PARRY SOUND - European Heritage Week, which passed unnoticed this week in three small Canadian towns, is not like other festivals.
There was no dancing, no special food, no parade of rosy-cheeked white children in bonnets and britches. It existed only on paper, thanks to a vote of the town councils in Midland and Parry Sound, Ont., and Cranbrook, B. C., on a motion they received in the mail last summer.
Dismissed by some as a dying gasp of propaganda from Canada's marginalized racist right, European Heritage Week succeeds today precisely because nobody knows about it until it is proclaimed, by which point it is already a success.
"Once you've stated it, that's it. It's a fait accompli," said Don Andrews, 66, leader of the defunct white supremacist Nationalist Party of Canada, who drafted the three-line resolution in the east-end Toronto rooming house that, in the 1980s, served as a rallying point for the disaffected racists who would go on to form the neo-Nazi Heritage Front.
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