A teacher of Culture et citoyenneté québécoise (CCQ) who repeatedly posts homophobic, antisemitic, and white supremacist comments on social media . . . knowing full well that his students will see it. We’re not joking: this is almost a full-time occupation for Billy Savoie, a teacher at the Cité étudiante high school in Roberval.
On October 17, he even invited his followers on TikTok and Instagram (including a number of his students, who are minors) to watch him “debate” another internet user whom he (incorrectly) believed to be a neo-Nazi. During this exchange, “Mr. Billy” posited that Adolf Hitler “was right about many things.”
Billy Savoie, a Right-Wing Activist with a Left-Wing History
Billy Savoie, originally from La Tuque, began studying at UQAM sometime around 2015. Early on, he got involved the Mouvement étudiant révolutionnaire (MER), the student wing of the Parti communiste révolutionnaire (PCR, a Maoist organization that existed from 2009 to 2022, not to be confused with the current PCR, which is Trotskyist). He stuck with the PCR in the split that tore the organization apart in 2016, with the Québec wing accusing the Canadian section of petty-bourgeois and “postmodern” deviations (this is important for what follows). The PCR then underwent a series of purges, the details of which we will spare you, as they are not relevant to this article. However, one element should be highlighted: the 2016 split and the successive purges, which lasted until 2022, were largely based on hostility toward “identity politics” and the increasingly overt transphobic stance adopted by the Québec wing of the organization. Billy Savoie stuck with the local PCR leadership to the end, and we even believe that he continued on with them when they dissolved the organization and founded the short-lived “Avant-garde communiste du Canada” splinter group, after expelling the old-guard PCR founders, who controlled the party’s bookstore, Maison Norman Béthune. Interestingly, Savoie was also the AFESH’s mobilization secretary during the 2017 campaign for paid internships.