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.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the