Growing Western alienation fuels conspiracy theories

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This article was published 06/09/2022 (1138 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — An Alberta man’s angry outburst toward Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland could be something that becomes more commonplace as growing Western alienation fuels conspiracy theories.

Whether it’s about conservation officers, fertilizer limits or COVID-19 isolation shelters, fringe media reports accuse the Trudeau government of actively trying to harm western Canadians.

It’s an impression Alberta and Saskatchewan political leaders seem happy to encourage — and one that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government seems unable to counter.

“When the governing party of Canada treats a third of the country as flyover country, it only exacerbates that feeling of not being heard,” said University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley.

Last month, far-right fringe media members got their hands on documents showing the floor plan for a new Winnipeg office for federal conservation officers. A blog distorted the normal planning document into a dire warning of a conspiracy to lock up people for their greenhouse-gas emissions.

Environment and Climate Change Canada’s new office in the Cityplace complex includes firearms storage and rooms for questioning people, the documents show. Both are standard for sworn enforcement officers who patrol rural areas of the Prairies, executing search warrants and enforcing rules pertaining to fisheries, migratory birds and endangered species.

“Because enforcement officers have specialized tools to perform their duties and to keep them safe, they require facilities to house and secure these tools,” wrote spokeswoman Amelie Desmarais.

“Officers routinely take witness statements when working on files, so we have specially designed interview rooms for this purpose.”

Yet fringe media suggested this was proof of “the climate communists’ hit list.”

Danielle Smith, a leadership candidate for Alberta’s United Conservative Party — and the presumed frontrunner to become premier in October — has been amplifying those claims this week, taking aim at “climate cops.”

Those same fringe media outlets have seized upon the Liberals’ proposal to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from fertilizer, portraying it as a nefarious plot to take over farms, limit food supplies or push people into eating insects.

Earlier this month, a landowner in Pense, Sask., 30 kilometres west of Regina, accused water scientists of trespassing as they took samples near a highway. The landowner claimed the scientists told him they were collecting samples to test for nitrates or nutrients related to farm runoff.

It caused a social-media uproar the Saskatchewan government was happy to latch onto last weekend.

A minister issued a public letter Sunday afternoon to the Liberals, decrying “several” instances of federal officials “trespassing” on private land, apparently before reaching out directly to the federal government.

Ottawa is investigating the incident, saying it’s possible scientists had strayed onto private land — but insisted the samples were not being collected to test for farm runoff.

It later came to light that the Saskatchewan government had modified its trespassing law a day before weighing in on the incidents, to specify that federal agents can be found in violation of the act.

“They are actively churning out misinformation, and in fact creating alternative facts by creating laws in unconstitutional ways,” Wesley argued.

To him, what underpins all these incidents is anger stemming from a loss of status among western Canadians. Many who relied on blue-collar jobs have no clue how they fit into a green transition, and feel attacked by international environmental movements.

“Those folks are now being openly challenged in a bunch of different ways,” he said.

“The federal government and the Liberal Party of Canada has become the villain in a lot of these conspiracy narratives.”

Gordon Pennycook, a University of Regina behavioural science professor who studies misinformation, says those sentiments aren’t new. But he says they’re dovetailing with a North American trend of conspiracies espousing a pro-conservative bias.

“There’s this increase in misinformation specifically on the political right, and people in Western Canada are more conservative; they’re more exposed to that type of misinformation,” he said.

“Part of that misinformation is specifically about the federal government and Trudeau; that’s an important part of it.”

Wesley said the Trudeau government bears some blame for focusing intensely on urban Canada in the 2019 and 2021 elections.

“I understand the political incentives, but to treat all of the Prairies as flyover country during two consecutive federal elections certainly isn’t helping to build national unity,” he said.

Wesley said both the Liberal and Conservative parties face a vicious cycle in trying to branch out, with the Prairies-based Conservatives struggling to crack Toronto ridings, and the Liberals having few rural seats to build a ground game.

Pennycook says that’s compounded by incidents such as Freeland being sworn at in public, and western leaders spreading unconfirmed information.

Still, the auditor general said in April that the Liberals have no clear plan to support energy workers in the transition to a low-carbon economy. Ottawa takes days to respond to claims from fringe media outlets, and agriculture groups argue the government has been to slow in detailing how it plans to limit nitrogen.

“It’s easy for a slip-up to turn into he things that we’re seeing online now. So that requires extreme diligence on their part,” Pennycook said.

And yet, after the 2021 election, Trudeau appointed two cabinet ministers from the Prairies into junior positions, and scrapped MP Jim Carr’s former role as a conduit to the Prairies.

“The message that people draw from that is that, ‘We’re not worthy of being heard,’” said Wesley.

“It’s a small step from, ‘You don’t feel us being worthy’ to, ‘We don’t see you as being legitimate,’ and that’s the most worrisome part of this.”

He said that feeling is the basis of Smith’s proposal to have Alberta assert is sovereignty over Ottawa by overriding any federal laws it disagrees with, an idea widely understood to be unconstitutional.

Earlier movements such as the Buffalo Declaration — the 2020 political manifesto released by four Alberta MPs denouncing their province’s underappreciated place in the Canadian confederation — similarly pushed for autonomy by arguing Ottawa is losing its legitimacy.

“That stems from the perception that the federal government doesn’t see westerners, particularly people in the Prairies, as being legitimate citizens,” he said.

“If they did, they’d stop and they’d listen. They’d tour here on campaigns.”

In an interview, the Winnipeg MP who handles Ottawa’s relationship with Prairies chalked the issue up to misinformation, frustration from the COVID-19 pandemic and social media.

“It’s misinformation, it’s disinformation and flat-out conspiracy theories,” said Dan Vandal, the minister responsible for the PrairiesCan economic-development agency.

“People are buying into it for reasons that are probably quite complex.”

Vandal (Saint Boniface – Saint Vital) also said he wasn’t familiar with the controversy in Saskatchewan over scientists collecting samples, despite it being top news in that province.

“The water issue you described is something new to me, so I’m not familiar with that,” he said in an interview last week.

“In my travels in Western Canada since I became minister, I have experienced none of that. I have met nothing but intelligent, passionate, proud Canadians who want to build their cities and their communities and their provinces, and create good jobs and contribute.”

When asked about how to counter the narratives that drive misinformation, Liberal ministers recently spoke instead about drafted legislation that aims to have hate speech taken off platforms. That bill has faced pushback over concerns it would limit expression.

The prime minister argued politicians need to resist leaning on anger to mobilize voters, and recognize that simple solutions often don’t work for complex issues.

“We all need to be careful about how we’re amplifying conspiracy theories; how we’re feeding into mistrust and anger. We need to deal in facts; we need to deal in responsible leadership,” he said Thursday during a visit to Winnipeg.

“Unfortunately, there are people looking for shortcuts, realizing that if you make people angry, they will be mobilized. But anger doesn’t build a country. Anger is not what settled the Prairies.”

Wesley said outgoing Alberta Premier Jason Kenney learned this the hard way, after he merged mainstream conservatives with the populist Wildrose Party in 2017.

His government launched an inquiry into nefarious foreign funding of environmental movements, which largely came up empty. He stepped down after COVID-19 rules split his caucus, bemoaning last winter that “the lunatics are trying to take over the asylum.”

Federal Conservative frontrunner Pierre Poilievre may be bound for the same trajectory, Wesley said.

“What we’ve seen here is you welcome these movement-conservative populists into the fold, you can’t control them. They will take over the party,” he said.

To counter western alienation, Wesley and other political scientists have floated the idea of joint cabinet meetings, where federal ministers would meet with their counterparts in Edmonton and Regina, to go over files in private and hold joint news conferences.

“It stops these premiers from filling the vacuum with lies and disinformation, and it gives them incentives to be honest brokers,” he argued.

“When Scott Moe knows he doesn’t have to see the prime minister, except maybe once a year behind closed doors — after which he can say whatever the hell he wants to say – that doesn’t foster trust between governments.”

The rise of misinformation has been growing for some time. In October 2020, when the Manitoba Métis Federation unveiled a COVID-19 isolation site in Treherne, 125 kilometres west of Winnipeg, fringe media claimed it was a “secret COVID-19 camp” that would intern people.

MMF president David Chartrand said his organization had to waste time explaining that it wasn’t helping set up a concentration camp, while people spreading “insulting” rumours face no consequences.

“The danger is that some people try to believe it,” he said. “How can they say things and just walk away? There has got to be accountability.”

Wesley said the only way politics is going to improve in Western Canada is if voters make it clear that they won’t accept conspiracy theories.

Provincial governments with majorities have backtracked on everything from Manitoba’s school-board reform to proposed strip-mining in the Rockies, after uproar from voters.

“I’ve always thought of politicians as rational actors; a lot of them respond to what they think will get them elected or re-elected,” Wesley said.

He said politicians from across the political spectrum should be expected to denounce people who harass public figures, without waiting for reporters to ask about those incidents.

“If people are sitting around waiting for politicians to respond to this directly, we’re going to be waiting for a long time — and a lot of people are going to get hurt.”

— with files from Danielle Da Silva

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca