Known white supremacist visits Mississauga councillor’s re-election campaign office
Published October 17, 2022 at 6:33 pm
The notorious white supremacist and current Hamilton mayoral candidate Paul Fromm, who is connected to the Ku Klux Klan and other neo-Nazi groups, made a stop in Mississauga recently to meet a council candidate up for re-election.
Fromm stopped in at the re-election office of Ward Six councillor Ron Starr, a meeting posted on the campaign’s Facebook page on October 11. Two images with Fromm were uploaded among roughly 60 other images after a large meet and greet between Starr and his supporters.
The pictures with Fromm and Starr show the pair taking and shaking hands and another of them standing shoulder to shoulder. While one image has since been removed, the other remains on the page as of October 17.
Starr has been a Mississauga city councillor since 2010 after a 30-year career in land development and on the electrical board and the Municipal Electrical Association. He denied knowing how Fromm was and said if he had, Fromm would not have been permitted into the event.
The is another controversy for Starr after he was found to have keyed his colleague, Karen Ras’, car in 2021. The city’s integrity commissioner fined him two months’ pay after the incident. Starr has rejected any wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, Fromm came to prominence in the nineties amid major controversies around his racist beliefs. He became a teacher at Mississauga’s Applewood Heights Public School in 1974. He taught at the school for more than two decades.
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In 1990 he gave a speech to the white supremacist group Western Guard and started giving numerous speeches at similar Heritage Front events, including on Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Fromm had been a Western Guard member in the 1970s but left after a Toronto Sun story about the group.
When Peel District School Board learned of these speeches years later, he was moved to adult education programs. The board said it was their only legal avenue at the time. However, Fromm claimed not to bring his fascist beliefs into the classroom. His teaching license was later revoked in 2007.
He has founded numerous white nationalist groups since the 1970s including the Edmund Burke Society, an attempted takeover of the Social Credit Party, the Western Guard, the Aryan Guard, Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform, the Canadian Association for Free Expression and currently heads the Council of Conservative Citizens.
Fromm has twice tried to run for mayor of Mississauga and is currently in the running for Hamilton mayor. According to the Mississauga News, he’s evidently a fan of Ron Starr, saying he’s “admired the work he’s done.” When Starr shared the image of the pair, so too did Fromm on his Twitter page.
According to The News, Fromm said he was sent a generic email about the event on September 17. Starr told The News that Fromm is not on his mailing list.
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