David MacKinnon
American professional baseball player (1994-)
David MacKinnon is a Canadian activist and volunteer. He ran the Sudbury Soldiers of Odin until September 2017 when Justin L. Smith replaced him so MacKinnon could run Soldiers of Odin Ontario.
Quotes
edit- We don't go out and intimidate people or flash our vests,
We have nothing to hide.
Last fall, a little girl found a needle on Louis Street, and she got poked by it,
As a parent myself, I couldn't imagine my child coming home with a needle that just got stuck in her hand.
I know some people want to keep it just because they worked hard for the name,
Some people want to keep it because Finland is pissed, and they want us to change it so some of us will be doing it just to spite them.
If somebody starts posting racist stuff, they get the choice: take it off immediately, don't do it again or you're out,
Saying every Soldier of Odin is bad would be like saying every Muslim is a terrorist. They're not and neither are we.
- We're just trying to prove that we're not racist,
I find what's hurting us is the fact the police chief made that statement apologizing and that he shouldn't have taken the picture.
That's probably been the worst part of it all because the soup kitchen is getting calls,
Which I think is kind of sad because why would you stop feeding people because of who's feeding the people?
I can't speak for every member,
But we've been in Canada for two years now. Before this all blew up, we were here, not long after Soldiers of Odin started. The name was already here. You just didn't hear much about us.
I did a little bit of research when I joined. But when I joined, I was told they weren't racists.
So some of us want to keep the name for spite, because Finland is mad at us, they don't want us using it,
Finland calls Canada traitors, except for Quebec, of course. Myself, I like to spite them, because we're Canada, we're not Finland.
When they talk about them now, they call them the former Soldiers of Odin,
All we do is help out at the soup kitchen, collect needles, recently we started helping out with organ donors. We're not going anywhere. We're going to keep doing what we can.
I don't mind that at all, we don't mind at all,
As far as immigrants coming here, we're all for it. We have no issue with it at all.
It doesn't matter what religion they are, what race they are or where they're from. If they need help, we will help them ... Our motto is, we're here to help. It doesn't matter who it is.
My comment was they shouldn't speed things up, they should leave it as it was,
We have no problem with them coming here, we just think that when you start rushing people through, you miss things sometimes and you can let a bad apple in.
I know there's a lot going on,
There's a lot of bad out there and a lot of good. I try to focus on what we're doing around here, especially in Ontario. We're trying to clean up our image around here.
We were at New Sudbury Days (Sunday) and a lot of people came up and said hi, some kept going,
The police chief wouldn't even walk near us. He turned and walked in the other direction when he saw it was us standing there.
While I was gone, the police chief walked up to our members of the club and said he knows who we are, he said he knew we were out there cleaning up needles and he thanked us,
Then he was going to take a picture with us, but they said David's not here, he's our president and he'll be back shortly.
The police chief came back about 45 minutes later, came up, introduced himself as Paul, shook my hand and said, 'let's do this picture.