Broadly speaking, the conspiracy theory suggests that a cabal of global elites planned for the pandemic as a way to “reset” the world and impose their own form of global economic control and policies.
While the phrase has circulated for years, the specific idea first evolved in relation to the pandemic earlier this year when plans were made by Prince Charles and the World Economic Forum (WEF) for a meeting dubbed the “Great Reset,” where world leaders would convene and discuss how to rebuild the economy and fight climate change after the pandemic. The WEF has since dubbed its various recovery plans and documents under the “Great Reset” branding.
Conspiracy theorists latched onto the term and the meeting as some sort of evidence that the “global elite” were conspiring to manipulate the global economy.
And, like many conspiracy theories, various groups and individuals have latched onto the idea to varying degrees. Some believe the pandemic is real, but allege that this apparent economic manipulation will only benefit these so-called “elites” and come at the expense of average people. Some allege that the pandemic was faked entirely, or has been planned for “60 years,” according to one believer interviewed in the Economist. Some believe it will result in lost freedoms, forced vaccines and “concentration camps” for those who don’t comply.
As is expected on the massive web that is the Internet, many of these beliefs intersect and overlap with other conspiracy theories from QAnon to anti-masker movements.
With 5,200 direct jobs lost in the fossil sector since March, the government of Newfoundland is beginning to talk, tentatively, about reinventing itself as a green energy leader. Also on the horizon: finding answers to the murky question of who will pay to decommission the fossil infrastructure left behind.
“Just a few years ago, with oil at more than US$100 a barrel, St. John’s was a boom town, with a soaring real estate market, rapidly growing population, and pricey new restaurants fuelled by oil executives and their expense accounts,” writes the Globe and Mail. Today, with the province’s key export hovering in the low $40s, those executives are fuelling nothing but anxious speculation about when, if ever, billion-dollar oil projects will get the green light.
Noting that Husky Energy’s C$2.2-billion West White Rose extension is on hold until “at least 2022,” the Globe adds that “drilling on the iconic Hibernia platform, which launched the province’s oil industry, has been suspended since April as a cost-saving measure.”
And according to a recent report by the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, that industry regulator “received zero bids for 16 of the 17 offshore parcels available for drilling in 2020—slashing planned exploration spending from oil companies to just $27 million, down from $1.3 billion in 2018.”
There will be no need and no justification to complete the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion or the Keystone XL pipeline if Canada makes any effort at all to strengthen its climate policies, according to the more ambitious of two fossil demand scenarios in an analysis published yesterday by the Canada Energy Regulator (CER).
Early news reports yesterday focused on the main scenario in the CER’s annual Energy Futures report, which concluded that Trans Mountain, Keystone, and Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline will be the last three the country ever needs. The Globe and Mail had the report projecting a “hefty” 12% reduction in oil and gas consumption by 2030, rising to 35% by 2050, with renewable and nuclear energy growing 31% by mid-century.
“Under the status quo scenario, the regulator projects the three pipelines under construction — Keystone XL, Trans Mountain, and Enbridge Line 3—will be the last ones needed to handle future growth in crude oil production,” CP writes. “Under the evolving scenario, crude production still grows about 18% before peaking in 2039, but the report says Line 3 alone is enough added capacity to handle that increase.”
For more than a year, the Trudeau government has been promising a pathway to net-zero emissions by 2050, beginning with a more ambitious carbon reduction target for 2030. One of the main criticisms of the federal climate accountability legislation released last week was that it didn’t include those details, but the general understanding before and since has been that the full plan is on the way.
Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government has come to be defined by two things: its hesitant responses to the emerging second wave of COVID-19 and its relentlessly pro-business approach to virtually all other matters.
The situation invites the question of whether the government’s stumbling reluctance to impose more restrictive measures to head off the growing numbers of COVID-19 infections, as recommended by medical experts from across the province, is a product of its pro-business orientation.
On the COVID-19 front, recent days have been defined by some deeply disturbing trends: record daily rates of new infections; an already fatal reappearance of the virus in long-term care facilities; and projections of uncontrolled infection rates exceeding 6,500 cases per day, which will overwhelm hospital and intensive care unit capacity. Although the news of potentially effective vaccines is encouraging, their widespread availability seems many months off.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford watches as Health Minister Christine Elliott walks to the podium to answer questions at Queen’s Park on Nov. 16, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
The provincial government’s responses to the situation have been surprisingly feeble. The province was actually moving in the direction of easing restrictions, particularly around public gathering spaces like restaurants, bars, gyms and places of worship, despite warnings that these could be key points of transmission.
It was then revealed that the province had ignored the advice of its own public health agency in terms of the infection rates needed to trigger further restrictions. The recommended thresholds for restrictions were reportedly increased by a factor of four relative to the advice received by the province from its own public health agency.
Taking the fall?
The imposition of further restrictions has been left in the hands of local medical officers of health despite the limited legal authority available to them. The province, it seemed, was prepared to let them take the political fall for the imposition of potentially unpopular restrictions.
The catastrophic projections released on Nov. 13 brought a partial turnaround by the province in terms of the thresholds for additional restrictions. But the government’s approach is still falling well short of what health authorities and experts are saying is needed to prevent disaster.
As if to add insult to injury, Ontario is poised to pass legislation that would effectively grant long-term care home owners and operators immunity from liability for the more than 1,800 resident deaths that occurred in their facilities during the first COVID-19 wave.
There is strong evidence that a significant portion of those fatalities were the result of neglect and poor care, rather than COVID-19 itself.
The province has extensive authority over public health matters, as well as a range of other legal and policy tools at its disposal to combat the virus. And on the surface, the government has consistently expressed concern and distress over the impacts of COVID-19 on its victims. Yet it had to be pushed into partial action by the recent outcry from the media and health experts over its failing responses.
Pro-business arguments
Why?
The answer may lie with Ford’s stance on issues beyond the pandemic. The essential feature of the Ford government has been its striking responsiveness to any argument presented to it from pro-business advocates and framed in terms of economic development.
The government’s record on the environment in this context is well-known: the shredding of Ontario’s climate change strategy; the elimination of the independent office of the environmental commissioner; the weakening or elimination of regulations on endangered species, forestry and toxic chemicals; and the evisceration of longstanding rules on industrial water pollution and environmental assessment.
Most striking of these tendencies has been the government’s willingness to acquiesce to the demands presented to it by the land development industry. Planning rules intended to curb urban sprawl in the Greater Toronto Area have been gutted.
The province has made unprecedented moves to reach deep into local municipal plans on behalf of development interests to eliminate constraints and permit ever greater development in areas like midtown Toronto that are already subject to intensive development pressures.
Ministerial zoning orders have been used with unprecedented frequency to override municipal and provincial rules on specific sites, most recently permitting a warehouse development in an environmentally significant wetland on Pickering’s Lake Ontario shoreline.
Provisions buried in the government’s November 2020 budget bill would undermine the role of local conservation authorities in controlling development for lands that are at risk of flooding and other hazards — significant considerations in the age of climate change — as well as for wetlands and shorelines.
Early morning fishermen take advantage of warm weather on Pigeon Lake near Bobcaygeon, Ont., on Nov. 7, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Thornhill
Sympathetic to business owners
The same unapologetic pro-business orientation seems to lie at the heart of the government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis.
The government has seemed particularly sympathetic to the pleas of small business owners, such as restaurants, bars and gyms, that would be affected by further shutdowns, despite the potentially significant roles these types of facilities could play in the spread of COVID-19.
A bartender and restaurant manager watch the news on television in the Port Credit neighbourhood of Mississauga, Ont., on Oct. 9, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
That’s profoundly short-sighted, laying the groundwork for disastrous runaway outbreaks like those occurring in the United States. Those types of outbreaks may only be able to be controlled, if at all, through the types of draconian and long-term lockdowns seen in places like Melbourne, Australia. The impact would be far more damaging to businesses than additional short-term restrictions.
A more effective and balanced approach would recognize the need for far greater restrictions in the short term, while working with the federal government to provide support to affected employees and helping businesses move their operations to take-out, delivery, curbside pickup and online services wherever possible.
Events in the U.S. and Europe are demonstrating just how bad a second COVID-19 wave could be. If the Ford government acts decisively, it may still be able to avoid the same fate, but time is running out quickly.
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The Jason Kenney government in Alberta is pitching hydrogen, plastics recycling, and even geothermal energy as elements of an economic diversification strategy that leans heavily on natural gas to create tens of thousands of jobs and reboot the province’s sagging economy.
The 26-page plan is long on aspiration, short on any assessment of the obstacles it could face, but just detailed enough to raise alarm bells about the shaky international markets its proponents hope to tap into, the unproven technologies it relies on, and the near-certainty that some of its main elements will be left behind by more affordable renewable energy options in as little as a decade. It also makes no use of the word “climate”, apart from one reference to Environment and Climate Change Canada.
“Canada is among the world’s top five producers of natural gas, with about two-thirds of this production coming from Alberta,” the province states in its online summary of the report. “The industry employs tens of thousands of Albertans and has the potential to generate billions of dollars each year in revenue.”
Fair enough, as far as it goes. But given a choice between treating that concentration as an advantage or a looming vulnerability, the province’s United Conservative Party government is once again casting its lot with yesterday’s technologies, rather than tomorrow’s.
Broadly speaking, the conspiracy theory suggests that a cabal of global elites planned for the pandemic as a way to “reset” the world and impose their own form of global economic control and policies.
