British Columbia has long had a reputation as Canada’s most progressive province.
But on the morning after the 2024 provincial election, British Columbians woke up to the bizarro reality that a far-right party, previously relegated to the fringes of B.C. politics, had elected a slate of extreme candidates and came within a whisker of forming government.
In the blink of an eye, legislation on the future of the province’s health and education systems would now be debated and voted on by people who subscribe to conspiratorial ideas about vaccines, the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic or nefarious international plots to force children to change their gender and eat bugs.
Meanwhile, conservative political leaders across Canada are pandering to conspiratorial segments of their base. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has floated conspiracies about the Pentagon spraying chemtrails over the Prairies while Conservative MPs have been running conspiratorial petitions calling for Canada to withdraw from the United Nations.
In fact, in the lead up to the federal election, Poilievre has been receiving glowing endorsements from InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones—Jones insists Poilievre is “saying the same things as me.”
What on earth is happening to Canada?
I’ve been reporting on right-wing politics over the last decade for PressProgress and have gone deep into the weeds on Canada’s online far-right. We are not simply seeing a rise in “conspiracies” and “misinformation” per se, I think we are witnessing tectonic shifts inside Canada’s conservative movement.
A decade or two ago, this was a movement that revolved around ideas about free markets, small government and reactionary social values. That’s all still there, but for a growing segment of the right, these ideas have been increasingly displaced by a sprawling, conspiratorial metanarrative that imagines an evil global cabal is using technocratic climate policies, authoritarian public health rules and gender-inclusive educational materials to control the world and keep ordinary people in their place—and yes, it is every bit as unhinged as that sounds.
In fact, I’m no longer sure the word “conspiracy” fully captures what’s really happening here.
The first thing you need to understand is that we can draw a direct line connecting the weirdness of B.C.’s 2024 election with the wave of anti-2SLGBTQ+ protests in 2023, the 2022 Freedom Convoy and the anti-public health protests throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. These are all symptoms of the same problem.
This phenomenon is driven by the collapse of traditional media and the rise of digital platforms. Across Canada, including B.C., newsrooms are being decimated by layoffs, local newspapers are shutting down and what remains of our stripped-down media ecosystem is concentrated in the hands of a small number of corporations and wealthy individuals. At the same time, our public discourse is being shaped by mysterious, unregulated social media algorithms that are distorting our democracy in ways nobody seems to fully understand.
Of course, it’s a cliche to blame everything that’s wrong with society on newfangled technological gizmos, but let me point to a concrete example: In 2018, Facebook announced it was tweaking its algorithms to promote “meaningful social interactions”—ostensibly a well-intentioned change to reduce clickbait links and spammy posts from brands.
One way they did this was by prioritizing posts from Facebook Groups, online communities where like-minded people connect around common interests. These groups are mostly benign when people share local neighbourhood news or zesty lo-cal cooking recipes. But this change also had the unintended effect of making it easier for people who believe in fringy ideas to connect with one another, share content that riles them up and eggs each other on.
My reporting in the early days of the pandemic suggests Facebook Groups played a big role in the emergence of anti-lockdown protests and the radicalization of a segment of our population.
On April 25, 2020, a month after Ontario’s government ordered its first COVID-19 lockdown, dozens of people displaying signs with QAnon slogans or claims that the World Health Organization was involved in “mind control” experiments flouted public health rules and marched on Queen’s Park. Ontario Premier Doug Ford would later call these people a “bunch of yahoos.”
I was curious how these “yahoos” were organizing. My investigation sent me to weird corners of Facebook where I discovered the main organizer was operating under multiple fake names and recruiting people by promoting the march in Facebook Groups associated with far-right politics, anti-vaccine activism, one-world government conspiracies and the idea 5G cell phone towers spread COVID-19 (I still have no clue who this person is or if they even live in Canada).
Over the next several months, these fringy online communities grew and started talking to one another. Anti-lockdown protests were turning into a ragtag coalition of anti-vaxxers, QAnon believers, flat-earth truthers, anti-immigrant white supremacists, People’s Party of Canada supporters. Extreme and conspiratorial online communities were introducing themselves to one another, sharing content in one another’s Facebook Groups and starting to merge.
Opposition to public health orders also mobilized spiritual communities. Not only evangelicals, particularly in Alberta, who were defiant over authorities cancelling gatherings in churches. We began to see vaccine-hesitant people involved in New Age spiritual practices, alternative health, wellness and fitness communities unexpectedly join forces with white supremacists and anti-government ideologically motivated extremists.
While some were already prone to conspiratorial thinking, others faced a perfect storm during the pandemic lockdowns. Estranged family members of people who went down conspiracy rabbit holes would repeatedly describe scenarios where their loved ones had experienced some kind of personal trauma and found themselves suddenly isolated without social support networks or access to mental health services. They made sense of their life situation through content they were encountering online while stuck at home during the darkest nights of the pandemic.
Whether protesting outside the homes of politicians or public health officials, outside hospitals or vaccine clinics or occupying downtown Ottawa for three weeks, these protests often functioned more as IRL (“In Real Life”) meet-ups for weird and lonely people from the Internet looking for a sense of community more than as an expression of a coherent political agenda.
The Freedom Convoy, perhaps the biggest IRL meet-up during the pandemic, was supposedly about “vaccine mandates,” but everyone in Ottawa would have seen signs referencing every random online conspiracy about vaccines, QAnon, the World Economic Forum or calls to hold Nuremberg-style COVID-19 trials to prosecute politicians, doctors and others involved in pandemic lockdowns for “crimes against humanity.”
Two years later, B.C. Conservative leader John Rustad found himself on a video call organized by anti-vaccine groups who were hyperactive in Facebook Groups when he was asked if he supports “Nuremberg 2.0”?
Rustad, in a stuttering response, assured them he would be open to joining other jurisdictions in legal proceedings inspired by the trials that prosecuted Nazi leaders after the Second World War. After these comments were first reported by PressProgress, Rustad walked them back, insisting he “misunderstood the question”.
Yet when speaking to his base, the B.C. Conservative leader would reference conspiracies about the United Nations forcing children to eat bugs and stood behind candidates posting on Facebook about conspiracies relating to chemtrails, the 2020 U.S. election, the January 6 insurrection, 15-minute cities, elite Hollywood pedophile rings, United Nations takeovers of municipal governments and plots to use climate policies to depopulate the planet of humans.
At a time when traditional media outlets are in decline and journalists struggle to vet candidates for public office, we keep seeing people from these obscure Facebook Groups and other strange corners of the Internet self-organizing, building political power and running for public office.
Working out solutions to these problems will be difficult and complicated, but one thing I can tell you is that policy-makers don’t seem to understand what they are dealing with or recognize that this is becoming a real threat to our democracy.
