On August 2, a man residing in Grayson, Saskatchewan, was arrested for online threats made against Prime Minister Trudeau:
On Tuesday, Christopher Hayes was arrested by RCMP members at his residence in the Saskatchewan town 170 kilometres northeast of Regina.  He was charged with one count of uttering threats against a Canadian government official. His home was also searched, and several electronic items were seized by police.....In one post from July, Hayes writes, “if I have to folks I’ll start personally threatening civil unrest, personally gathering people to overthrow Notley and eventually Trudeau… I have nothing to hide from the #RCMP who are already watching my Facebook account… am I threatening personal harm to Trudeau or Notley? Nope."  The post goes on to say Hayes will spend all of his time “to organize a movement to overthrow a corrupt government. If the RCMP as a whole had any balls ya [sic] all show throw Notley and Trudeau in fn [sic] jail for corruption and crimes against the people of Canada.”  Other posts are in support of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, while others go after government and politicians. One of the threatening messages were still on Mr. Hayes' Facebook page when this writer took a look. A second one could not be found at that time, but a screen shot was taken by a friend who tipped us off to Christopher Hayes' online activities. Both posts were made on July 8:

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Another post made on the same day included a petition to allow concealed firearms in Canada (because goodness knows people like this should be walking around with concealed weapons):

[Image] The day before his arrest, Hayes posted another message which given the context of his other posts a call for violence.... as well as exhibiting an overall ignorance of economics and geopolitics:

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This also doesn't appear to have been Mr. Hayes' first interaction with the police:

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Prior to the tip about this guy, we really didn't give it much thought. But when we did a little bit of digging, we found that he had recently become associated with a group we started covering here on the blog a few months ago:

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Hayes' first post occurred on July 22 and echoed the anti-Muslim and anti-government rhetoric found on his own Facebook profile:

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Thus far no members or associates of the Soldiers of Odin have commented on Hayes' links to the group.

UPDATE: We apparently missed a post in the Soldiers of Odin Saskatchewan chapter's Facebook page. Someone claiming to be Christopher Hayes' brother posted the following on the page on August 3:

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[Image] Well, no, that's not "all he wrote." We grabbed a few other screen shots and
we're betting that there may have been others that were sent down the memory hole. "Mjohn" provides another post by Christopher Hayes made elsewhere in which C. Hayes also linked to one of his previous posts already included on the blog:

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In the meantime, Mr. Hayes has his supporters in the other anti-government/anti-Muslim we've been keeping an eye on:

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Marilyn Taylor has been a fairly high profile member of these groups for some time (we first became acquainted with her prior to the last election when she would smugly post her guarantee that Stephen Harper's Conservatives would win an even larger majority.... how's that work out for ya?). In this post, which she re-posts on a number of other similar Facebook pages, Taylor doesn't blame the alleged perpetrators for the crimes committed (unless the crime was committed by a Muslim, in which case it was totally the fault of the Muslim even if the story isn't actually true), but instead blames Trudeau and his government for creating the conditions for these incidents to emerge.

So much for some conservatives and their pious preaching about personal responsibility, but we digress.

The response to Taylor's post on Canadians United 4 Canada was, as always, predictable:

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As were the responses to the same post by Taylor made on Canadians Against Justin Trudeau....

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[Image] Uhm, people HAD been arrested for threatening Mr. Harper. Here's one such  example.

Google is your friend. Learn to use it properly.
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[Image] No, a threat, be it on Facebook or elsewhere, is not and never
has been considered to be "free speech." .... as well as the WCAI (Worldwide Coalition Against Islam) page:

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But Ms. Taylor wasn't the only one to justify threats made against the Prime Minister. The story was also published to the III% Saskatchewan page....

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.... and to the WCAI page, which resulted in some especially enlightening comments:

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Threats against Trudeau, Rachel Notley, and others have been growing in intensity since both the elections that brought them to power. People have repeatedly pointed out such threats, but not much appeared to be done about them.

Hopefully this arrest is an indication that the threats will now be taken seriously.