Crickets are the main course of a conspiracy-laden informal petition released by the federal Conservative Party earlier this week to attack Canada's climate policy.
The petition references a conspiracy theory popular with online influencers and some conservative politicians and pundits who say the federal government is part of a global plot, led by the World Economic Forum, that uses climate measures to force people into submission – including by making them eat insects.
This is entirely false. There is no global conspiracy to use greenhouse gas emission reduction policies to impose an authoritarian regime. That hasn't stopped the federal Conservatives from leveraging the conspiracies to attack Canada's carbon tax.
"Justin Trudeau is attempting to impose a woke agenda on Canadians," the petition reads. In addition to "betting big on an edible bug factory," it claims Trudeau’s agenda includes "a mandatory digital ID, a central bank digital currency, no more roads, and a global shipping carbon tax."
Canada is looking into digital IDs, but if implemented, they would be optional. The Bank of Canada has researched a digital dollar, but is scaling back that work to focus on "broader payments system research and policy development."
The reference to "no more roads" nods to a February controversy when Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said the federal government is prioritizing funding for public transit and low-carbon transportation over building new highways. And the shipping tax references a statement by Guilbeault that Canada "is supportive" of global efforts to tax aviation and shipping to help poorer countries adapt to climate change.
"No international body will have the right to impose its policies on Canadians," the petition reads. "We, the undersigned, call on Justin Trudeau to stop his woke agenda, end the reckless government spending and give Canadians what they want: A carbon tax election NOW."
Cricket factory a focus of conspiracy theories
The petition centres around a recent announcement that Canada's largest edible cricket factory is laying off two-thirds of its workforce in what it calls an extended retooling, with plans to rehire in July. Aspire Food Group, the facility's owner, received an $8.5 million loan from the federal government in 2022, which Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) confirmed to Canada's National Observer the company must reimburse.
In a statement released at the time, the government said the funds aimed to help the company develop new technology to grow crickets, quickly and with relatively few resources, for sale as high-protein flour. Insects are among the planet's most sustainable sources of protein, generating fewer greenhouse gas emissions and pollution than meat, poultry or dairy. The flour is intended to be added to processed foods and pet food.
But last week, the company announced that it was laying off 100 of its 150 employees. The company "needs to make some improvements to its manufacturing system" to improve yields, a process that will take about seven months, Aspire CEO David Rosenberg told AgFunder News.
Typically, it would be the mundane tale of a flashy start-up getting government funding, then suffering growing pains. But not in the case of Aspire: soon after the federal funding was announced in 2022, the company's London, Ontario, facility became a common trope in Canada's right-wing conspiracy theories.
At the time, online conspiracists were already busy pushing the false claim that a voluntary nitrogen fertilizer emissions reduction plan proposed by the federal government was actually a plot to devastate farmers and starve Canadians. Several conservative politicians, including Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, nodded to the conspiracy at the time, a Canada's National Observer investigation revealed.
The government's support for Aspire's cricket farm boosted the conspiracy further, with proponents claiming that the government also wanted to force people to eat the insects. This is false — yet far-right news outlets like The Counter Signal, Rebel News, and True North have written dozens of articles on the subject over the past several years.
In a statement, a spokesperson for AAFC said that " the government of Canada will not force Canadians to eat insects…. Canadians are, and will remain, free to consume the foods of their choice."
Ryan Katz-Rosene, a professor of political studies at the University of Ottawa who studies food systems, said in an email he is concerned the Conservatives are promoting these conspiracy theories.
"I presume they are using this kind of petition and language because they know it galvanizes and rallies support more than if they were to use more neutral and objective language in a petition like this," he wrote. "I don't know how many Conservative MPs and or Party staffers/strategists really 'believe' much of this conspiracy stuff. I'm assuming it's only a small share who are really down the rabbit hole as it were."
Canada's National Observer asked the federal Conservative Party why it created the petition and to provide evidence backing the document's claims. It did not respond by deadline.
Comments
Where are the Liberals, NDP, Greens on calling out Pierre "Snake Oil Salesman" Poilievre on spreading conspiracy theories and outright lies to the Canadian people? Why is the Corruption Party of Canada allowed to spread this propaganda knowing they are outright lies unchecked?
Why would anyone ever vote for the conservative party knowing they are untruthful to you the Canadian voter. Look at Pierre, Danielle Smith, Scott Moe, Doug Ford and how untruful they are constantly with information and secret deals. No thanks!
The opssoition parties need to wake up and start challenging and speaking out loud in the media over all this.
Everybody is "allowed" to spread outright propaganda with lies unchecked. Everybody.
That's our world. Gotta deal with it.
All lies, all the time.
I'm not sure how much effect these levels of lies have on the larger population that isn't down rabbit holes all day. They certainly crank up the ones who show up for convoys and sign-waving, and that's something, for sure.
Gwynne Dyer's latest book on climate ("Intervention Earth") touts the entirely artificial process of precision fermentation to create foodstuffs. Not great eating, but they can be sold as animal food.
If successful, it'll put the cricket-growers into bankruptcy, never mind the public squeamishness about them.
That's why the Conservatives brute it about - Conservative propaganda is all about "squeamishness" felt more keenly by conservative minds; they're just less comfortable with body functions and natural processes. They are squeamish about sexual differences, too, which has driven Conservative propaganda for 50 years.
Oddly, none of them are squeamish about the daunting list of actual ingredients on fast food products.
I'm reminded of the documentary 'Supersize Me' where the author deliberately spent a month eating only McDonald's food. After a couple of weeks his doctor was strongly advising him to stop due to vastly increased cholesterol and blood pressure. Near the end he was literally nausiated by the taste and unique beef tallow smell eminating from every outlet.
A couple of years before watching that doc I had a bad experience with salmonella and a quarter pounder I had at lunch. At the time I was working in an architecture firm located on a converted barge in Vancouver's Coal Harbour. It gently rocked with every passing boat and the room began to spin. I spent two hours in a small washroom cublicle.... I've never seen the inside of a McDonald's since, but the smell pumped out of their vents repulses me every time.
To think my diet was much healthier despite the occasional slips, mainly because it's convenient. From a purely nutritional aspect, I'll bet a cricket burger is far healthier than a Big Mac.
There really *is* basically nothing left to ingest that isn't contaminated by toxic chemicals.
And I'm not so sure Canadians aren't every bit as gullible to MAGA-style lies, as Americans. Otherwise, how to explain the popularity of PP?
The hard right "lost" the BC election by less than the Democrats lost the US one.
People seem to get most of their news now on social media ... and since social media algorithms keep giving them more of what they've already showed interest in, and worse: they target content based on information from across the internet, concatenated to form a dossier of susceptibility for each user. Not unlike Cambridge Analytica, back in 2015/16.
Those who "won't eat bugs" don't realize that they most likely already have done so. Bits of wings and dessicated moth larvae, all ground up in the flour.
Any kid who read the humor section of Readers' Digest in the 50s might recall the wisdom shared by a clergyman, to the effect that families with daughters undoubtedly had eaten "bugs" that didn't get washed from the lettuce picked from the home garden. Home gardens aren't so common, now, but I've come across fat, juicy cabbage lopers in supermarket cabbages and heads of broccoli.
While crickets don't appeal to my gustatorial sensibilities (it's hard to want to eat something after you've seen one "get born" or saved one from drowning -- I've watched both a grasshopper and a Monarch butterfly emerge).
And I do love their "music" as summer moves into fall!
The Conservative Party of Canada's fixation on crickets is because it manipulates their easily led supporters. Conservatives don't care that it makes no sense whatsoever.
As usual Poilievre and followers making a mountain out of a molehill as well as creating more misinformation and misinterpretation. Poilievre would like us to buy into the feds not investing in our future thru research. Think about agriculture and the many crops researched to improve quality and yields! Canola always comes to mind . Think of the lowly apple and the many varieties now available , many thru government sponsorship
USask conducted research over, if memory serves, 11 years on hundreds of Prairie farms practicing regenerative agriculture with particular focus on soil health. Conservation tillage and nutient and carbon fixing cover crops played the most important parts.
The results were phenomenal. Soil organic material and nutrient levels increased. Both drainage and moisture retension improved. And the main crops, planted right through the cover crops using only seed drills, saw vastly improved yields. The icing on the cake was the fact the atmospheric CO2 sequestered in the soil was equivalent to taking over a million burner cars off the road over those 11 years. I believe this occurred using 2,000 farms, but that needs to be checked.
The Roedale Institute in the US has also achieved similar results from its limited acreage and has published reports on it. Australia is also out front on regenerative agriculture. The USask report is out there but I'm not able to find the link while tapping out this post on my phone.
Soil health is important. So is land use and in particular the opportunity costs of failing to rewild land currently used for grazing or growing crops for animals. Environmentalist George Monbiot explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiVmrkK7VVY
And here's a dive into the data: https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-opportunity-costs-food
How is it not illegal for PP and his ConBots to spread these outright lies? Surely there's a law that covers this—particularly if it's a petition.
It's getting way too late already, but the Liberals should really just be doing libel suits. Lots of libel suits. Libel suit after libel suit. I know that libel is harder to get with public figures, but on the other hand when it's political figures doing the libel I think you can make a strong case that they do know the truth and are lying and have what the libel courts call "malice" . . . these days it seems to me it's pretty open and shut.
There's a big difference between saying "Trudeau is an asshole" or "Trudeau's policies are disastrous" on one hand and saying "Trudeau is trying to force us to eat bugs" on the other . . . the latter is a FACTUAL claim which is not true and which it could be pretty easily proved was invented by people deliberately trying to create defamatory lies. And there's a lot of that stuff around. You could probably take a bunch of people to the cleaners, and then based on what you learned in discovery you could probably take them to the cleaners a few more times. And then maybe whatever propagandists were left with shirts on their backs might pull their horns in a bit, and we'd have a slightly more civil political discourse in this country.
And if libel law in Canada is so messed up that this is not workable because it's really almost impossible to get a libel judgement on something someone said about a political figure . . . then pass a law first reforming libel law with respect to public figures.
Possibly a lot of it starts in the legislature and parliament ... where, apparently, it's no holds barred!
There are other interesting twists and turns, set out in Wikipedia, under "Canadian defamation law".
Anything which is irrelevant, u can be assured Poilievre and Conservatives in general will be fixated on it.