Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is leaning into his banking background as his country fights a trade war with the US, but his financial ties have also made him a target for conspiracy theories.
Incorporating tropes familiar to followers of the far-right QAnon movement, conspiratorial social media posts about the Liberal leader have surged ahead of the country’s April 28 election.
Posts range from false claims he recited a “satanic chant” at a campaign event to artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images of him in a pool with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Photo: AP
“He’s the ideal person to be targeted here, for sure, due to his background, as well as his financial work,” said Ahmed al-Rawi, an associate professor of communications at Canada’s Simon Fraser University.
Before serving as governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, Carney had a lucrative career as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. Mentioning a candidate’s affiliation with the global financial elite, and particularly the World Economic Forum, has become a dog whistle for the right.
Canada’s Conservatives have leapt to highlight Carney’s connections to the annual gathering in Davos, with party leader Pierre Poilievre in January describing him as “the voice for the billionaire globalist elite that have been impoverishing the working class around the world.”
Anti-establishment sentiment is present on the left, but people trying to associate Carney with a supposed circle of nefarious elites were “mostly far-right players and provocateurs,” al-Rawi said.
Many posts have zeroed in on a picture from a festival in the UK showing Carney and his wife standing next to Epstein’s convicted accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
This 2013 photo is authentic, but it precipitated the spread of several AI-generated images shared to emphasize a supposed link between Carney and Epstein.
The Canadian Digital Media Research Network found a small number of bot accounts pushed the association by replying to posts from Canadian political figures. Once larger accounts began to engage with the claims, millions of views rolled in.
For conspiracy theorists, a grain of truth mixed with fabricated evidence is enough for a claim to truly take hold, al-Rawi said
A spokesman with the Carney campaign said that the claims being spread were “false and disinformation,” adding that any insinuated connection with Maxwell was incorrect.
“She went to high school with Mark Carney’s wife’s sister,” he said. “Although they may have bumped into each other in public settings, they are not friends.”
Experts said engagement with the claims appears to be somewhat contained to groups already critical of Carney’s Liberal Party.
Polls indicate that Carney’s replacement of Trudeau coincided with a surge in Liberal support.
Anatoliy Gruzd, director of research at the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University, said the inauthentic images often qualify as enough evidence for someone already primed to believe in conspiracies built on a belief in sinister control exerted by central banking.
“If there’s a way to connect to something that a particular fringe group already believed in, maybe it’s enough to seed some kind of doubt,” he said.
Repetition of conspiratorial claims, even for people who remain skeptical, can undermine a candidate by creating confusion, he said.
“None of the single theories may be true, but it creates a doubt in the real facts,” he added.
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