A protester dances on a concrete jersey barrier in front of vehicles and placards on Rideau Street, on the 20th day of a protest against COVID-19 measures, in Ottawa, on Feb. 16, 2022.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Jen Gerson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Spend too much time arguing on the internet, and you’re bound to come across an increasingly common phrase: “Yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s truth.”
I’ve seen that phrase written in comments sections and on X; under news articles noting that Greek government mismanagement may have been partially responsible for wildfires there last year; and by, in one case, Piers Corbyn, the older brother of former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who uttered the phrase to a ravenous crowd protesting lockdowns and other aligned evils: masks, social distancing, vaccines, 5G mobile networks, and a non-binding UN sustainability resolution that some conspiracy theorists believe is a harbinger of a totalitarian one-world government imposed on mankind. Most recently, I saw it in response to a claim that Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek purposely broke the water main in order to impose tyrannical water restrictions on the populace.
Of course, the idea that every notion today derided as lunatic must be tomorrow’s revolutionary truth doesn’t square with the evidence at hand. The conspiracy theorists’ misses far outweigh their hits. And it requires too many leaps of logic and fact to go from criticizing poor planning and communications, to assuming a truly malign intent for total domination and control. Most governments and institutions fail because of very ordinary human weaknesses such as greed, incompetence, internecine backbiting and general decline. Not because cabinet members attended a World Economic Forum conference, or signed in blood allegiance to a vast global cabal.
But sometimes conspiracy theorists get things right.
I’ve been doing research for my book on the Satanic Panic, and if there’s one thing I have observed, it’s that conspiracy theories that gain any serious traction are very rarely rooted in pure fantasy. They usually trace their deepest origins to some scrap of truth – usually one that is either unacknowledged, or snobbishly dismissed by people who hold (or are perceived to hold) positions of power and authority.
And the rest of us – people who believe in institutions and expertise – need to figure out what to do about that, because lately, many of yesterday’s conspiracy theories do, in fact, have the ring of truth about them.
Let’s start with the elder Corbyn’s particular bugbear, COVID-19 vaccines. It’s no secret that there are many internet sleuths who believe that the mRNA vaccines expedited by the COVID pandemic are responsible for a surge of inexplicable sudden deaths since their introduction. I, and a number of experts, do not find the evidence for this claim to be compelling, at present; further, I believe that the mass adoption of vaccines was the single most effective intervention for the speedy return of normality.
But it’s also absolutely true that AstraZeneca’s product – a viral-vector vaccine, rather than an mRNA one such as Pfizer’s or Moderna’s, and a drug that I personally advocated for when it became the first COVID vaccine available in Canada – has recently been withdrawn by the manufacturer in light of newer drugs that are believed to be better adapted to target COVID-19 variants. It’s also true that some countries, including Canada, discontinued its use last year.
While the vaccine is still considered safe and effective, it has been associated with a rare side effect known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS). The government of Canada itself now says that 36 case reports “were found to be consistent with a causal association to immunization” by viral-vector vaccines – a reporting rate of 1.3 per 100,000 doses administered.
Meanwhile, remember those vaccine mandates? It wasn’t so long ago that a broad and influential swath of the general populace accepted, as if it were holy doctrine, the argument that the unvaccinated should not be allowed to travel, work or sit in restaurants. These mandates were then levered into a divisive wedge issue by the Liberals against the Conservatives in the 2021 election. But within months of that election, the logic of such mandates collapsed, in part because we discovered that the vaccines were simply not as effective at curbing transmission as we had once hoped.
And, hey, what about those theories about lab leaks? Remember when it was near verboten to suggest that, perhaps, China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology might be responsible for a strange and novel coronavirus showing up in … Wuhan?
We still don’t know where COVID-19 came from, and may never have a definitive answer to that question. However, the hypothesis that it originated in a lab and was released accidentally is so mainstream that it received full billboarding in The New York Times. Nor is it now controversial to note that efforts were made by researchers, governments and international governing bodies to obfuscate those very lines of inquiry.
On COVID-19, some of yesterday’s conspiracy theories are today’s truth. It’s a bad look.
Demonstrators against a COVID-19 vaccine mandate leave in a truck convoy after blocking the highway at the busy U.S. border crossing near Coutts, Alta., on Feb. 15, 2022.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
We can also find such bad looks if we turn closer to home. In 2022, the Canadian government invoked the Emergencies Act to clear out a series of entrenched anti-vaccine-mandate encampments in Ottawa, and at various border crossings around the country. Two years later, we’ve seen two official reviews come to competing conclusions about whether that extraordinary use of government power was justified.
Meanwhile, the only protest that was found to represent a public-safety threat was the encampment at Coutts, Alta., where police raided a nearby home and found a cache of weapons. In April, three men arrested in connection with that raid were found guilty of mischief over $5,000. Another two continue to stand trial for a more serious charge, conspiracy to commit murder.
In other words: The most demonstrably dangerous faction of the trucker convoy was arrested and disbanded before the government invoked the Emergencies Act. It’s difficult to reconcile that fact with the Liberals’ decision to use that act to subsequently freeze the bank accounts of convoy organizers without a warrant. One doesn’t have to like the convoy to acknowledge that this was an abuse of power.
Then there’s the Liberal government’s own attempts to address the disinformation that they believe is feeding increasingly disruptive and threatening behaviours: C-11, the Online News Act and, more recently, the Online Harms Act.
Even assuming the best of intentions, what we have in practice are laws that give the government the ability to regulate user-generated content on platforms such as YouTube; a law that prompted Meta to shut Canada’s mainstream media outlets out of Facebook and Instagram altogether; and a law that The Atlantic, that noted bastion of incendiary far-right rhetoric, has rightly called “extremist,” saying that it will “impose draconian criminal penalties on hate speech and curtail people’s liberty in order to stop future crimes they haven’t yet committed.”
That’s not a conspiracist’s tweet. That’s a quote from America’s most venerable magazine.
The same is true in the wake of the rather shameful spectacle now unfolding in our democratic theatre around foreign interference. Not a single party leader or MP is willing to name the parliamentarians whom the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians found to be “semi-witting or witting” participants in foreign states’ efforts to interfere in our politics – or, by its definition, traitors to Canada. It’s the kind of thing that many of us would have rightly dismissed angry protesters for saying a couple years ago, and it was only a year ago that Justin Trudeau suggested that mere questions about Chinese interference in Canadian elections were racist. Today, a parliamentary committee has confirmed parliamentarians’ involvement in such interference, and they are being called traitors by writers in this very august newspaper.
None of this engenders trust in our leaders or in government. These functions can only operate effectively if they are broadly trusted by not only parliamentarians, but also by the general public.
Well-intentioned attempts to suppress wrongthink are not only misguided on their own merits, they are destined to fail. Even more so when institutional power is increasingly disintermediated by the internet. That is exactly what is happening.
Surveys consistently show that trust in both federal and provincial governments is declining. Trust in the media is dismal (sorry). According to Statistics Canada, less than half of Canadians trust the justice system and the courts. Police fare the best out of the lot – but even here, trust topped out at 65 per cent of those surveyed in the fall of last year.
When institutions fail to be accountable and responsive, the people who are governed by those institutions will inevitably respond with populism, revulsion and even civil disobedience, if not outright violence.
And when that happens, how should “right-thinking” Canadians who actually believe in our institutions respond?
Conspiracy theories do not emerge from a vacuum. They are organic reflections – perhaps even symptoms – of a disease within the body politic, and the underlying illness is declining social cohesion and trust. What I see is an institutional elite, including media and governments, who want to pin the etiology on external factors: the rise of social media, disinformation, bad actors spreading hate and eroding faith in democratic institutions.
This, too, is a conspiracy theory.
Like the others, it’s rooted in truth: There are certainly many opportunists and malicious nation-states who really are out to erode our collective faith in those who are intended to lead and inform us. But like all the other conspiracy theories, this is only a half-truth, divorced from context, and often understood out of proportion to both its origins and effects.
“Disinformation” agents are now features of the informational ecosystem, and governments and institutions must find ways to adapt to that reality. However, they must do so understanding that it is not the duty of citizens to trust their leaders. Rather, it’s the duty of those who hold power to behave in ways that elicit trust from their citizens. Sometimes that involves swallowing collective pride, and dealing fairly and openly with controversial theories and opinions from unconventional sources. A good idea can be defended on its own merits, regardless of its origins. I will note that many of the “conspiracy theories” noted above have subsequently been given deeper consideration by entirely mainstream publications and governments.
Whether we are talking about media, academia, the law or government, no institution in a Western democracy should see its role as being the sole and indisputable arbiter of truth on any subject. Institutions are not benevolent dictators of mass public opinion. They exist to give arguments in the public sphere a fair hearing, albeit a hearing subject to ordinary constraints such as time, money and manpower. Their role is to be fair, not final.
The onus of responsibility lies with those who hold power, not those who are held by it. No institution has the right to command trust. Citizens who have no reason to distrust their leaders and institutions are far less likely to be swayed by clumsy online ramblers or foreign chaos agents. If bad-faith actors are effective at persuading a wide swath of the populace, the failure is one of institutional credibility. The damage is self-inflicted, even if the causal agent is external. Doctor, heal thyself.
To hold a position of influence or power is to serve the public, not to demand that it sit mute and complacent. Those who aspire to lead can’t take trust for granted; it’s something they have to earn every day through their conduct, their speech and their habits.
If they fail, if the electorate loses faith in the institutions that serve it, if a conspiracy theory proves to be tomorrow’s truth, then the blame must be apportioned to the proper place. Not with the people, but rather with the institutions themselves.