Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is leaning into his banking background as his country fights a trade war with the United States, 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 AI-generated images of him in a pool with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“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 both 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 lept 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 Al-Rawi noted people trying to associate Carney with a supposed circle of nefarious elites were “mostly far-right players and provocateurs.”
– Inauthentic accounts –
Many posts have zeroed in on a picture from a festival in Britain 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. AFP did not find any legitimate pictures of the pair.
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.
Al-Rawi said for conspiracy theorists, a grain of truth mixed with fabricated evidence is enough for a claim to truly take hold.
A spokesman with the Carney campaign told AFP the claims being spread were “false and disinformation” and said 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.”
– Seeding doubt –
Experts said engagement with the claims appears to be somewhat contained to groups already critical of Carney’s Liberal Party.
Carmen Celestini, an assistant professor in religious studies at the University of Waterloo, said the push appears to be building on attacks that were successful in hitting Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau.
“It just sort of makes sense to move those conspiracy theories towards Carney,” she said.
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.
Gruzd said repetition of conspiratorial claims, even for people who remain skeptical, can undermine a candidate by creating confusion.
“None of the single theories may be true, but it creates a doubt in the real facts,” he said.
