Melissa Guille
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Melissa Guille (born ca. 1972) is a leader of the Canadian Heritage Alliance (CHA).
Guille became involved with Neo-Nazi groups in Canada through her brother, Chris Guille, who had been a longtime member of the Heritage Front. While studying at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario in early 2000, Guille joined the Heritage Front with the intention of starting a local chapter. Within a few months, she instead decided to form the Canadian Heritage Alliance in order to use political wedge issues to bring young people to racialist politics.[1]
Guille met far right activist Paul Fromm at a meeting he was speaking at in Kitchener, Ontario in September, 2000. He agreed to help her with her project. At the same time, she met Marc Lemire, who soon became her boyfriend and helped her develop a website and policy platform. Lemire and Guille later clashed when he became the leader of the Heritage Front and she refused his entreaties to become leader of a Kitchener-Waterloo Heritage Front chapter instead of continuing with the CHA.
Guille's brothers, Andrew Guille and Chris Guille, were involved in the CHA. Andrew embarrassed his sister when it was revealed he had been convicted in 1999 for possession of child pornography, a fact the Guilles had kept from other members. According to researcher Matthew Lauder, Andrew Guille remained active in the CHA after his conviction. Chris Guille announced his departure from any leadership role with the group in 2003. By 2003, the Guilles had left Kitchener-Waterloo and moved to London, Ontario where the CHA is now based.
According to lawyer Richard Warman's complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, material on the CHA website included calls for ethnic cleansing and genocide against Jews: "We must now solve the most urgent of all problems, and that is, of course, the Jewish Problem; there are only two alternatives: we must expel them, or we must massacre them!"[2] Guille appeared before the Human Rights Tribunal on November 20, 2006 to face charges that she and the Canadian Heritage Alliance violated the Canadian Human Rights Act. Warman, who brought the complaint against Guille, stated that "you just had to scratch a millimetre beneath the surface" of the CHA website to find examples of "vicious attacks on the Arab, Jewish and black communities."
Melissa Guille defended herself on her website:
"The complaint against the CHA and Ms. Guille did not originate as a result of a criminal investigation, nor did it originate from a protected group that feels they have been discriminated against or exposed to contempt by viewpoints expressed on the website," the notice reads. "The complaint came from a man, Mr. Warman, who had spent years scouring the website and waiting until he had enough to file a complaint against CHA and Ms. Guille in an attempt to oppress opinions that are in conflict to his own." [3]
