The Most Famous
EXTREMISTS from Canada
This page contains a list of the greatest Canadian Extremists. The pantheon dataset contains 283 Extremists, 2 of which were born in Canada. This makes Canada the birth place of the 26th most number of Extremists behind India, and South Korea.
Top 3
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Canadian Extremists of all time. This list of famous Canadian Extremists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Robert Pickton (1949 - 2024)
With an HPI of 45.80, Robert Pickton is the most famous Canadian Extremist. Her biography has been translated into 17 different languages on wikipedia.
Robert William Pickton (October 24, 1949 – May 31, 2024), also known as the Pig Farmer Killer or the Butcher, was a Canadian serial killer and pig farmer. After dropping out of school, he left a butcher's apprenticeship to begin working full-time at his family's pig farm, and inherited it in the early 1990s. Between 1995 and 2001, Pickton is believed to have murdered at least 26 women, many of them sex workers from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Pickton would confess to 49 murders to an undercover RCMP officer disguised as a cellmate, going on to say he wanted to make it an even 50, but thought he was caught because he got "sloppy". In 2007, he was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 25 years—the longest possible sentence for second-degree murder under Canadian law at the time. In 2010, the Crown attorney officially stayed the remaining 20 murder charges, allowing previously unrevealed information to be made available to the public, including that Pickton previously had a 1997 attempted murder charge dropped. Crown prosecutors reasoned that staying the additional charges made the most sense, since Pickton was already serving the maximum sentence allowable. The discovery of Pickton's crimes sparked widespread outrage and forced the Canadian government to acknowledge the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, with the British Columbia provincial government forming the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry to examine the role of the police in the matter. Pickton died in 2024 after being attacked in prison by another inmate.
2. Karla Homolka (b. 1970)
With an HPI of 41.92, Karla Homolka is the 2nd most famous Canadian Extremist. Her biography has been translated into 20 different languages.
Karla Leanne Homolka (born May 4, 1970), also known as Karla Leanne Teale, Leanne Teale and Leanne Bordelais, is a Canadian serial killer who acted as an accomplice to her husband, Paul Bernardo, taking active part in the rapes and murders of at least three minors in Ontario – including her own sister, Tammy Homolka – between 1990 and 1992. Homolka attracted worldwide media attention when a controversial plea bargain with Ontario prosecutors meant she was only convicted of manslaughter, and served only twelve years for the torture, rapes and murders of the other victims, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Homolka testified against Bernardo, who was convicted of the Mahaffy–French murders and received life imprisonment and a dangerous offender designation. Homolka's plea bargain came about after she told investigators that she had been Bernardo's unwilling accomplice as a result of domestic violence. However, videotapes of the crimes surfaced after the plea bargain and before Bernardo's trial which showed that Homolka had been a more active participant than she had originally claimed, including in the rape and death of her sister. As a result, the plea bargain that she had struck with prosecutors was dubbed in the Canadian press the "Deal with the Devil". Public outrage about the deal continued until Homolka's high-profile release from prison in 2005. Following her release, Homolka settled in Quebec, where she married a brother of her lawyer. She briefly lived in the Antilles and Guadeloupe, but by 2014 had returned to Quebec.
3. Omar Khadr (b. 1986)
With an HPI of 28.86, Omar Khadr is the 3rd most famous Canadian Extremist. His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.
Omar Ahmed Said Khadr (Arabic: عمر أحمد سعيد خضر; born September 19, 1986) is a Canadian who, at the age of 15, was detained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay for ten years, during which he pleaded guilty to the murder of U.S. Army Sergeant 1st Class Christopher Speer and other charges. He later appealed his conviction, claiming that he falsely pleaded guilty so that he could return to Canada where he remained in custody for three additional years. Khadr sued the Canadian government for infringing his rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; this lawsuit was settled in 2017 with a CA$10.5 million payment and an apology by the federal government. Born in Canada, Khadr was taken to Afghanistan by his father, who was affiliated with Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. On July 27, 2002, at age 15, Khadr was severely wounded during fighting between U.S. soldiers and Taliban fighters in the village of Ayub Kheyl; Khadr is alleged to have thrown the grenade that killed Speer. After he was captured and detained at the Bagram Airfield, he was sent to the Guantanamo Bay detention camps in Cuba. During his detention, Khadr was interrogated by both Canadian and US intelligence officers. After eight years in detention, Khadr pleaded guilty in October 2010 to "murder in violation of the laws of war" and four other charges at a hearing before a United States military commission. The charges were filed under the US Military Commission Act of 2006 and considered under US law to be war crimes, although the act was not in place at the time the alleged offenses took place. Khadr agreed to an eight-year sentence with no credit for eight years already served and the possibility of a transfer to Canada after a minimum of one year and parole eligibility after three years. According to the UN, Khadr was the first person since World War II to be prosecuted in a military commission for war crimes committed while still a minor. His conviction and sentence were denounced by some civil rights groups and the United Nations Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict. Meanwhile, early in 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada had ruled that the Canadian government's interrogation of Khadr at Guantanamo Bay "offend[ed] the most basic Canadian standards [of] the treatment of detained youth suspects", but stopped short of ordering Khadr's repatriation. However, on September 29, 2012, Khadr returned to Canada to serve the remainder of his sentence in Canadian custody. Khadr was released on bail in May 2015 (pending an appeal of his U.S. conviction) after the Alberta Court of Appeal refused to block his release as had been requested by the Canadian government. In 2017, the Canadian government announced a CA$10.5 million settlement with Khadr to compensate for damages arising from its previous handling of the case. Tabitha Speer, Christopher Speer's widow, filed an application to enforce a US$134 million Utah default civil judgment in Canada. On March 25, 2019, the Alberta Court of Queen's Bench ruled that Khadr's time on conditional release counted towards his sentence, which was declared completed.
People
Pantheon has 3 people classified as Canadian extremists born between 1949 and 1986. Of these 3, 2 (66.67%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Canadian extremists include Karla Homolka, and Omar Khadr. The most famous deceased Canadian extremists include Robert Pickton. As of April 2024, 1 new Canadian extremists have been added to Pantheon including Omar Khadr.
