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It’s hard to pick just one moment that illustrates the new depths plumbed by the lowest common denominators of Quebec society in 2020. But a good candidate came one Sunday last month, when a small group of anti-mask activists (sans face coverings, of course) gathered outside a home in Westmount that they mistakenly thought belonged to Quebec Premier François Legault.
“I don’t live in Westmount,” Legault later tweeted ever so dryly, sharing a link of a story about the demonstration. “The protesters have the wrong address … and perhaps the wrong cause.”
It wasn’t the only or even the biggest demonstration this year against the measures taken to curb the spread of COVID-19 in Quebec. But the mistaken location of their rally is an indicator of how ill-informed, moronic and misdirected those bucking the public health directives are about the pandemic — among many other basic facts.
While Montreal was at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in Canada last spring, Quebec also became Ground Zero for a contagious form of covidiocy. Thanks in part to homegrown conspiracy theorists like Alexis Cossette-Trudel, the warped worldview of the shadowy cult-like group QAnon found fertile ground here. In its followers’ eyes, the pandemic is a plot by a group of Satanic pedophiles running a child sex-trafficking ring who are determined to oust U.S. President Donald Trump. They also believe 5G is spying, vaccines are toxic and that Lady Gaga is a cannibal. If it sounds like a joke, it’s not.
This kind of lunacy is not unique to Quebec, despite Cossette-Trudel (the son of a pair of felquiste kidnappers) fanning the flames here. In Ontario, a sitting MPP, Randy Hillier, is leading the charge against the provinces’s lockdown measures, peddling misinformation and organizing rallies that contravene health guidelines.
But before Facebook, YouTube and Twitter shut down his accounts for spreading misinformation, Cossette-Trudel helped whip so many people into a deluded frenzy that a CROP poll in October found that a staggering one in five Quebecers subscribe to these ludicrous ideas.
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