City hall in Toronto in winter with the skating rink open. Canada is often imagined as a welcoming place, but there has been a recent rise in negative sentiments towards immigrants and immigration. Several commentators have pushed the narrative further. Photo: Tiago Louvize

The Anti-Immigration Playbook

The right-wing and, increasingly, centrists have taken to scapegoating recent immigrants for problems like housing, job security and cost-of-living. Instead of looking at underlying problems like lack of government investment in services, people are being drawn to simplistic explanations that certain groups of people are to blame.

At the centre of it all are media-makers and politicians who have persistently pushed that agenda forward.

One prominent figure is Harrison Faulkner, a young writer and podcaster with the far-right publication True North.

The publication’s parent company, True North Centre for Public Policy, has received big money from powerful sources, such as $540,000 from Gwyn Morgan, who used to be the CEO of oil company Encana. This was noticed by Geoff Dembicki at DeSmog, a climate-focused outlet that has also reported on True North’s coverage opposing various climate policies.

Much like his ideological predecessors, such as Gavin McInnes and Jonathan Kay, Faulkner plays on age-old concerns: Where is my taxpayer money going? Why is the cost of living unaffordable? What sets Faulkner and those like him apart is that rather than focus on billionaires and major corporations, he has, for a while, suggested the problem is mostly immigrants and migrants, including international students. He focuses often on South Asians, particularly Indians.

This comes at a time when we are seeing a new generation of right-wing media makers online, such as True North reporters Cosmin Dzsurdzsa and Rachel Parker and the amplification of longtime media personalities Lauren Southern and Lauren Chen.

There is some overlap between uber-conservative rhetoric and the “manosphere” of incels (involuntary celibate men who largely blame women and “wokeness” for their lack of sexual intimacy).

Syed Hussan, executive director of the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change, says what’s critical in all of this is the cross- fertilization that happens from far-right extremists to the mainstream right-wing and then to the mainstream media and policy.

We saw “cross-fertilization” through the rise of the “trad-wife” aesthetic, meaning “traditional wife,” a trend of adhering to a certain set of gender roles and often accompanied by other right-wing cultural ideologies. With TikTok being a prime space for it to grow, alt-right tendencies of nationalism and anti-feminism filtered into the feeds of mainstream social media spaces.

This rhetoric exists in a wider ecosystem on social media platforms, being shared on Instagram Reels, TikTok and X (formerly
Twitter), which extends the reach far beyond True North followers. Hussan calls it an “alternative reality” of disinformation.

“There’s this growing idea that immigrants are responsible for the housing crisis … to the point that we have seen the federal government make so many changes [such that over] a million temporary permits will be set to expire next year,” he says. This is a major shift from a government and business community which supported immigration and which, until recently, saw it as a key to the health of the economy.

Faulkner’s video reporting for True North consistently brings a whirlwind of hysteria, with many viewers responding with hard-line anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Back in May, Faulkner covered a protest in P.E.I., organized by international students. He was confronted by an organizer and asked to leave. “Why did you post that video, and you don’t even know what’s happening here?” asks the organizer. “How much hate did you spread with that video? Are you aware of that?” they continue, referring to his previous video which was published with the headline: “Time To Leave.”

In the video, Faulkner says that many of these students did not come to Canada with the intent to study, implying that they abused the system.

“No, I’m posting a video on what’s publicly available,” Faulkner replies to the organizer.

“Thank you for taking the time to come here. You should have contacted us first so you would know what’s happening here,” the organizer tells Faulkner.

The Grind reached out to True North to ask Faulkner to comment for this article but did not hear back before publication.

In online circles, content is shared quickly. For example, an image posted by Faulkner and others was widely shared, claiming to show a Sikh man defecating at a gas station. It was debunked as fake by the owner of the gas station. But regardless, the image posted by Faulkner was seen over nine million times on X and many people still believe it happened. Faulkner’s caption reads in part: “Mass immigration is totally working.”

Faulkner is consistently critical of the Trudeau government, pointing the finger toward them when it comes to immigration. He sticks to what sells, which currently is mainly anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Content is “often [shared] even without commentary,” says Hussan. “For example, you’ll have a Reel of young brown kids in Brampton having a fight. Somebody posts it on Snapchat or elsewhere, and then it’s cut, made shorter … but because it’s part of this ecosystem, it doesn’t need interpretation, right?” Hussan says. People repost it with captions like: “Can you believe this is Canada?”

Journalist Rachel Gilmore has been vocal about errors in Faulkner’s posts.

He posted a video from a street party in Brampton with almost all brown people, without noting that it was a sanctioned festival with a city permit. His caption said, in part, “Imagine living on this street.”

Gilmore has also reported on Faulkner disclosing the names of MPs with dual citizenship to far-right extremists on Telegram. “Harrison is a megaphone for really fringe ideas, and there are others like him, like Alex Jones,” Gilmore tells The Grind. “It’s
basically these people who have a foot in the extremist world and a foot in the mainstream.”

Gilmore says the extremism is seen when Faulkner echoes the same rhetoric you see on “really dark Telegram channels” such as Diagolon, a far-right white supremacist group.

“I sometimes see them sharing Harrison’s work on their channels,” says Gilmore. “What ends up happening is [people] like Harrison can launder these more extreme messages to a more mainstream audience.”

Previously, Faulkner, through True North, interviewed Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre — one of few publications to do so. Poilievre has also amplified Faulkner’s work by reposting it on social media.

Recently, Faulkner has been part of the residential school denialism discourse that has been on the rise. An episode of his Ratio’d show focused on that topic and was eventually taken down from Spotify for “inciting violence or hatred.”

Whether Faulkner is aware of it or not, he appears to create a breeding ground for extremism to grow.

According to Gilmore, it stems from Faulkner operating from a set of values and ways of viewing society that are not reflective of our laws or culture within Canada, many of which were held up by previous generations of commentators.

His recent tweets about the clashes in Brampton are an example that Gilmore uses. Faulkner shared an episode of Ratio’d, covering the counter-Hindu protests in Brampton with the caption reading: “Mass immigration from India has created a situation where a violent foreign religious conflict is taking over city streets.”

“The implication in that tweet is that there are domestic religious conflicts. But Canada doesn’t have a state religion. … We are a secular society,” says Gilmore. She goes on to say that he creates this “us versus them” dynamic where the “us” is white and Christian and “them” is anyone outside of that.

Faulkner’s work feeds into the ecosystem, says Gilmore. “It’s working for him, his following on [X] is getting bigger and bigger, and that means that’s going to have more reach.”

Gilmore says that the best way to combat this rhetoric is to continue to criticize his work and only try to cover egregious and problematic narratives he shares without over-platforming him.

“I constantly worry about increasing his platform,” she says. “But, when people write articles or make videos exposing what is actually at the root of this…and demonstrating how the rhetoric is prejudicial in nature, that counters the narrative that he’s trying to create for himself as a safe person to be trusted. What you might do is help pull the wool back from someone’s eyes.”

This article appeared in the 2024 Dec - 2025 Jan issue.