“Do I look like a terrorist to you, lady?”
That was the first question a young Windsor man asked an RCMP interviewer shortly after members of a special federal anti-terrorist police unit plucked him off a city sidewalk and carted him off to a holding cell.
“No, I’m not saying you look like … I’m not judging here,” Sgt. Shelly Schedewitz responded.
What followed was more than an hour of what the police officer told Seth Bertrand would be a “chit chat” about the “significant charges” he was facing. Their meeting — audio-recorded and videotaped in an interview room at Windsor police headquarters on May 5, 2022 — was played Wednesday at Bertrand’s terrorism trial across the street at the Superior Court of Justice building.
When it’s suggested he participated in and/or contributed to the Atomwaffen Division — labeled by Canada, the U.S. and other countries as a violent neo-Nazi terrorist network — Bertrand initially responds: “I was never involved with Atomwaffen.” But then he soon confesses he had “tried to get involved with them.”
He told Schedewitz he had learned it was a “para-military terrorist organization … I wanted to jump on that.” Bertrand said he was even in contact “with one of their guys in Canada for a while.”
But Bertrand, 21 years old today but 19 at the time he was taken into custody, told the arresting and interviewing RCMP officers “that stuff” was now in his past.
Bertrand is charged with the Criminal Code offence of “participation in the activity of a terrorist group.” The RCMP alleges he “offered his skills and commitment to do things for this listed terrorist entity.”
Sworn documents filed in court for a trial that began this week and continues in November were made available to the media Wednesday. They include a copy of the online application Bertrand is alleged to have filled out to join Atomwaffen, a global far-right group accused of having committed murders and which calls for acts of violence against racial, religious and ethnic groups, police and others to, according to Public Safety Canada, “prompt the collapse of society.”
Asked on the application form why he wanted to join the Atomwaffen Division, or National Socialist Order, Bertrand, 18 at the time and still in school, said the group’s “professionalism and your propaganda quality … stands out to me. I wanna be a part of that.”
Adding a quote from German fascist leader Adolf Hitler, Bertrand said if he’s accepted as a member, “I promise all my loyalty to you” and that he wants to be a part of a group “actually doing things to help save/protect the white race.”
Bertrand mentions he was in the military cadets. To the question, ‘Why should we bother to recruit you?’ Bertrand wrote he was once “running my own division” and that he had “already proven myself worth (sic) … a stunt of mine made it in the local news.”
Bertrand came onto the radar of Canada’s national security watchdogs after being charged by Windsor police for a string of unsettling vandalism incidents targeting a same-sex couple’s home and the Trans Wellness Ontario office in Windsor in early 2021. He was convicted of hate crimes and sentenced in August 2022 to five months house arrest.
Bertrand insisted in his RCMP interview that those interests and activities were in his past — “a very dark patch in my life that I do not like” — and that “I never actually ended up joining them.” He pointed out Atomwaffen wasn’t yet “registered as a terrorist organization” at the time he sought to join, his application filled out on his school computer account.
I became a Neo-Nazi
“It was stupid,” he told Schedewitz. It started, he said, after a “really nasty” breakup with a girlfriend followed by depression and then being approached by a sympathetic fellow cadet who knew “a lot of people that feel just like you and who can help you.
“I was introduced to National Socialism. I became a Neo-Nazi.”
Asked by Schedewitz about his interests, Bertrand replied: “I’ve always been interested in the military and stuff like that … I’ve always thought that I’ve belonged behind the butt of a rifle.” He said he’d tried to join the military reserves but “failed the aptitude test by one mark.”
The defence is challenging the admissibility of the entire statement Bertrand gave police, arguing the accused’s Charter rights were violated by not being given proper access to his lawyer of choice nor being properly instructed as to the criminal jeopardy he faced in speaking to investigators.
Defence lawyer Bobby Russon, in another document filed with the court, argues the Crown’s case against Bertrand “relies solely” on the emailed Atomwaffen application.
The trial continues next month, but Superior Court Justice Maria Carroccia must still rule on the defence’s Charter application.