I’ve been watching something creep into Canadian political discourse and it’s starting to feel urgent enough to name. The conspiracy brain that we used to associate with American right-wing media has crossed the border, and it’s made itself completely at home. Trudeau was a WEF puppet implementing a globalist agenda. The trucker convoy was being surveilled by a secret government network. The carbon tax was never about the environment, it was about control. Fifteen-minute cities are a UN plot to trap you in your neighbourhood. Bill Gates is poisoning the food supply. And Mark Carney, who has barely been in office five minutes, is apparently already the architect of a decades-long scheme to hand Canadian sovereignty to unelected global elites. This is the daily content diet of a growing slice of the Canadian right. And it’s not just anonymous accounts. It’s coming from politicians. It’s coming from media figures with large platforms. It’s being repeated at kitchen tables in Alberta and Saskatchewan like it’s common sense. What makes it particularly frustrating in a Canadian context is that there are real things to be angry about. Housing is genuinely broken. The cost of living has genuinely hammered working people. Western alienation is a real and legitimate political grievance with decades of history behind it. You don’t have to invent a globalist cabal to explain why a lot of Canadians feel like the system isn’t working for them. But the conspiracy framework doesn’t want real problems. Real problems have complicated causes and require hard tradeoffs and might implicate your own side. A shadowy global elite pulling strings is so much cleaner. So much more satisfying. The people selling this stuff in Canada aren’t martyrs or truth-tellers. They’re building audiences. They’re raising money. They’re running for office on the back of your outrage. And every time a real policy debate gets swallowed by another theory about Davos or the WHO or 5G towers, the people with actual power over your life get to operate with a little less scrutiny. Canada deserves a serious right-wing opposition. One that argues about tax policy and resource development and federal overreach with evidence and good faith. What we’re getting instead is an import from the American culture war, poorly translated and applied to a country it barely fits. We can do better than this. We used to.