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Home Forums A SECURITY AND NEWS FORUM Far-right activist Tommy Robinson landed in Canada — and was arrested. Who is he, and what happens next?

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    Nat Quinn
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    When the anti-Muslim and anti-immigration activist from the U.K. known as Tommy Robinson landed in Montreal earlier this month, he rolled his teal suitcase into the arrivals area, straight to the woman with a microphone and camera.

    First, a hug. Then, the questions about travelling to Canada.

    “Were you scared?” she asks, in the video posted to the social feeds of far-right website Rebel News on June 18.

    “Of course,” Robinson says with a laugh. “I never thought I was getting in.

    “The whole time flying here I didn’t expect to get in,” he continues. “I didn’t even book a hotel!”

    The question of whether or not Robinson should be in the country — and what he should be doing if here — has taken on some urgency after he was arrested and then released in Calgary on an immigration offence immediately after the first event of a planned three-stop Canadian tour.

    His speaking tour of Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto was his first trip to Canada. If the trip originally flew under the radar, that changed Monday when another video posted to social media showed him being handcuffed outside a hotel in Calgary, by two undercover police officers who say — before driving him away — he has an “outstanding immigration warrant.” A spokesperson for Calgary police confirmed that while they’d assisted in the arrest, it’d been conducted at the instructions of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

    Everyone travelling to Canada must show they meet the requirements to enter the country, the CBSA notes, and someone can be ruled admissible for a slew of concerns, including criminal activity or human rights violations. The specific allegation Robinson faces is misrepresentation — which can include giving information that is untrue, misleading or incomplete — a spokesperson for the immigration division of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada said on Thursday.

    Now Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, faces a hearing, which “will determine whether or not Mr. Lennon is admissible to Canada and whether or not he will be authorized to remain or be ordered removed from Canada,” the spokesperson said in an email.

    Who is Tommy Robinson?

    Robinson is one of Britain’s most high-profile far-right figures, and one of the loudest voices in the anti-Muslim movement that sprang up in the 2000s, says Dan Collen, an extremism researcher and associate of the Canadian Institute for Far-Right Studies. “There was a lot of Islamophobia in the years post-9/11, and figures like Robinson pushed that to further limits than were necessarily socially acceptable before his time,” Collen says.

    Robinson helped found the now-defunct English Defence League, an anti-Islamic protest organization, which has been banned from Facebook and Meta for breaking rules on hate speech. According to the Irish Times, he has criminal convictions related to assaulting a police office, stalking, and fraud, and has been jailed for using a false passport to enter the U.S.

    He is believed to have raised significant funds in donations from followers but declared bankruptcy after losing a 2021 libel case after falsely accusing a teenage Syrian refugee of violently attacking “young English girls.”

    His history has caused problems entering other countries. In 2018, he was denied a visa to attend an event about Islam in the U.S. after 55 British lawmakers publicly asked he not be allowed in, citing concerns he would use the trip as an opportunity to raise funds. He was also detained in Mexico in 2022 while trying to go vacation.

    Both Robinson and his hosts have blasted the arrest as an act of censorship. “Tommy’s message of freedom of speech and opposition to mass migration could be the real the reason he was arrested,” reads one story posted on Rebel News.

    “I just humiliated the Canadian government on an international level,” Robinson told an online interviewer Wednesday, speaking from a beige-toned hotel room. (When getting arrested, he was a little blunter: “F—- Justin Trudeau,” he can be heard saying before the doors of the police vehicle close.)

    People with violent convictions often have trouble getting into Canada, Collen says, and based on Robinson’s history and his comments on arrival, it seemed not unlikely he expected he might get arrested.

    Now Robinson has said on social media that he’s been required to turn in his passport and remain in southern Alberta, which has thrown a wrench into his travel plans. Rebel News’ owner, Ezra Levant, is now arranging a lawyer. (The lawyer they are said to have hired did not respond to requests for comment.)

    Despite the restrictions on his movements, Robinson seems to have kept busy. According to his feed on X, formerly Twitter, he has done an in-person interview with so-called “Freedom Convoy” leader Tamara Lich — his podcast is called SILENCED — and had a video chat with Ontario MPP Goldie Ghamari. (The Carleton MPP was kicked out of Premier Doug Ford’s caucus on Friday, after Ford called the meeting “deeply regrettable.”)

    The Rebel is now crowdfunding donations — by cheque or e-transfer — to help fund a lawyer for Robinson, and according to its website, had raised over half of its goal of 1,500 donations by Wednesday.

    (According to online archives, the Rebel has owned the domain http://www.tommytrial.com since at least 2019, when it was used to raise funds for Levant to go to London to cover a harassment case Robinson launched against Cambridgeshire police, arguing they’d kicked him out of a pub because of his beliefs about Islam. He eventually lost, with the judge noting he “isn’t as well known as he and his supporters may think.”)

    In an interview with another online publication, he also addressed claims from some social media users that he had gotten arrested as a publicity stunt, a claim which he called “ridiculous.”

    “How can I purposely get myself arrested? How?” he said. “Why would I do that? I’m sat in my hotel room, I’ve got to be out now in 10 minutes, I have to change hotel rooms again, I missed my event in Edmonton, I’m missing my event in Toronto,” he added. “I don’t normally like to entertain these ridiculous allegations.”

    For now, he awaits his admissibility hearing, which the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada said will be scheduled in due course.

     

    British anti-Islam campaigner arrested in Canada (thestar.com)

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