From COVID to aliens, conspiracy theories popular in Canada: A survey – PiPa News

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OTTAWA – The Earth is flat. Intelligent beings from other planets have secretly contacted us. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did not land on the moon in 1969. They may sound like strange statements, but a new poll suggests that a significant number of Canadians believe in these and other conspiracy theories.

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About 5% of us are flat earthers, the poll suggests, while 11% say they think the moon landings are fake. And a third of respondents say they think evidence that aliens have been in contact with our planet is being hidden from the public.

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Polling firm Leger surveyed 1,529 Canadian adults and 1,011 Americans between November 24 and 26, asking for their beliefs in a number of popular conspiracy theories. The poll cannot be assigned a margin of error because online surveys are not considered true random samples.

Overall, 79% of Canadians and 84% of Americans surveyed said they believed in at least one of a list of conspiracy theories mentioned in the poll. In both countries, conservative voters were more likely to believe in conspiracies.

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Just over a quarter of American respondents say they believe global warming does not exist, compared to 16% of Canadians.

Most popular, among Canadians and Americans alike, was the idea that the mainstream media manipulates the information it disseminates. Fifty-five percent of Canadian respondents and 67% of American respondents say they believe so, while another 10% of Canadian survey participants said they did not know.

Second was the long-held theory that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a cover-up. Kennedy was shot while riding in a convertible in his motorcade on November 22, 1963, in Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested the same day, although he claimed he was not responsible. Oswald was shot and killed two days later at a Dallas police station.

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More than a third of Canadian respondents and just shy of half of Americans said they do not believe the official account of the former president’s death.

Although the poll did not present alternative theories, many of the popular conspiracies about Kennedy’s assassination involve his vice president Lyndon B. Johnson, the CIA, the Mafia and other countries including Cuba and Russia.

Around a third of respondents from both countries say they think the car crash that killed Princess Diana in Paris in August 1997 was murder, rather than an accident.

The same number of Canadians – 34% – said they believe scientists and governments are preventing known cures for cancer.

Thirty-two percent of Canadians and 51% of Americans surveyed believe that COVID-19 was created as a biological weapon in a laboratory.

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US intelligence officials released a report in June that rejected some points raised by those who argue that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab, noting that American spy agencies were divided over how the the pandemic began.

That report said four intelligence agencies still believe the virus was transmitted from animals to humans, while two agencies – the Leavement of Energy and the FBI – believe the virus leaked from a laboratory. The CIA has not made an assessment.

The June report was met with outrage from Republicans, some of whom argued at the time that a lab leak was the only option that made sense. The poll suggests that 70% of Republican voters believe in the lab leak theory.

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Republicans were also more likely to report that they believe the government is hiding the truth about the harmfulness of vaccines, a conspiracy supported by 63% of GOP voters and 49% of Americans overall.

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Those trends were reflected in the Canadian data as well: A third of those surveyed believe governments are lying about vaccines, but that number jumps to 45% of conservative voters.

The survey results also suggested that among Canada’s four main political parties, Tory voters lead the way in believing in all but one of the conspiracies presented in the poll: Half of Bloc Quebecois voters have not been convinced by the official account of JFK’s assassination.

There was also less inconsistency among voting intentions when it came to survey respondents who said they believed evidence of alien contact was being hidden from the public. The survey also suggests that the belief that mainstream media handles information is strong across the political spectrum, with those intending to vote Conservative at 69%, Liberal at 37%, the NDP at 47% and the Bloc on 44%.

A quarter of Conservative supporters polled say they believe the 2020 US election was rigged and stolen from Donald Trump. That’s eight points higher than the Canadian average of 17%, but well shy of the 57% of Republicans who think the same.

A regional analysis suggests that Albertans are most likely to believe that a secret global elite is working to establish a world government, at 44%, and that feminism is a strategy to enable women to control society, at 19%.

The management theory of feminism was almost twice as popular among Canadian men than women.

— With files from The Associated Press

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