OTTAWA - An Austrian man who has been permanently banned from the United Kingdom for promoting extremist narratives said this week he hopes Canada won’t deny him entry ahead of a conference he’s set to speak at in Hamilton this month.

Martin Sellner is being marketed as a keynote speaker for an Aug. 29 conference of the Dominion Society, which advocates for “remigration,” the mass deportation of immigrants.

Sellner was permanently banned in 2019 from entering the U.K. on security grounds. A U.K. government letter, which was publicized by Sellner’s organization, said he posed a serious threat to the country’s efforts to counter extremism, according to a report in The Guardian.

Sellner’s U.S. travel permit was also cancelled in 2019 after it emerged that the gunman behind the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand donated about 1,500 euros to him. The Christchurch shooter was convicted of killing 51 people and the attempted murder of 40 more in the March 2019 terrorist attack.

German authorities gave Sellner a three-year entry ban in 2024 after a meeting of nationalists triggered large protests.

Citing privacy laws, Canadian government officials won’t say if Sellner will be admitted to Canada. A spokesperson for Immigration Minister Lena Diab’s office said in an email that anyone coming to Canada must meet admissibility requirements set out in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

People may be deemed inadmissible to Canada for any one of a number of reasons, including espionage, taking part in a group involved in violence or terrorism, or being a member of an organized crime group.

On Tuesday, Sellner replied to an X post from the Dominion Society promoting his appearance at the conference, saying: “I hope they let me in.”

Ameil Joseph, a Hamilton-based anti-racism scholar, said that if other countries have restricted Sellner’s access, Canada should consider doing the same.

“If he wants to talk, he can do so. He can do it online. He can do anywhere else. He doesn’t need to physically come to Hamilton to a place that already has a growing white nationalist problem,” Joseph said.

Hamilton Mayor Andrea Horwath said in a statement she’s been contacting venue owners in the area to tell them what the Dominion Society stands for so they can make booking decisions with the “full context.”

“The Dominion Society’s own website identifies ‘remigration’ as a central objective of its movement, and the Canadian Anti-Hate Network has identified the organization as part of Canada’s broader white-nationalist movement,” Horwath said.

“While people are free to express their views, I have always been clear that there is no place for hate, racism or discrimination in Hamilton.”

The mayor added that the City of Hamilton will not rent any space to the Dominion Society.

The group’s website describes remigration as “the return of foreigners to their respective homelands” and advocates for a 10-year immigration moratorium, stripping people of permanent residency and deporting five to nine million people.

The group says this is “the only path forward” to address challenges in Canada like the high cost of housing and a tough labour market. The Dominion Society puts a specific focus on the Indian population in Canada.

Daniel Tyrie, Dominion Society chair, said in an emailed response that his group’s legal team can’t see why Sellner would be deemed inadmissible and argued any attempt to stop him from coming to Canada would be “a blatant act of political persecution.”

He added that Horwath’s comments are “inappropriate and unbecoming of her office.”

“Canadians — even those you might disagree with — have a right to peacefully assemble and discuss their vision for the future,” Tyrie said in the email Wednesday.

“Her comments feed a toxic environment of political polarization and encourage unhinged activists to engage in violence and acts of terrorism. She should retract them and apologize.”

Joseph said that the city has faced challenges with white nationalist groups organizing in the area, including the Sons of Odin and Nationalist 13.

Joseph said while the Dominion Society and people like Sellner share many ideas with these other groups, they try to communicate them in a way that fits the mainstream political discourse. He said the same strategy was used by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, who later became a Louisiana state representative in 1989.

”(Duke’s) conspiracy theories about Jews and Holocaust denial and his racist ideas were taken to a platform where he tried to table them in kind of laundered ways. And I feel like the Dominion Society of Canada is an organization that’s attempting to use the same tactics,” Joseph said.

One of those tactics, he said, is to use people’s anxieties about the economy to pull them toward the “great replacement” theory — the notion that governments are deliberately using immigration to dilute the political power of white people.

That argument was echoed by Raqib Naik, executive director of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate in Washington, who has been studying how the concept of remigration moved from the political fringes of Europe to the U.S. mainstream.

“For example, Gregory Bovino of the U.S. border control, he mentioned his target is to remigrate around 100 million people. And that is equally the size of non-white population in the U.S.,” Naik said.

“So when they use the term remigration, it is actually inclined at all the non-white populations within those countries.”

The U.S. State Department uses the term remigration to describe its broader migration policy. 

A May 11 press release from the State Department says its “goal is not to ‘manage’ migration, but to foster remigration.”

Naik said that people who get drawn these movements aren’t necessarily white supremacists themselves, but often feel very real anxieties about housing, the job market and affordability that white supremacists exploit.

Anti-immigration speaker banned from U.K. still planning to attend Ontario conference