Maclean's: A bit of background on Mario Beaulieu

So Mario Beaulieu, president of Montreal’s Société-Saint-Jean-Baptiste, is peeved at how during the election, “Anglophone media in Quebec and Canada multiplied accusations of xenophobia and all sorts of other slanderous insinuations towards sovereignists and defenders of French.” Let’s put aside the tar-brush generalization of “Anglophone media”—we aren’t all the same, Mario—and the fact that he didn’t cite a single example of Anglo media’s supposed overindulgences in his letter. Rather, let’s have a look at the recent past of the organization that is making these accusations.

In 2006, the SSJB hosted Fleurdelix et Les Affreux Galois, a band with ties to the “Rock identitaire français” movement. Two of its members, Jonathan Stack and Simon Cadieux, are former members of a band called Trouble Makers, which was on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of known white power rock bands.

Fleurdelix et Les Affreux Galois played the SSJB’s headquarters on Sherbrooke Street at the behest of François Gendron, then the SSJB’s youth wing president. Gendron has longtime ties with noted Front de Libération du Quebec member and convicted murderer Raymond Villeneuve ...