Marc Lemire tells CHCH claims against him are false

The city of Hamilton employee who’s the centre of an investigation over his alleged ties to Neo-Nazi groups reached out to CHCH following our report, to give his side of the story.

Marc Lemire, an IT analyst for the city of Hamilton emailed us to pinpoint what he felt were factual mistakes with CHCH’s report regarding his ties to the white nationalist group Heritage Front, widely regarded as the most prominent hate group in Canada since the Klu Klux Klan.

In the email Lemire says, “I am not and have not been the president, or the last known leader of the Heritage Front. To be clear: I reject what they stand for. Period.”

However, a 2005 judge’s decision recognized Lemire as just that. The document read, “Mr. Lemire, the last known president of the Heritage Front, was working for Mr. Zündel part-time and then full-time for many years until Mr. Zündel left for the United States.”

Lemire’s own website, the freedomsite, includes a blog by one of the founding members of the Heritage Front, Greg Lincoln who wrote an open letter to the ‘new leadership’ specifically Marc Lemire, who seems to have assumed the role of head honcho and put his good name on the line.

Lemire also says he took issue with local activist and lawyer Craig Burley’s concerns he shared with CHCH over the information accessible to Lemire due to his job. Lemire wrote in part that Burley stated that no such allegation has ever been made against me before nor substantiated by any court.

A former Heritage Front member, Elisa Hategan, detailed to CHCH her and Lemire’s roles with the Heritage Front, “myself and Marc by the way were given instructions on how to find personal information of anti racist activists and community members, so we would harass and terrorize them afterwards.”

Additionally, the same 2005 court records say that Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundell had close ties with members of violent racist and extremist movement. The document goes on to list a number of associated names including Marc Lemire.

Lemire has never been found guilty of any hate crimes. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal did however find that Lemire violated a now-repealed hate speech provision after he posted an article written in the 1990’s about the aids virus’ links to homosexuality.