When we last caught up with the Sudbury Electoral District Association of the People’s Party of Canada, their candidate was Jason Lafauci, a local weed guy and far-right agitator. Soon after we published that piece, Jason was removed from his position after posting that the Prime Minister should be hanged. Now, there is a new man on the scene repping the PPC in Sudbury:
Sean Paterson is an ex-airborne infantry soldier and muscle car enthusiast who works in the mining sector. He should be really easy to see around town, because he has huge PPC stickers on his car.
Interestingly, Jason Lafauci is still on the scene as well. These Facebook posts from the Sudbury EDA’s page conspicuously promote his conspiracy theories about used needles.
We’re going to go out on a limb and suggest that Jason is still running that page.
This “local man” happens to be Jason Lafauci.
Jason has been talking about knocking on doors for the party and trying to get others to volunteer to do the same.
And he’s also saying that he’s the president of their Electoral District Association.
Ain’t that some shit.
However, everywhere else, it’s all about Sean Paterson, who we’re guessing doesn’t care that Jason recently said we should execute the Prime Minister. Sean Paterson is the candidate listed on the PPC’s website and all of the links there go to his social media pages at the time of this writing.
If you ignore the aesthetic differences, Sean is much like his predecessor. His views and conspiracy theories are very similar.
He also likes to share content from followers of Q Anon. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Q Anon is essentially a millenarian cult that developed on online forums. They believe that hidden elements in the U.S. government are working with Donald Trump to overthrow the “deep state”. We’ve never observed Sean talking about Q Anon himself, but he does look to be at least adjacent to the Q cult.
(UPDATE: Sean did say something about Q Anon later in the day after we published this, so here it is.)
Sean is also a fan of former intelligence official turned racist grifter Tom Quiggan. Guys like Tom Quiggan are a dime a dozen down in the United States, where there is a whole cottage industry of “intelligence insiders” who use their resumes to give credence to the outlandish views that they now advocate. In Quiggan’s case, this manifests in conspiracy theories about Muslims taking over the country.
When he’s not busy sharing stuff from cults and Islamophobic disinformation artists, Sean also finds the time to tweet some of his own views, like his opinion that white supremacist Faith Goldy is a sellout who is not far right enough.
As far as how much local support the PPC have; it’s still hard to gauge, but we’ve been keeping an eye out for what the rest of the far-right have been saying.
Chris Chaperon of the Soldiers of Odin (SOO) is not on board it seems, but we suspect this is more for reasons of optics than political disagreement. Let’s a remember that one of their members was a PPC candidate for a while and they have close ties to Jason Lafauci, so there’s likely some variance in opinions amongst the SOO.
Dan Dubois of Canadian Combat Coalition (C3) is all-in though:
Sean even reciprocated and shared one of Dan’s posts. Isn’t that nice?
The Yellow Vests seem on board too:
And of course this nazi gun nut guy loves them:
It’s safe to say there is definitely a far-right constituency here on Sudbury and it’s not going anywhere any time soon. What’s most notable here with the PPC is the support from sections of the far-right and extreme right that are divided by their different aesthetic preferences.
Put another way: The PPC have demonstrated that they can appeal to Baby Boomers, Gen-X’ers and Millenials from a variety of very different right-wing subcultures.
As far as their prospects for electoral success, those are of course not very good. But not everything in politics is about numbers and popular support from the masses – despite what many of us like to think. Even a few white supremacists can have a major effect and one needs only to look at a few of our online spaces, some of our local bars or the city of Hamilton to see how quickly and easily a place can get bad.
(The second part of our coverage of the PPC can be found here.)
Anti-Racist Sudbury 