A (0:01)

Hey, Sal. Hank, what's going on? We haven't worked a case in years. I just bought my car at Carvana and it was so easy.

B (0:08)

Too easy.

A (0:08)

Think something's up? You tell me. They got thousands of options, found a great car at a great price, and it got delivered the next day. It sounds like Carvana just makes it easy to buy your car, Hank. Yeah, you're right. Case closed.

C (0:24)

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A (0:31)

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B (1:03)

Hey everyone, I'm Matthew Remsky. This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. You can follow myself, Derek and Julian individually on Bluesky. The pod is on Instagram and threads under its own handle and you can support our Patreon as well. You can also find me on YouTube and TikTok and upscrolled at Antifascist dad. So it's a brief episode today called Mark Carney is Nice, but Canada Sells arms to ice and what I want to do is to contextualize my Prime Minister Carney's now famous speech at Davos, which ostensibly was about seeking new pathways for international trade independent of a now volatile us. Many folks found this speech refreshing in some way. Here was a politician confessing that his powerful subculture has been lying to itself for generations about the morality and efficacy of the international rules based order. But in my view, it wasn't an important speech for that obvious admission, but for the lessons it provided about the deep contradictions and hypocrisies of liberal politics, which when it pretends to stand up to fascism, it's really asking that the capital order return to an era of better optics. Carney told a truth about neoliberalism that conceals a bigger lie about capitalist inevitability. And he pulled it off with the affect of a more benevolent patriarch, which in the age of Trump, Musk, Thiel, Orban and Bolsonaro can be really attractive and distracting. Now over on Antifascist Dad, I looked at Carney as a mild mannered affective foil to right wing monsters and how deceptive this is in ultimate terms. But today, here on conspirituality, it's more about the numbers. I'm going to be summarizing the hypocrisy of a middle power government like ours pretending to distinguish itself from American chaos, while its military and tech firms are deeply enmeshed in the worst aspects of the American police state at home and abroad. Now, off the top, I want to flag the excellent ongoing independent reporting of Rachel Gilmour, my fellow Canadian journalist, who in her early 30s is really breaking the mold of anti fascist beat reporting here with broad social media reach. She got her start out of Carleton University in Ottawa with a journalism and human rights degree and then took an internship at the Aboriginal People's Television Network in Ottawa. And then she worked her way into the Parliament press pool and then started cutting tiktoks to reach a bigger and younger audience hungry for a leftist point of view in the mainstream. National broadcaster CTV picked her up thinking they were going to capitalize on that initiative, but they later laid her off. But as her social media presence grew, so did online harassment and threats from the right. She has soldiered on nonetheless. Now through her own media company, Bubble Pop, which is sort of a Canadian counterpart to Taylor Lorenz's power user, Gilmour covers federal politics, digital reform, impacts on society, election integrity, far right extremism, and then the intersection of news with social media. She does great work. I'm going to link to her substack in the notes, specifically to her coverage of just how complicit we are as Canadians with US Military profiteering and adventurism and and I'll get to the money details in that segment. But the first thing that anyone should understand about Carney's attempt to distance himself from Trumpian politics is that in the area that is under most scrutiny globally at the moment, which is how wealthy countries of the global north treat their immigrants or refugees, Carney's government is actually attempting to mirror Trumpian immigration policy. I'm going to link to a very solid article by Petra Molnar at TechPolicy Press that evaluates the Strong Borders Act Act. This is Bill C2, introduced by Carney's government in mid-2025, which expands surveillance powers, weakens privacy standards, and restricts asylum procedures in ways that mimic the Trump administration's hardline immigration stance. Rather than defending human rights or differentiating Canada from U.S. policies, the bill would impose a one year bar on refugee claims for people entering via the U.S. border. And it broadens Canada's data sharing and surveillance apparatus under the US Cloud, which grants US intelligence agencies access to data on American citizens stored on servers in Canada. All of these measures likely violate a number of charter rights to process and privacy, while consolidating power in the executive in a very unparliamentary way. And it's not new. Molnar situates the Strong Borders act within a longer Canadian history of border control shaped by racial exclusion, surveillance and security logics, as opposed to humanitarian principles. Between 1885 and 1923, Canada had something called the Chinese Head Tax, if you can believe it. Of course you can believe it. Designed to deter Chinese immigration after their labor helped build the Canadian Pacific Railway, it institutionalized racial discrimination, framed Chinese workers as economic threats, and it laid the groundwork for the 1923 Chinese Exclusion act, which virtually halted Chinese immigration. Then in 1914, Canadian authorities denied entry to 376 mostly sick passengers from British India under the Continuous Journey Regulation. This was a rule crafted to specifically exclude South Asian migrants. Their ship, the Komagata Maru, spent two months in Vancouver Harbour and then was forced to sail back to India, where British forces killed several passengers. And as you'd expect, during the Cold War, Canada tightened immigration screening to exclude individuals suspected of communist ties, while internally the RCMP harassed suspected communist organizers, including the men and women who had illegally journeyed to Spain to fight with the International Brigades against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. It wasn't good enough that they were right about the fascists, and had they won in Spain, the following war might have turned out differently. The Canadian government was much more worried about their ideas than it was impressed by their heroism. So there's always a history. Carney's hard line against immigration isn't explicitly openly connected to these threads of racism, colonialism and red scarism, but those influences are all there. He's more in the zone of pandering to public anxiety over housing and strained services, while making no move to socialize anything. And pandering also to fears about the future of labor in the shadow of AI, while making no moves toward the only sane bulwark against coming mass disruptions, an employment guarantee or something like it. Imagine countering fears of unemployment that will surge because tech billionaires are basically allowed to do whatever they want and then punting that fear off on immigrants. So now turning to Rachel Gilmour's reporting, here's her rundown of just how enmeshed the Canadian military complex is with US domestic terrorism at this point. So we have Montreal based security firm Gardaworld that secured at least $8 million in U.S. contracts supporting work on the Florida ICE detention facility called Alligator Alcatraz. We have Ottawa tech company JSI Telecom with contracts worth at least $7.3 million with U.S. department of Homeland Security communication systems for court ordered wiretaps and investigative support tools used in ICE and other law enforcement operations. Vancouver's social media platform hootsuite is part of a pilot with ICE for monitoring social conversations about enforcement actions and agency perception. Now that project's current value is around $95,000 US with additional Homeland Security contract amounts up to $2.8 million for related services. Now Thomson Reuters, which is headquartered here in Toronto, holds multiple DHS contracts worth as much as $31 million US including investigative databases, risk mitigation tools, analysis tools supporting homeland security operations and several of those directly assist ICE activities. Waterloo based Magnet Forensics has at least seven DHS contracts totaling 3.6 million, including licenses for digital evidence extraction tools used by ICE and other agenc. It also receives Canadian government contracts. Ottawa based I Corps has an active ICE contract for a tactical robot that supports firearm and tactical programs. The US arm of Montreal CGI holds multiple DHS contracts including two with ICE valued at over $319,000 specifically while total DHS engagements exceed $104 million, spanning software and support systems linked to EN and finally, Gilmore Pings a story that has gotten a lot of coverage. Brampton based Rochelle, this is an armored car company, secured a $7.2 million contract to sell 20 armored Senator vehicles capable of stopping high caliber rounds to ice. And I'll just add, in the aftermath of the murder of Alex Preddy, Canadians got the thrill of watching our trade agreements in full splendor as a Rochelle senator was seen entering the neighborhood where he was shot to intimidate protesters at the murder site as they ch on tear gas. Do Canadians care about these complicities? Well, there is a law called the Export and Import Permits act which mandates a human rights risk assessment and a review of sales like these. However, Canada has a long standing US exemption under the EIPA because we're such good neighbors. And to give a sense of how government squishiness on this meets corporate amorality, a similarly toothless vetting arrangement covers Rochelle's use of the Ford 550 chassis for their vehicles. Because the Senator is an upfitted vehicle based on a Ford chassis, Ford is only interested in maintaining its own technical standards. It doesn't want its chassis to fall apart in the wild because Some cowboy didn't know what they were doing. But if an upfitter wants to upfit a 550 to help murder protesters in the streets, that's just business. And besides, you don't expect the hard working Russian Israeli business dudes of Rochelle to be able to control how foreign governments use their little trucks, do you? So all of this is going on in the background of Carney's Davos speech, which ostensibly and without naming him, is a public divorce notice for Trump. And he has a disarming low key charisma that is really effective at first, obscuring the hypocrisy of how deeply Canadian businesses are in bed with the US military on ice. But then there's a second stage purpose for that charisma. In my opinion, Carney can also use it to manage moral outrage over the complicity. Now, here's how it goes. I think when people first sniff out these contradictions, they're outraged and rightfully demand that it end. And that's where Carney type charm comes in. Fully integrated with the kind of bureaucratic slow walk processes designed to always protect trade value and kick the human rights issues down the road. Canada's tiny socialist minority pegged this back in September. And MP Jenny Kwan of Vancouver tabled a private member's bill to enforce human rights reviews for the end use of all exports. If that were passed today, the resources flowing from Canada to ICE would end really quickly. But you know what? It's just so complicated. Just like ending arms shipments to Israel during a genocide. Which is why you get the foreign affairs minister standing up in Parliament and saying that Kwon's bill, which by the way, has no hope of passing so they don't really have to say anything, really would risk undermining security and the defence industry and then literally claiming Canada has one of the strongest military export control systems in the world and considerations for human rights are at its very core. That is not true at all. So when asked what he makes of Canadian firms supplying ice, the public safety minister said he would, quote, let the respective Canadian companies answer that question. So dog ate my homework. It's my boss's boss. It's not my problem. So when business as usual is your answer to revelations of atrocities committed by business as usual, you need an impressive presentation to sell that contradiction. And that's a big part of what Carney and his politics of liberal manners is good at. He's calm, he's measured, he's soft spoken, he's a solid hockey player. Who dubbed our bi Canadian response to Trump's tariffs with the slogan elbows up, which was really popular here in the country, but it kind of also fizzled out after a while. And elbows up means that when you go for the puck in the corner during a hockey game, you go in hard, right? You prepare to hit the person, you prepare to get hit. But he always said this phrase with a kind of wink, I think, because even that plucky populist nationalism isn't his primary value. Because is it really elbows up to cut trade deals with Qatar? Now, for all of my Canadian social media commentators who come at me with, oh, it's easy to criticize, but useless if you don't have an alternative, what's your plan? First of all, there's a lot of impatience in comments like that. Like, let's remember how long it took for unions to form and then win an eight hour day. If you want fast answers, that's what fascism is for. The fascists will give you fast answers. Also, criticizing capitalism isn't easy. It requires climbing out of generations of propaganda. So my plan begins with analyzing why liberal pro capitalist politics will not defeat or prevent fascism. And hopefully you would consider those points and then we'd talk together about what to do, which is like democracy right now. Where is that conversation happening here in Canada? I've got a ping. Avi Lewis, who is running for the leadership of the federal ndp. The election's at the end of March. The NDP New Democratic Party started out in 1961 as a socialist powerhouse, but with subsequent union erosion and capitulation, it has faded in power over the past decades. Now I think Lewis is great. He's married to friend of the pod, Naomi Klein. So that's a powerhouse. It's a solid leadership race. But also the subject of some controversy over how the party vets candidates. For instance, how they've barred a guy whose anti genocide language and activism has been most consistently direct and abrasive over the past couple of years. Now, that decision was made by the same party elders who have presided over the party's decline. So there's a problem there. But Lewis is also a staunch anti Zionist Jew, just as Klein is and is running a Mamdani echoing campaign here, raising a ton of small donor money and holding raucous 1920s labor hall vibes, town halls across the country. He's running a fairly socialist campaign on public ownership and worker power. He's a long term environmental activist. He's proposing a Canadian Green New Deal with millions of unionized jobs that transition and end the Oil economy, proportional representation, public options for groceries and banking, guaranteed housing, taxing billionaires out of existence. And let me just circle back to transitioning out of the oil economy. He speaks really, really clearly to the fact that what's left of the industrial core that produces oil in Canada, these are high paying jobs that if they are lost they will cause waves of right wing resentment. That's actually what's propping up the political support for the oil economy at this point. So let's make sure that those people have a place to land when we must end the oil economy. And it has to be soon. You can't take things away from people without offering support. And he speaks really eloquently to that. So I think that's really cool. The town hall I went to was packed. It was multiracial, multi generational. And because the NDP is sitting at a pitiful seven seats in the current legislature, they don't even have a party status. There's a sense that this is a moment to revision and rebuild socialism in a post industrial party. And along with this is something really cool. A lot of openly spoken about ambivalence toward the party itself. Speaker after speaker saying the NDP has failed us as workers for decades. They've compromised too often and too hard with reactionaries, but it is an infrastructure we can seize and build on and connect to movements outside of the electoral sphere. So that's pretty inspiring. From everything I know, this is the long term strategy for beating fascism, given we don't descend into civil war to shrink and dismantle and replace the capitalist infrastructure piece by piece so that no liberal or conservative will ever call on the fascists again to protect capital so that no fascist can ever again manipulate the grievances of the common people because those grievances will be seen and tended to. So thanks for listening everyone. On Monday's Patreon bonus, I will run down some of the religious influences involved in Carney's modus operandi. So see you then. Maybe. Link is in the notes. Take care of each other.