Regina police raid home of ex-prof accused of spreading hate
Last Updated: Monday, June 11, 2007 | 6:13 PM CT
CBC News
Regina police are investigating a former university professor accused of spreading hate online.
Terry Tremaine, 58, who was let go from his job as a University of Saskatchewan mathematics professor in 2005, is the subject of a criminal complaint by Ottawa-based human rights lawyer Richard Warman and the Canadian Jewish Congress.
Terry Tremaine's computer was seized by the Regina police on Friday.
(CBC)
They accuse him of willful promotion of hatred in online postings that target Jewish, black and First Nations people in Saskatchewan.
On Friday, police entered Tremaine's home and seized his computer. No charges have been laid, but Tremaine said he knows what the authorities are after.
"There are certain groups within this country who want to silence us, who want to silence people with views like mine," Tremaine told CBC News on Monday.
Warman said Tremaine has been posting "extremist racist and bigoted anti-Jewish, anti-black material to a U.S. neo-Nazi website called Stormfront."
Tremaine was the subject of a federal human rights complaint in October 2004 initiated by Warman.
In February, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal fined Tremaine $4,000 and ordered him to stop using phone lines to make comments "likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt."
He was let go from his job at the U of S in 2005, after Warman sent some of Tremaine's postings to university president Peter MacKinnon.
Warman said Tremaine, who had previously taught in the Caribbean, had described blacks as "prone to criminality, as violent, basically as equivalent to being mentally disabled."
Discussing his work at the U of S, Tremaine said he kept his "political" views out of the classroom and treated all of his students equally.
He called himself the leader of the National Socialist Party of Canada and a member of "white nationalists."
"We want to see a variety of policies implemented that will help to preserve the status of the white race in Canada," he said.
Tremaine said he should be able to air those views without being prosecuted.
However, Warman said Canadian law still applies on the internet. If Tremaine is found to be violating the decision by the Human Rights Tribunal, he faces up to five years in jail and an unlimited fine.
