I'm not going to editorialize the following... it's all there. The joke, of course, is that Conservatives would never read it, which is sad. They would benefit greatly from its vital ideas. ("It's too long!")
"Canada is not an ignorant country. That is precisely what makes the present crisis more interesting, and more damning.
Statistics Canada reported that 57.5 per cent of working-age Canadians had a college or university credential in the 2021 Census, the highest share in the G7. Ontario’s figure was higher still, at 62.8 per cent. Canada has led the G7 in post-secondary graduates since 2006. This is not, then, a country where public error can be explained by some simple absence of schooling. The vice under discussion is subtler than illiteracy, and far more difficult to cure. It is the migration of competence beyond its proper border.
A person successful in one domain begins to imagine that success as transferable authority over all domains. The man who runs a shop thinks he understands monetary policy because he has balanced payroll. The farmer who understands soil, weather, machinery, and labour begins to imagine himself competent to dismiss climate science. The contractor who has dealt with permits begins to believe he understands constitutional government. The podcast listener, after three hours of grievance delivered in a confident tone, imagines himself educated.
This is the peculiar intellectual disease of the modern right. It is not mere ignorance. Mere ignorance is humble enough to be taught. This is ignorance armed with achievement, property, experience, and resentment. It is the ignorance of the capable man outside the field of his capability. It is the tradesman who would laugh an amateur out of his shop, then pronounce on epidemiology after half an hour online. It is the business owner who would never hire an untrained stranger to manage his books, then accepts economic theory from a politician reducing global inflation to a slogan. It is the citizen who demands credentials from his dentist, mechanic, lawyer, and accountant, then sneers at credentials the moment they belong to a climate scientist, historian, judge, journalist, or public health expert.
That is not independence of mind. It is intellectual trespass.
The modern Conservative movement has not created this vice from nothing. It has discovered it, flattered it, organized it, and turned it into a politics. Its genius, if so degraded a word may be used, has been to persuade citizens that their lack of knowledge is actually a higher form of knowledge, uncorrupted by universities, bureaucracies, courts, public broadcasters, experts, or all the other institutions that exist to discipline opinion with evidence. It tells them they are not uninformed; they are awake. They are not suspicious without warrant; they are brave. They are not rejecting expertise; they are resisting elites. Thus vanity is baptized as common sense.
Here lies the real scandal behind the EKOS finding. EKOS research reported by Cult MTL found that among Canadians in the strongest disinformation category, 80 per cent supported the Conservative Party of Canada, rising to 89 per cent when People’s Party supporters were included. The study used true-or-false claims about climate change, vaccine safety, and Russia, then compared belief in disinformation with political support. That finding should not be vulgarized into the claim that all Conservative voters are stupid. That would be lazy, cruel, and inaccurate. The more serious indictment is that modern Conservatism has become the natural political home of people who mistake confidence for competence.
They know things. That is the point. They know how to run businesses, repair engines, manage crews, farm land, teach classes, keep accounts, supervise workers, raise children, sell houses, build decks, wire rooms, lead departments, and survive hard years. Many have worked for everything they possess. Many are intelligent. Many are responsible in the ordinary conduct of life. Yet intelligence in one field does not grant sovereignty over all fields. A man may be excellent at what he does and still be grossly uninformed about what he merely feels.
The modern Conservative voter often sins exactly there: at the point where practical experience becomes epistemic arrogance. Having been right about some things, he imagines himself immune from being wrong about others. Having been patronized by some fools, he concludes that all correction is condescension. Having seen governments fail, he concludes that government expertise itself is fraud. Having caught one expert in error, he makes himself superior to expertise as such.
The farmer’s knowledge is real. It does not make him a climate scientist. The shopkeeper’s knowledge is real. It does not make him a central banker. The police officer’s knowledge is real. It does not make him a criminologist. The parent’s knowledge is real. It does not make him an immunologist. The taxpayer’s knowledge is real. It does not make him a constitutional scholar. The voter’s grievance may be sincere. It does not make the grievance true.
A liberal society depends upon this distinction. Men and women are free to judge public affairs, but freedom of judgment does not abolish the obligation to know something before judging. Mill defended individuality of mind, but never confused individuality with the worship of one’s first impression. Liberty requires the discipline of thought, not merely the permission to speak. The modern right has kept the language of liberty while discarding the labour that makes liberty intelligent.
This is why climate denial and climate minimization remain so revealing. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that human activities, chiefly greenhouse gas emissions, have unequivocally caused global warming. Canada’s own environmental indicators report that Canada has warmed at roughly twice the global average rate, and northern Canada at roughly three times the global rate.
Yet the Conservative response has been to turn climate into an argument about personal irritation. The farmer knows weather. The commuter knows gas prices. The homeowner knows heating bills. The business owner knows cost pressures. All of that knowledge is immediate, concrete, and politically powerful. It is also insufficient. Weather is not climate science. A gas bill is not atmospheric chemistry. A tax complaint is not a model of planetary warming. But modern Conservatism takes the partial knowledge of lived experience and licenses it to dismiss the disciplined knowledge of entire fields.
That is how “axe the tax” became more than opposition to one policy. It became a permission structure for ignorance. A serious conservative party could have accepted climate science and debated instruments: nuclear power, industrial carbon pricing, adaptation, permitting, transmission lines, rural fairness, technological investment, or a less politically fragile way of reducing emissions. That would have required governing intelligence. The party chose the chant. The chant flatters because it asks nothing of the listener except agreement.
The same pattern appeared during the pandemic. A citizen may know his own body, his own risks, his own anger, his own lost income, his own exhaustion with mandates. That knowledge has moral weight. It does not make him an epidemiologist. It does not qualify him to weigh vaccine safety from Facebook clippings, nor to decide that public health reporting is a conspiracy because he distrusts the tone of public health officials.
Canada’s vaccine safety reporting states that adverse events after vaccination are not necessarily caused by vaccination, and that evidence continues to show the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh the risks of the disease. That is the sort of careful distinction a serious public must be able to hold in its mind.
Modern Conservative politics did not teach that distinction. It prospered by blurring it. It found citizens angry at mandates and allowed that anger to bleed into suspicion of vaccines, suspicion of doctors, suspicion of public health, suspicion of statistics, suspicion of any institution that refused to ratify the feeling. There was room for a principled civil-libertarian critique of pandemic government. There was room to say governments overreached, communicated poorly, and sometimes treated citizens as subjects rather than adults. But the right too often preferred the easier harvest: not liberty disciplined by fact, but grievance dressed as liberty.
The Freedom Convoy should be remembered in that light. It was not only a protest against mandates. It was a theatre of overextended certainty. People who did not understand law believed they had discovered constitutional law. People who did not understand public health believed they had exposed public health. People who did not understand parliamentary government believed they could replace elected authority with street pressure and call it democracy. The convoy mind was not merely angry. It was certain. Its certainty was its danger.
That same danger now travels through foreign policy. A Canadian may know war is costly, that governments lie, that foreign aid can be misused, that NATO is imperfect, that media narratives deserve scrutiny. None of that makes him competent to launder Russian talking points as independent thought. The DisinfoWatch and Canadian Digital Media Research Network report found a political divide in vulnerability to Russian narratives about Ukraine, with Conservative supporters reporting the highest exposure and showing greater belief in several Kremlin-aligned narratives than Liberal and NDP supporters.
Again, the vice is borrowed competence. The citizen knows distrust. He mistakes distrust for geopolitical knowledge. He knows governments have misled people before. He mistakes that general truth for a license to disbelieve every specific truth he finds inconvenient. He knows the West has made mistakes. He mistakes that knowledge for moral equivalence between an invaded country and the empire invading it. He hears some podcaster mutter about NATO, biolabs, Nazis, corruption, or proxy wars, and feels himself elevated above the ordinary citizen who still believes Russia invaded Ukraine because Russia invaded Ukraine.
Here, modern Conservatism’s contempt for expertise becomes a gift to tyrants. Authoritarian propaganda rarely asks the foreign citizen to love the dictator. It only asks him to doubt everyone else. It asks him to say, with great satisfaction, “Well, we do not know the whole story.” This sounds like humility. Very often it is vanity. The speaker does not mean that he will study the matter more deeply. He means that his suspicion deserves the same standing as knowledge.
The Joe Rogan episode made the pattern almost too neat. Pierre Poilievre went onto one of the largest American podcasts, hosted by a man with no evident mastery of Canadian constitutional government, federalism, parliamentary responsibility, provincial jurisdiction, Indigenous law, or the actual machinery of the Canadian state. Abacus Data found that Conservative voters were more positive toward Rogan than Liberal or NDP voters, and that Conservative voters were also the most engaged with Poilievre’s appearance on the show.
Rogan matters because he is the high priest of the self-credentialed age. His show imitates depth by duration. Three hours pass, and the listener feels he has witnessed inquiry. Yet length is not learning. A long conversation between two men outside their depth remains a long conversation outside their depth. The set is casual, the tone masculine, the rhythm leisurely, the contempt for “mainstream media” constant. It gives the audience the sensation of intellectual freedom without the inconvenience of intellectual discipline.
A fact-check of Poilievre’s appearance found misinformation or misleading claims about immigration, the oilsands, seed oils, safer drug supply, and inflation. That list is almost comically perfect. It moves from public administration to environmental science, from nutrition to addiction policy, from economics to national identity. The common thread is not subject matter. The common thread is the performance of knowing.
This is what modern Conservative politics has learned to perform: the confident reduction of complex fields into digestible resentment. Immigration becomes a number inflated for effect. Inflation becomes government profligacy with all global causes sanded away. Drug policy becomes moral panic. Energy becomes pure virtue, stripped of environmental consequence. Climate becomes tax. History becomes grievance. Expertise becomes arrogance. The citizen is not asked to understand. He is invited to feel superior to those who do.
Residential school denialism is the darkest version of the same vice. Here the overextended layman moves from error into moral indecency. The historical record is not built on rumour. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated missing children and unmarked burials; the Special Interlocutor’s work has continued around missing children, unmarked graves, and burial sites connected to former residential schools. The issue involves survivor testimony, archival records, ground searches, church and government documents, Indigenous law, forensic practice, and the ethical treatment of burial sites.
The denialist arrives without that knowledge and announces that he has “questions.” The phrase sounds modest. It often means something quite different: no answer will be accepted unless it protects the story already preferred. He has not mastered the archive. He has not sat with survivors. He has not studied the records. He has not earned the right to speak with such certainty. Yet he has noticed that some early public language around “mass graves” was imprecise, and from that imprecision he builds an escape hatch from the whole moral history.
A Canadian Journal of Political Science study defines residential school denialism as misinformation connected to deaths, abuse, genocidal intent, and the identification of suspected unmarked graves at former school sites; it found that denialist beliefs are more common among conservatives. The Special Interlocutor’s executive summary also describes denialists claiming there are no missing and disappeared children and no unmarked or mass graves in Canada.
This is the arrogance of incompetence in its most obscene form. The denialist takes precision, which serious inquiry requires, and turns it into suspicion. He takes the slow pace of respectful investigation and treats it as proof of fraud. He takes Indigenous restraint around sacred sites and calls it concealment. He demands that grief perform for him on his timetable, then declares the grief suspect when it refuses.
That posture has become familiar across the right. Climate denialists have questions for the IPCC. Vaccine cranks have questions for public health. Russian apologists have questions about Ukraine. Convoy romantics have questions about mandates. Residential school denialists have questions about missing children. The questions are rarely instruments of inquiry. They are instruments of delay. They preserve the speaker’s self-image as a thinker while protecting him from the burden of actually thinking.
A true education should teach the limits of one’s competence. That is the paradox. The more one knows seriously about anything, the more one understands how much labour knowledge requires. The real mechanic knows engines are not mastered by attitude. The real nurse knows medicine is not mastered by suspicion. The real teacher knows learning is not the same as exposure. The real lawyer knows law is not a feeling about fairness. The real farmer knows land punishes arrogance. Competence, when honest, should breed humility.
Modern Conservatism has instead cultivated the conceit of the half-informed. It has taught people to treat their instincts as evidence, their resentments as analysis, and their successful management of one life as sufficient qualification to overrule specialists in every other field. Its greatest political achievement has been emotional: it makes people feel wise at the very moment they are being made easier to deceive.
This is why the educated nature of Canada matters so much. A less educated country might plead deprivation. Canada cannot. We have schools, universities, colleges, public libraries, public broadcasters, searchable archives, courts, statistical agencies, scientific reports, and every imaginable means of correction. The problem is not that information is absent. The problem is that correction has become humiliating to those who have been taught to experience correction as domination.
There is a class element here, but it is not the simple one Conservatives prefer to imagine. They like to say criticism of misinformation is contempt for working people. This is a useful shield and a dishonest one. The issue is not work. It is epistemic vanity. Working people are owed truth as much as anyone. Farmers are owed truth. Tradespeople are owed truth. Business owners are owed truth. Parents are owed truth. The deepest contempt is not telling them they are wrong when they are wrong. The deepest contempt is feeding them falsehood because falsehood converts well into donations, applause, and votes.
The Conservative politician who flatters this condition commits a double offence. He degrades public knowledge, and he insults the very people he claims to honour. He treats them as citizens whose anger is more useful than their judgment. He gives them slogans instead of explanations, enemies instead of causes, personalities instead of institutions, and suspicion instead of thought. Then he calls this respect.
A serious conservatism would do the opposite. It would tell its own voters hard truths first. It would say that climate change is real, even if Liberal policy is flawed. It would say vaccines saved lives, even if mandates went too far. It would say Russia is the aggressor, even if Western policy deserves scrutiny. It would say residential schools were an atrocity, even if public language around burial sites must be careful. It would say crime matters, but crime data matters too. It would say public institutions can fail without being conspiracies.
That conservatism would have moral weight. It would deserve argument. It might even deserve power.
The present Conservative movement too often offers something cheaper: a politics of transferred competence and sanctified resentment. It tells the citizen that because he knows something, he may dismiss anything. Because he has worked, he may sneer at study. Because he has suffered, he may ignore evidence. Because he pays taxes, he may treat every public servant as a parasite. Because he has common sense, he may trespass through every discipline like a conqueror.
The result is a citizen who knows enough to be confident and too little to be ashamed.
That citizen is the ideal subject of modern Conservative politics. He is educated enough to speak, busy enough not to study, resentful enough to distrust correction, and proud enough to mistake that distrust for independence. He will not be told what to think by experts. He will be told what to think by entertainers, politicians, influencers, and algorithmic merchants of grievance, provided they begin by assuring him that he already knew it all along.
The final tragedy is that such a citizen becomes less free while imagining himself liberated. He thinks he has escaped elite control when he has merely exchanged difficult authorities for easier ones. He rejects the professor and accepts the podcaster. He rejects the statistician and accepts the anecdote. He rejects the historian and accepts the meme. He rejects the court and accepts the convoy lawyer. He rejects the public broadcaster and accepts the man with a microphone who profits from his agitation.
This is not freedom of thought. It is capture by flattery.
Truth is public infrastructure. A country cannot function when large numbers of citizens come to believe that their competence in one field entitles them to supremacy in all others. Roads require engineers. Courts require law. Medicine requires science. Climate requires climate science. History requires records. Economics requires more than household analogy. Constitutional government requires more than irritation with politicians. A democracy gives every citizen a vote. It does not thereby make every citizen an expert.
The Conservative trade in unreality depends on confusing those two things. It takes the dignity of democratic equality and perverts it into the fantasy of universal expertise. It tells voters that because their voice counts equally at the ballot box, their uninformed opinion counts equally in every discipline. That is the fatal slide. Political equality is sacred. Intellectual equality is earned.
A party may attract the misinformed by accident once. When it keeps flattering the overconfident, defending the uninformed, elevating the unqualified, and building campaigns around the vanity of borrowed certainty, accident becomes confession."
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