Gate crashing into an age of conspiracy theories
Residents of my neighbourhood in Ottawa, which sits right next door to Rideau Hall, are pretty casual about the RCMP and conspiracy theories.
It’s not unusual to see members of the prime minister’s family passing through New Edinburgh, conspicuous only because of their constant RCMP accompaniment.
Conspiracy theorists have been telling us for nearly 15 years now that these sightings are actually complex political staging — because “everybody knows” that the prime minister’s family has split up. (Stephen and Laureen Harper were the target of these rumours for nine years, Justin and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau for the last five, proving that the trick to an enduring conspiracy theory is to have interchangeable actors.)
But this long-running lore is looking pretty tame right now in light of what happened early on Thursday morning, when an armed intruder came crashing onto the grounds of Rideau Hall, not long after a pandemic-related conspiracy post appeared on a Facebook page associated with his business.
If this doesn’t cause some more reflection by Facebook, Twitter and other social-media outlets about what’s getting circulated on their platforms, it should.
Corey Hurren, the man arrested outside Rideau Hall, is the founder of a Manitobabased store called GrindHouse Fine Foods, and a Canadian Forces reservist with a keen interest in conspiracy plots around the pandemic, as the Star and others have been reporting. The RCMP was not talking on Friday morning about any connections between his social-media posts and Hurren’s actions at Rideau Hall. But those two nervous hours in New Edinburgh remind us that the layers of security around the prime minister are not just for show, and that talk of threats to politicians can too easily turn into real-life deeds.
Only the day before the truck crashed through the gates of Rideau Hall, on Canada Day, gaggles of protesters were roaming around Parliament Hill, spouting conspiracy theories and ill wishes toward Trudeau. When I stopped briefly in front of the building that houses the Prime Minister’s Office, I listened to a man preaching over a loudspeaker about Canada’s complicity with “communist China.”
I could only last 10 minutes or so, but from what I could gather, most of Canada’s current problems, including COVID-19, were manufactured in China and it was our own fault for not noticing.
Over in front of the U.S. Embassy, not far away, a protest the same day featured calls for Trudeau to be arrested and chants of “lock him up.” People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier made an appearance at that gathering, proving perhaps that he’s still interested in cultivating the darker side of Canadian politics.
Twitter has been buzzing with theories — conspiracy and otherwise — linking all these events. At least one very active Twitter account, with thousands of followers, was pushing the idea that the Rideau Hall incident was used to cover up Trudeau’s actual arrest that morning. This is an echo of my favourite conspiracy theory during the early days of the pandemic — that the prime minister was only pretending he was in COVID-19 isolation and was in fact under house arrest.
It’s all hilarious until someone believes it, as so many people were discussing in comparison to the famous “Pizzagate” saga of the last U.S. election, featuring a way-outthere story about Hillary Clinton running a satanic childabuse ring from a Washington pizza shop. Who would believe that? A fellow named Edgar Maddison Welch did, arming himself with two guns and a knife and storming into the Comet Ping Pong restaurant to thwart the evil plot.
Regardless of whether Hurren turns out to be Canada’s version of Edgar Welch, it does seem that this Canada Day week in the capital has put the political fringe far too close to the centre. Is it because much of politics during the pandemic is now being conducted in the virtual world, where anyone with a social-media account can be a carrier of the misinformation virus?
Twitter recently introduced a fact-checking feature, much to the annoyance of Donald Trump, but it does not look like it is doing much to check the kind of conspiracies that were circulating this week around Canadian politics and the intruder at Rideau Hall.
I asked a Twitter representative about it on Friday. The company is aware of some of the more egregious posts, but no word on what measures it could or would take, at least not now.
Nothing in the scene around my neighbourhood on Thursday morning felt staged or choreographed — the flashing police lights, the fearful residents, the roads blocked. It’s going to be a little harder to be casual about conspiracy theories in future if this turns out to be a case of one of them leaping right off the fringe of social media and right on to the doorstep of the prime minister.