is being destroyed by white patsies who allow Indians/Sikhs into the country, an Indian diaspora looking for a welcoming host country they can exploit and destroy.” (July 4, 2025)
“Canada was a modern paradise of peace, prosperity & White people working united for a great future for their children. Then we opened the floodgates to the Third World and it’s been deteriorating ever since. Restore Canada to greatness, reject Multiculturalism!” (April 18, 2026)
“Immigration from the third world will destroy the identity of Canada as an Anglo-French-Indigenous nation into a polyglot of enclaves with each ethnic identity competing for influence, power & control over their “community”, setting up Canada as many nations within one nation.” (October 25, 2024)
“Indigenous bands have their own Sovereign nations. Canada is an exclusively British French European project to establish an enlightened civilization… It was intended by law & spirit to be a White Majority nation with very selective immigration policies meant to keep out the Chinese, Sikhs, Indians, Pakistanis, Africans, Arabs, Japanese, non-white races. This was the law until 1962. Abandoning that… for Multiculturalism has led Canada into near ruin.” (April 25, 2026)
Emery skews facts for his racist agenda, writing “Do you think Canada could end up like South Africa? With whites a minority surrounded by hostile cultural invaders living in their enclaves throughout Canada perpetuating their tribal grievances & ethos? 1981 Vancouver was 85% white. In 2021, Vancouver is 43% white. In just 40 years, whites became a minority in their own city.” (Oct. 3, 2024). Emery’s analogy here collapses under basic historical reality. In South Africa, whites were never a majority—they arrived as a small colonial settler minority in the 17th century and ruled a Black African indigenous majority through centuries of conquest, dispossession, and brutal apartheid enforcement that legally stripped the Black population of rights, land, and citizenship in their own country. The “hostile cultural invaders” he warns about were, and remain, the demographic and historical majority on the land long before European arrival. Cherry-picking modern population stats to paint the Black majority as invaders while ignoring this foundational invasion and minority rule is a sleight of hand that flips victim and colonizer. Emery applies the exact same logic in Canada, dismissing First Nations as mere “Stone Age” remnants with no legitimate standing, rejecting their prior occupation, title claims, and treaty rights in favor of “might makes right” European conquest. In both cases, he weaponizes demographic numbers to delegitimize indigenous majorities while excusing or celebrating the original settler minority’s dominance.
Emery on the Threat of Multiculturalism
Emery sees multiculturalism as an abomination. He refers to “1) Millions of Indians we don’t want or need... 7) pandering to the ungrateful ‘indigenous’ 8) 2 million Muslims we don’t want or need 9) 2 million Sikhs we don’t want or need 10) multiculturalism” (Dec. 26, 2025). “Multiculturalism was the greatest mistake the government of Canada ever made. Instigated by Pierre Elliott Trudeau beginning 1968. Accelerated by Mulroney, Chretien, Harper & put on steroids by Trudeau Junior. Canada now: Millions of Third World migrants in every job & ethnic enclaves.” (March 11, 2025)
“Canada was a modern paradise of peace, prosperity & White people working united for a great future for their children. Then we opened the floodgates to the Third World and it’s been deteriorating ever since. Restore Canada to greatness, reject Multiculturalism!” (April 18, 2026)
For Emery, every ethnic community in Canada, like Chinatown and Ethnic spots like Little India / Gerrard India Bazaar, Little Jamaica, little Korea, etc along with every ethnic or minority festival like Pride, Chinese New Year, Diwali Festival, National Indigenous Peoples Day, is an affront to his White Canadian way of life.
”I’m saying the western tendency to decency and compassion is destroying a safe and high trust society because when we extend compassion to the savages; indigenous, Muslim, Sikh, alien cultures; they invariably become an existential threat to our well being.” (Nov. 13, 2025)
“Pandering to Muslims, natives, transgenders, Sikhs, Indians, blue hairs, Alphabet Mob, Blacks, women is going to foment a million mutinies as each enclave, each ‘demographic’, each self-centered lobby vie for power, control & influence in a fractured Canada.” (May 15, 2026)
Emery sees the presence of multiculturalism at a Halloween event, as an affront to Canadian tradition, so even when immigrants try to fit in with Canadian culture, its a fail in Emery’s small, racist, world view.
Emery’s Call for the Mass Deportation of Coloured People
Is not just immigration at issue, Emery seeks mass deportation of existing Canadian immigrants.
In a December 12, 2025 post, he wrote: “No more Africans, Asians in Canada. Out with invaders, miscreants, rapists, criminals, welfare addicts, Muslims, Sikhs, Indians, goondahs, scammers, Chinese klepto-millionaires, asylum cheats, food bank exploiters, deadly truckers. By any means necessary. Before it’s too late.”
Link to post. He has endorsed large-scale remigration and deportation policies. On May 6, 2026, Emery stated: “This agenda we need in Canada - immediately! Read this great Remigration & Deportation Agenda by MP Rupert Lowe of England.”
Link to post. Emery distinguishes between “homegrown” (primarily white) criminals, whom Canada should handle internally, and non-native ones, whom he wants removed. In an April 20, 2026 post: “Lesson for Canadians. We have our own homegrown criminals. We do not need African, Asian, middle eastern, Indian, Sikh, Chinese, Pakistani, Afghan, Albanian miscreants & criminals. ... Rapists & gangsters out!” Link to post
He repeatedly asserts that Canada belongs to its founding population and that many current immigrants do not belong. In a January 14, 2026 reply: “It’s OUR country. Canada was founded & built by white Europeans, largely Anglo-Saxon, French. We will take care of the white criminals in our midst. You however, should NOT even be here in Canada. You don’t belong here. Indians are carpetbaggers.”
Link to post
Emery advocates prioritizing native-born Canadians and supports a political shift to enable removals. On May 1, 2026 he wrote: “Both the Conservatives and Liberals are utterly captured by the ethnic lobbies. We need a new movement that places Canadians -those born in Canada- ahead of foreigners, foreign workers, asylum claimants, fake refugees, scammers, dual citizens.”
Link to post
These statements reflect his consistent position that large numbers of existing non-native immigrants—particularly from certain regions and backgrounds—should be deported to restore Canada’s pre-mass-immigration character. :
Emery is 68 now, and he seems to be struggling to survive. This is one of the things about him that shocks me as much as his descent into racism, his state of poverty. He was one of the most masterful people I knew at making money, but it seems he never had the forethought to stash much away for times like these. this may be a blessing for the rest of us, as lack of funds, and nightshift job packing food cans on a shelf in a Grocery store warehouse may be saving us all from louder messaging from Emery on his white nationalist agenda. However, this is still for him, an opportunity for launching a racist tirade.
Marc Emery frequently positions himself as a hard-working, older white Canadian who is personally impacted by the job market he criticizes. He describes working full-time on the night shift in a warehouse at low wages while supporting a family, using his own situation to highlight what he sees as the economic marginalization of white Canadians due to mass immigration. In one post, he wrote:
“I’m 66. Canada Pension pays me $717 a month after paying into it for 50 years! Not enough to pay 1/3 of the rent in a month! So I work at a big warehouse out this way on the night shift full time at $19 an hour because I’m the sole earner raising three girls with their mother.” (Aug. 1, 2024)
He has reiterated the physical demands of the role in more recent statements, such as:
“I stand on my feet all night long every night for 8 1/2 hours at a warehouse doing a hard physical job all night at $20 an hour with no massage benefits at all.” (April 2026). Emery is woking a graveyard shift, which must be hell as 68 years old. Curiously, he never considers the role, people who should have been prepared for retirement, but still need to work, has on jobs for the youth.
And noted his reliability: “I, for example, have not missed a shift of my physical warehouse job in 4 years, although I booked off 8 days for eye surgery.” (April 3, 2026)
Emery frames these personal circumstances as emblematic of broader racial displacement. He argues that white Canadians, including himself and younger white workers, are pushed into low-wage, physically demanding jobs or face exclusion because employers prefer “taxpayer-subsidized” immigrants from India and elsewhere who accept lower pay or different conditions. This is a rather successful hook in an economy depressed by a tariff war. This ties directly into his employment critiques:
“The primary driver of Canadian unemployment is the flood of flotsam & jetsam of the Third World (read India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, et al) arriving by the millions... Take our jobs...” (April 29, 2026)
“UNEMPLOYMENT is much worse among white Canadian young people 15-24 because they are being REPLACED ECONOMICALLY by imported TAXPAYER-SUBSIDIZED INDIAN workers. It’s intentional too!” (December 2024)
“My local A&W had a staff lunch yesterday & all 10 staff were from India or The Philippines. So today or Monday I am going to talk to the manager & suggest that it might be good for his business & future relationship with the community if he hired some local people to work there.” (May 9, 2026)
“There are over 1,500 @TimHortons in Canada, employing over 100,000 “residents”. This is a challenge to you! Find a white person behind a Tim Hortons counter and photograph them & we will post here. Are there any white people left working at Tim’s? Let’s find out! Prizes!” (Oct.2, 2024)
“I just returned from the grocery store and McDonald’s, and all 18 people working at the registers and preparing food were from India. Not a single white person to be seen working at either place.” (Sept. 20, 2025)
By referencing his own warehouse work at roughly $19–$20/hour, Emery presents himself as living proof of a system that forces even long-time, dedicated white Canadians into grueling labor while prioritizing non-white immigrants for easier or better opportunities. He contrasts this with anti-white hiring biases in government, universities, and corporations, where he says “WHITE MEN NEED NOT APPLY.” This personal narrative strengthens his call to prioritize “Canadian-born white males” in employment and drastically reduce immigration to restore wages and job access for people like himself.
Marc Emery frequently promotes core tenets of Replacement Theory (often called the “Great Replacement”), arguing that deliberate government and corporate policies are systematically displacing Canada’s White founding population through mass immigration, anti-White hiring practices, and cultural marginalization.
He claims White Canadians — especially young White men — are being economically and demographically replaced by “imported,” “taxpayer-subsidized” non-White workers, particularly from India, Pakistan, and Muslim countries. In one post he stated: “UNEMPLOYMENT is much worse among white Canadian young people 15-24 because they are being REPLACED ECONOMICALLY by imported TAXPAYER-SUBSIDIZED INDIAN workers. It’s intentional too!” (Dec. 8, 2024). Emery frames this as intentional, writing that “the white population replacement in Canada is at alarming levels” and accusing institutions of anti-White bigotry with phrases like “WHITE MEN NEED NOT APPLY” in government jobs, universities, and corporations. He nostalgically contrasts today’s Canada with the “largely white” optimistic era of the 1950s–60s and uses terms like “flotsam & jetsam of the Third World,” “Invasion,” and “genocide” to describe the process, warning that White men “aren’t going to submit to genocide.” This narrative ties economic displacement, cultural erasure, and demographic change into a unified story of orchestrated replacement.
“No jobs for White Men in Newfoundland. Someone needs to talk to the Board of Regents at @MemorialU about this filthy, blatant & provocative bigotry against White men. It’s going to fuel a revolution if this shit doesn’t change. White men aren’t going to submit to genocide.” (April 20, 2026)
“Your government of Canada despises straight White males. You see this messaging in everything. Government programs, government funded or regulated jobs (universities, colleges, civil service, Crown corporations etc), TV advertisements, everywhere it’s WHITE MEN NEED NOT APPLY!” (April 20, 2026)
“Accelerating rate of excess males in Canada since Trudeau took over in 2015. The surplus is not of white males, but of Indian & Muslim males. I wonder if that has an impact on the safety of women in our urban areas of Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, London, Hamilton, Edmonton?” (Jan. 5, 2026)
“Young people might not understand that Canada in 1967 was the most hopeful, optimistic, peaceful, beautiful place of stability & continued prosperity in the whole world for two decades 1947-1967. Largely white population but you won’t find any immigrants of colour complaining of that period either.” (Dec. 19, 2024)
“Your government of Canada despises straight White males. You see this messaging in everything. Government programs, government funded or regulated jobs... everywhere it’s WHITE MEN NEED NOT APPLY!” (April 21, 2026)
“Brampton was once a fine White Canadian city where crime was almost unknown. Now a dystopic enclave for the flotsam & jetsam of 3rd 🌍, Canada’s most crime-ridden city. Islamic terrorists welcomed into Canada to carry out violence are honorary Canadians? Never, ever will it be.” (April 9, 2026)
“You’ll notice this flood of flotsam & jetsam from the Third World to Canada came after 10-15 years of mass messaging by corporations & government that Whites are shit & deserve marginalization.” (April 22, 2026)
“UNEMPLOYMENT is much worse among white Canadian young people 15-24 because they are being REPLACED ECONOMICALLY by imported TAXPAYER-SUBSIDIZED INDIAN workers. It’s intentional too! This has been supported for two decades by Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, Greens, Bloc in Ottawa.” (Dec. 8, 2024)
“Corporate Canada hates White Canadians. Academia Canada hates White Canadians. Isn’t it obvious? Straight white males must pretend to suck cock in order to get hired! What degradation! It’s an institutional war against White Men.” (May 15, 2026)
“Because millions of Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Muslims, Africans, have flooded Canada & taken millions of jobs at the expense of young white men & women, have sent housing costs soaring to the severe detriment of young Canadians, health care responses are blighted…” (Nov. 8, 2024)
“Add Vancouver, Richmond, Surrey, Brampton, Mississauga, Toronto to this list of cities where the founding culture is now the minority after a decade or two of Invasion.” (April 24, 2026)
Marc Emery’s Political Aspirations for a White Nationalist Party
As noted, Emery was a candidate for The People’s Party of Canada. Many people view the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) as racist because its strong opposition to mass immigration, official multiculturalism, and “extreme diversity” policies is frequently interpreted as veiled white nationalist rhetoric or the promotion of “Great Replacement” ideas.
Critics point to the party’s platform calls to drastically cut immigration, repeal the Multiculturalism Act, and prioritize cultural assimilation, alongside Maxime Bernier’s past comments decrying the “cult of diversity.” This is compounded by repeated incidents of far-right individuals, white nationalists, and overt racists being attracted to or involved with the party — including founding signatories with neo-Nazi or anti-immigrant ties, controversial local tweets (such as one invoking outdated racial pseudoscience), and resignations from riding associations citing internal racism and antisemitism. While the PPC and Bernier reject the racist label and frame their positions as defending Canadian values and protecting social cohesion, opponents argue the language and associations go beyond legitimate policy debate into group-based scapegoating of immigrants and non-white communities.
Marc Emery ran as the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) candidate in the 2021 federal election in the riding of London North Centre (Ontario), where he finished fourth with about 5% of the vote. At the time, he aligned with the PPC’s platform of reduced immigration, opposition to multiculturalism, and populist conservatism under Maxime Bernier.
More recently (2025–2026), Emery has distanced himself from the PPC, calling it effectively finished after a sharp drop in support. He has instead run for local office as a candidate for Sechelt District Council (Sunshine Coast, BC) on a ‘anti-woke’ platform and repeatedly floated the idea of launching a new federal party — sometimes referred to in his posts as a “Restore Canada” party — explicitly aimed at reversing demographic changes, halting non-White immigration, restoring a “White Canada,” and prioritizing the interests of Canada’s founding (White European) population. His rhetoric in this period has become significantly more overt in promoting white nationalist themes of replacement, cultural preservation for Whites, and criticism of “invasion” by non-White immigrants.
I’m running for Sechelt District Council in the local election here October 19. OPPOSED TO ALL THE WOKE SHIT!
Including:
•Land acknowledgements in any taxpayer paid for or subsidized facility
•Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity (SOGI) in school curricula.
•Gender neutral bathrooms
•pandering to the indigenous & giving them an inch more land, shoreline or waterways
•The flood of foreign workers while our Mayor asks for even more. Foreign workers suppress wages & change the culture of the Sunshine Coast
•Drag Queen Story Hours for children in the Sechelt Library-City Hall building
•Reduced garbage pick up to one barrel
Every two weeks
•Taxes have increased 6-8% for each year since this last group of losers has “run” the district.
•Sechelt District has 4 bureaucrats earning ridiculous big city salaries of over $220,000 a year
•Inadequate pumps that bring too little water from the massive aquifer beneath the entire Sunshine Coast. They put in 5 inadequate water pumps so they can continue to lecture us every summer about conserving water. Woke is to blame, not a lack of water.
•the failure to provide adequate parking at St. Mary’s (Sechelt General) hospital
•anymore homeless shelters. The more we subsidize & enable crime & drug addiction, the more of it we will get.
I will do whatever it takes to make the Sunshine Coast more affordable and practical for young CANADIAN families.
We can be sure Emery’s interest in politics here goes far beyond the municipal level. As we saw at the beginning of the article he is in the beginning process of creating a White Nationalist ‘Restore Canada’ Party. This vision is built purely out of his view that other political parties in Canada, are not nearly racist enough. “All 🇨🇦 political parties will not, cannot, address the elephant in the room; mass migration to 🇨🇦 has been a disaster for Canadians. Cons, Libs, NDP, Bloc, Greens are dominated/influenced by Sikhs, Muslims, Chinese, Indigenous, Indians; sacrificing the birthright of Canadians.” (April 12, 2026)
“Canada is the only country in the western world where not a single one of our 338 Members of Parliament nor a single one of our 105 Senators have expressed caution or alarm or concern about the massive over-immigration happening in Canada. Not a Tory, not a Green, not an NDP, not the Bloc, not the governing @liberal_party” (June 11, 2024)
“Sikhs don’t belong here. This isn’t their country. All the political Parties in Ottawa are corrupted by the many ethnic lobbies. Restore Canada to its former greatness & Whiteness. Canada was 97% white from 1867 to 1970, you have no idea how safe & wonderful it was.” (April 18, 2026)
Emery frames people working on antiracism efforts against Sikhs in Canada as race traitors, as he posted on the International Cannabis Day, 420”: “There is no bigger White race traitor patsy than Brampton Mayor @patrickbrownont. The World Sikh Organization is a Sikh secret society pretty well that manipulates & influences politicians in Canada. Mayor Brown is one of their most useful idiots.” (April 20, 2026): “No one panders to the Sikh community harder than Pierre ‘I Left My Heart in Amritsar’ Poilievre.” (April 24, 2026)
He singled out Poilievre again noting the need for a Canadian white Nationalist Party: “A dozen clips of Pierre Poilievre explicitly selling out those of us born in Canada to hordes of Third World invaders Pierre believes should be here, encouraged to stay, where employers get the cheap labour they need. Need a Restore Canada federal party.” ( May 9, 2026)
Emery is particularly concerned about Sikhs in political positions “A Sikh @PrabSarkaria in charge of Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation is like putting an arsonist in charge of fire prevention.” (Oct, 2, 2025).
This again, becomes part of the call for Emery’s dream of a Canadian White Nationalist Political Party, as he notes that of 160 Liberal members of Parliament 48 are not white people and also questions How did Canadians elect so many Muslim activists/radicals into our government?
Emery bolsters his racism with a cry to make Canada White Again, noting Canada’s first PM’s own racist agenda.
Although this effort is still in it’s infancy, the possibility that Emery could grow such efforts is not something that should be ignored.
Emery has been growing his connections to White Nationalist groups
In recent months, Marc Emery has openly aligned himself with the Dominion Society of Canada (DSC), a registered non-profit that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network describes as the “political arm” of white nationalism in Canada. The group promotes “remigration” — a euphemism for the mass deportation of non-European immigrants — and seeks to push Canadian politics toward explicit ethno-nationalist policies. Emery has publicly endorsed the Dominion Society, paid the membership fee, and confirmed his membership, while actively encouraging his followers to join.
Marc Emery promoting the Dominion society in a Facebook Post (Dec. 8, 2025):
Marc Emery recruiting for the Dominion society in a Facebook Post (April 17, 2026)
He has also expressed strong support for Second Sons of Canada (@SecondSonsCA), a militant nationalist group often described by researchers as part of the “Active Clubs” network associated with white nationalist fitness and activism circles. In one post, Emery stated: “I endorse the Dominion Society @DominionSoc and Second Sons of Canada @SecondSonsCA.” This group was recently highlighted in the CBC story Canadian, U.S. fascist fight clubs joining forces south of the border, CBC investigation finds.
Emery has not publicly named many additional formal organizations, but he frequently promotes his own “Restore Canada” initiative, which mirrors the remigration and white-majority restoration goals of the Dominion Society and Second Sons. He has appeared on far-right platforms such as “Canadian Nationalist Thursday” and consistently amplifies content from this ecosystem.
These connections provide important context for understanding the consistent racial framing in Emery’s recent output.
Sources:
Emery endorsing Dominion Society and Second Sons:
Emery’s additional support for Second Sons:
Canadian Anti-Hate Network and investigative reporting on Dominion Society / Second Sons and antihate.ca/
This alignment marks a notable shift in Emery’s public activity from cannabis advocacy toward organized white nationalist networks, particularly with dangerous groups such as Second Sons. After my initial online confrontation with Emery over his White Nationalist agenda, I did receive messaged threats from the sort of people who would be members of such groups.
Marc Emery Calls for a White Male Canadian Military
The Canadian Armed Forces have faced persistent and well-documented challenges with white nationalist and far-right extremism in their ranks for decades. High-profile cases include reservist Patrik Mathews, exposed in 2019 as a recruiter for the neo-Nazi group The Base, and confirmed members of Atomwaffen Division seeking military training. Investigations have repeatedly uncovered serving members on white supremacist dating sites, participating in fascist fight clubs like Second Sons Canada, and linked to groups such as Diagolon. Independent reports, including a 2022 review and a 2025 University of Alberta-commissioned study, describe deep-rooted white supremacism, systemic racism, and an environment where extremists enlist for combat skills, networking, or to prepare for a perceived “race war.” While the military has implemented screening measures and hateful conduct policies, critics argue enforcement remains inconsistent, allowing the problem to simmer and occasionally erupt into scandals that damage public trust. Emery seems largely in tune with this infiltration
In a series of inflammatory posts on X, Emery has launched a blistering attack on the modern Canadian Armed Forces, portraying it as ruined by diversity, women, and non-white recruits. Echoes of the sort of rhetoric we have heard South of the Border from Pete Hegseth and his purge of “woke” from the American military. Emery’s rhetoric explicitly romanticizes an all-white, male-dominated military of the past while demanding the exclusion of Black Africans, Sikhs, Indians, Muslims, “Third World mercenaries,” and female soldiers. His vision is clear: a restored “White Male Canadian Military” built on exclusion, not inclusion.
The most explicit example came on April 29, 2026, when Emery reacted to reports of ethnic infighting in Canadian Forces training platoons:
“The Canadian military is a total shitshow. Black African mercenaries go at each other over African tribal differences, the black African men are NOT used to bunking with women soldiers, so there’s going to be sexual harassment, rape, assault. It’s nuts we have female soldiers.”(April 29, 2026)
This single post manages to combine anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and outright misogyny in one breath. By labeling Black African recruits “mercenaries” driven by “tribal differences” and blaming the presence of women for inevitable sexual violence, Emery reduces complex integration challenges to crude racial and gender stereotypes. The implication is unmistakable: women and Black soldiers have no place in Canada’s military.
Just days earlier, on April 21, 2026, he mocked efforts to boost recruitment:
“If you want to fill the Canadian Armed Forces with 1,400 non-Canadian ‘permanent residents’, recent Invaders made citizens, mercenaries, women, DEI hires, and the desperate flotsam & jetsam of recent newcomers, yes, you can fill your quota demanded by Trump.” (April 21, 2026)
On April 20, 2026, he escalated the loyalty smear:
“20% (1,400) of the new recruits are not Canadian citizens. Foreign Invaders given guns, security, access. Of the other 80% many are also Indians with a Canadian passport. Big mistake. Who do you think Sikhs/Indians/Muslims are loyal to?” (April 20, 2026)
And in February 2026, Emery openly contrasted “White Canadian born soldiers” with the supposed threat of “Third World mercenaries”:
“White Canadian born soldiers are going to have different loyalties than a Third World mercenary. Sikhs are flooding into Canada… Sikhs are a warrior caste & gravitate to armed service (for better or worse).” (February 20, 2026)
He further idealized a lily-white historical military:
“Show me a photo of any ordinary Canadian battalion in WW1 or WW2 & every single guy is white, although there will be the occasional native in there. You will see few if any blacks, no Sikhs or Muslims…” (February 20, 2026)
This selective nostalgia erases the actual record of Canadian military service — including thousands of Indigenous soldiers, Black volunteers in both world wars, and Sikh and South Asian contributions in later conflicts — while pushing a fantasy of racial purity.
Emery’s broader worldview makes his military fixation even more toxic. He has repeatedly described non-white immigrants as “flotsam & jetsam,” “invaders,” and “scammer cultures” who “change the character of Canada.” Applying that same lens to the Armed Forces, he demands a force that prioritizes “White Canadian born soldiers” and rejects everyone else. His call to exclude women — framed as protecting them from the very recruits he demonizes — is textbook misogyny dressed up as concern.
This is not legitimate criticism of recruitment policy or integration challenges. It is naked white nationalist grievance politics aimed at the one institution that is supposed to defend all Canadians. By stoking fears of “tribal differences,” disloyalty, and sexual violence, Emery is actively undermining morale, cohesion, and public trust in the Canadian military. His solution — a de facto White Male Canadian Military — is as un-Canadian as it is dangerous.
Emery seems to hold a similar view on policing, noting in a Tweet “Wherever you have Sikhs & Indians, you find massive corruption, infiltration by organized crime, bribery. 82 Brampton, Ontario area police officers willing to cheat to advance. A new low in policing. Get Muslims, Sikhs, Indians, Women out of policing!” (April 4, 2026)
/photo/1
Canada’s strength has always come from its ability to draw on diverse talent while maintaining professional standards. Emery’s vision would turn back the clock to an exclusionary past that never truly existed in the pure form he imagines, while ignoring the real sacrifices made by Canadians of every background. His posts do not strengthen Canada; they divide and weaken it. In a time of global tension, the last thing the Canadian Armed Forces needs is a loud voice calling for racial and gender segregation under the guise of “restoring” the military.
Emery Broadcasting Hate Speech?
One of my concerns is that Emery could get a podcast going — something like the “White Power Hour with Marc Emery.” I suspect the only thing saving us from this is his nightshift work stocking shelves in a grocery store warehouse, a lack of technical support and funding. He has been trying to make a few extra bucks by selling celebrity birthday wishes and such, but as his reputation has pretty much been destroyed in the cannabis reform movement, and his identity in the White Supremacy movement is little known. However, the latter is changing.
On Thursday, May 7, 2026, Marc Emery appeared as a guest on the Canadian Nationalist Thursday X Space hosted by @BlondeBigot11 (Joanna Evenson). The host announced: “Hi Frens! Tomorrow night for Canadian Nationalist Thursday we’ll be joined by @MarcScottEmery, BC’s charismatic ‘Prince of Pot’ whose fairly recent character arc from libertarian to nationalist has been fascinating to witness.” Emery teased it enthusiastically as “going on Fox & Friends or The View.”
@BlondeBigot11, with ~58k followers, is a leading voice in Canada’s online White Nationalist scene. She is best known for her aggressive anti-trans activism, including a high-profile 2023–2024 campaign against a transgender/non-binary art teacher (Wilson Wilson) in Pitt Meadows, BC. Evenson posted screenshots of the teacher’s personal photos (including post-surgery images), accused them of inappropriate behavior, and helped amplify the story through Libs of TikTok, leading to widespread harassment. The teacher later filed a human rights complaint against her for transphobic harassment. She frequently uses terms like “groomer” and mocks “trans day of visibility” events.
Her content also regularly features explicitly racist rhetoric that strongly overlaps with Emery’s views. Examples include posts claiming Indians/Sikhs are flooding jobs and depressing wages, calling non-White immigrants “invaders,” complaining about “dark skinned foreigners” changing Canada’s character, and statements like “If you have Canadian children, you better get real racist, real fast.” She often highlights crimes by Sikh, Indian, or Muslim individuals and generalizes them to entire communities — exactly the same pattern Emery uses with “Sikh scammer culture,” “Pakistani rape gangs,” “Muslim invaders,” and “replacement” fears.
These shared obsessions with anti-trans activism, demographic replacement, and framing non-White immigration as an existential threat to White Canada served as natural meeting points between Emery and @BlondeBigot11. Their May 7 space appearance publicly cemented this alignment, giving Emery visibility in nationalist circles while helping normalize his harder-edged racial rhetoric.
Emery can be an engaging speaker, and I am sure if he had the time, energy and money to do it, he could easily grow a large crowd of Nazis, Soldiers of Odin, Proud Boys, and other White Nationalist viewers. This would take the harm of his toxic view beyond Canadian borders as well.
This brings us to our conclusion, and the Question of What Can Be Done About Emery’s Promotion of Hate? One avenue of defence may lay in Canadian legislation regarding Hate Speech.
Has Marc Emery Violated Canadian Hate Speech Laws?
“‘Hate speech’ laws are only intended to be used against white people. Hate speech is the excuse for anti-white laws that are enabling the demonization of white cultures. In our schools, universities, job searches, applications, government programs for cheap foreign labor; all reinforce the ethos that white people are lesser people who can be de-prioritized, marginalized & replaced by new third world arrivals This is happening now despite the clearly obvious fact that every modern device, machine, invention we use today was developed by white European men.” -Marc Emery (Sept. 2, 2024)
Canadian hate speech law, primarily Section 319 of the Criminal Code, prohibits the wilful promotion of hatred and the public incitement of hatred against identifiable groups based on race, colour, religion, ethnic origin, or other protected characteristics. These provisions aim to prevent statements that vilify groups in ways likely to lead to harm or breach of the peace. While free speech is robustly protected, courts have drawn a line when language crosses into dehumanization, collective blame, or calls for violence or segregation. Here are four of the clearest examples from Marc Emery’s public statements in 2025–2026 that legal observers might argue cross that line.
1. Calls to Restore Jim Crow Segregation and Lynching for Black People
Emery has repeatedly advocated bringing back Jim Crow laws and suggested lynching as a solution to Black crime. In one post he wrote:
“Bring back Jim Crow! White girls & women didn’t get raped by savage Black young men every single hour of every day in the USA when Jim Crow laws (1877-1964) kept the violent impulses of the Black man under control.”
Similar statements include “Bring back Jim Crow. The 61-year old experiment of giving Blacks unrestricted access to white society was an enormous historical error” and praise for lynching as a deterrent: “if there was still [such a] thing called lynching, black Americans would be way better behaved.”
Under Section 319(2), portraying an entire racial group as inherently “savage” with “violent impulses” that require segregation or extrajudicial violence can constitute wilful promotion of hatred. Courts have previously found that sweeping racial stereotypes combined with calls to restore oppressive systems meet the threshold for promoting detestation.
2. Advocating Violence Against Indigenous Protesters
In response to infrastructure blockades, Emery posted:
“Any indigenous band that blocks railroads or any infrastructure should be dealt with by truncheons cracking their skulls within 24 hours. When you seize railroads you are going to war. Time to finish the job our ancestors didn’t.”
This statement directly calls for immediate physical violence against members of an identifiable Indigenous group. Section 319(1) covers public incitement of hatred likely to lead to a breach of the peace. Explicitly urging authorities or individuals to crack skulls and “finish the job” of historical conquest is among the most straightforward examples of potential incitement.
3. Dehumanizing Muslim and South Asian Men as Rapists and Invaders
Emery has repeatedly described certain immigrant groups in highly inflammatory terms. Two representative statements:
“Any country is putting all their women at risk by importing hordes of Muslims from Pakistan, India, Afghanistan... These vile men are obsessed with raping White women.”
And:
“All those rapey dark Third World degenerates watching White women porn all day wondering when it’s their turn to rape a White girl or woman.”
By framing entire ethnic and religious communities as predatory “hordes,” “degenerates,” and “rapey” threats obsessed with assaulting White women, these posts promote collective guilt and dehumanization. Canadian courts have ruled that language reducing groups to inherent sexual predators or existential threats can violate hate speech laws, especially when tied to calls for exclusion or deportation.
4. Characterizing Sikh and Indian Communities as Inherent “Scammer Cultures”
Emery has made numerous statements such as:
“Sikh/Indian Scammer culture strikes again... These people are not compatible with Canadian values. For defrauding the elderly, 25 lashes. Then DEPORT!”
He has also referred to Indian immigrants broadly as “flotsam & jetsam of the Third World” who come to “exploit and destroy” Canada. Labeling an ethnic community as a “scammer culture” inherently incompatible with Canadian society, while advocating corporal punishment and mass deportation, goes beyond policy critique into group vilification. This pattern of statements could be viewed as wilfully promoting hatred against people of South Asian origin.
These four examples — advocating segregation and lynching for Black people, calling for violent suppression of Indigenous protesters, depicting Muslim and South Asian men as rapists, and branding Sikh/Indian communities as scammer cultures — represent some of the strongest potential violations of Section 319. Each uses dehumanizing language, attributes negative traits to entire groups by race, ethnicity, or religion, and in some cases explicitly encourages violence or extreme discriminatory policies.
Emery and his supporters would likely argue these statements are protected opinion, rooted in crime statistics or cultural observations, and fall under defences of truth-seeking or public interest. Whether prosecutors would pursue charges (which require Attorney General consent for many hate speech cases) would depend on a full contextual analysis, including audience reach and likelihood of harm. Nevertheless, the quoted material sits in the zone that has triggered complaints and investigations in similar Canadian cases. The question remains open, but the legal risk is evident.
In order to address these issues, I have created a petition at Change. org, to encourage the RCMP’s Hate Crimes Unit to Investigate Marc Emery for alleged Hate Speech
We are asking for a proper police investigation to determine whether these specific communications meet the legal threshold for hate propaganda under Canadian law — the same standard applied to others in the past.
Our request:
The Sunshine Coast RCMP (Sechelt Detachment) and the BC RCMP Hate Crimes Unit open a formal hate crime investigation into Marc Emery’s public statements from 2025–2026.The BC Prosecution Service review the evidence for potential charges under Criminal Code s. 319.Greater transparency and accountability regarding the enforcement of Canada’s hate speech laws.Protecting free speech does not require tolerating the wilful promotion of hatred against entire racial, ethnic, or religious communities. We urge authorities to apply the law consistently and fairly.
Please sign and share this petition so that Canadian law is upheld. -Petition: Investigate Marc Emery for alleged Hate Speech
CONCLUSION
Emery’s descent from Libertarian activism, into White Nationalist hate, has been a disturbing thing to document, and his indoctrination process towards that, via figures like Peterson and Saad, can be seen in disenfranchised white men who have followed a similar path. Where this all concludes, remains to be seen, and how that turns out, largely depends on what truly righteous and freedom loving people do in response to this. We only have to look South of the Border to see how movements like this can foster and grow.
And Emery, if you are reading this, you need to no longer refer to yourself as the ‘Prince of Pot’. Such a claim is a slur to cannabis users the World over and through history. May its sacred smoke cause you to choke. Your racism now exceeds that of cannabis’ worst enemies, like Harry Anslinger and Emily Murphy. Moreover, you yourself know you can never again attend any major cannabis event or gathering, as too many people know you as an accused sexual predator, and extreme racist now. Cannabis is a celebrated plant that is shared in all the Nations of people you despise and preach hate against. Like Canadian society, cannabis culture’s history and myth is a multiethnic celebration of diversity and inclusion, which you are no longer a part of. All your former colleagues in this movement, save for a few lost souls who followed with you in your descent (yeah you Bours and Goodwin) reject and renounce you. Nevermore the ‘Prince of Pot’ now and forever, you shall be the ‘Pariah of Pot’, and this will be your legacy, and I will make sure of that. So mote it be.
https://pot-shot.ca/2026/05/21/shart-empathy/
Getting through this piece by piece, as it’s incredibly well written and supremely detailed.
This has given me a lot to think about for various reasons.
Before I give my extensive thoughts on Emery, this article in particular, and other topics. I want to share that I am Christian Malcolm Honour Goodwin, the son of Chris Goodwin(who is mentioned here). I go by my middle name Malcolm. I’ve known Marc for many years, even lived with him at a point in my life.
I feel that I have a very unique perspective on Marc, Chris, and the cannabis scene as a whole as I was introduced to it by Chris at an extremely early age.
Thank you for writing this.