Photograph by Marina Dodis
Last fall, a ragtag band of right-wing agitators, conspiracy theorists, and family-farm defenders set up an encampment at a poultry operation in rural British Columbia. They called themselves the Ostrich Army. A year earlier, dozens of ostriches at Universal Ostrich Farms had come down with H5N1 bird flu, and in an attempt to limit the spread, the Canadian government ordered a thorough cull of every bird on the farm. The Ostrich Army, on the other hand, discerned more sinister motives. To them, this had all the trappings of a classic cover-up. The ostriches, the theory went, actually contained, in their genetic makeup, the key to a vaccine-less “universal cure” for COVID-19. In trying to wipe out the animals at the farm, the Canadian government was trying to keep that cure from the public.
For the October issue, J. B. Mackinnon joined the Ostrich Army as they stood guard at Universal Ostrich Farms, ready to save the birds from whatever nefarious government agents would eventually be sent their way. I spoke to him recently about the long shadow of COVID-era paranoia in Canada, the science behind ostrich culling, and Trump’s collapsing reputation north of the border.
Matthew Sherrill: In the article, you identify a certain strain of Canadian paranoia that you argue is a pretty direct response to the country’s lockdown protocol during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conspiratorial thinking has obviously flourished in the United States since COVID—from vaccine skepticism to QAnon—but I wonder whether you can provide a sense of what feels distinct about the Canadian variant of this mindset.
J. B. MacKinnon: In the U.S., it’s not that hard to imagine covert power at work on a vast scale. In Canada, where I live, it takes real effort. We have a small population and a modest economy. There’s less sense that the elite live in a separate reality—I bumped into the prime minister in a parking lot one time, and my dad sat down for a beer with another prime minister after spotting him in a bar in Chile. Canada’s military is low-profile and historically underfunded; I’ve had more interactions with police on visits to the U.S. than I’ve ever had in Canada, and Canadian intelligence agencies largely lack the CIA and FBI’s long history of known large-scale conspiracies. But there seems to be a pattern among conspiracists:the less likely the theory, the more fiercely it’s believed and defended. To the Canadian conspiracy theorist, the fact that the trappings of tyranny mostly cannot be seen is just a sign of how deeply hidden and powerful it must be.
Sherrill: One thing that struck me as we worked on this piece is how frequently many of your sources (a Canadian Food Inspection Agency employee; a worker at a flight school close to the ostrich farm) insisted on anonymity out of fear of retribution from the Ostrich Army. And your portrait of these protestors is certainly farcical at times, but also genuinely frightening. What was your sense of just how far some of the army members were willing to go in their defense of the birds, or in their crusade against the CFIA?
MacKinnon: I had the sense that there was a strong kayfabe quality to the Ostrich Army’s threats and outrage. They talked as if dictatorship were on the doorstep, but they didn’t really behave that way. When the storm troopers come, do you take down the barricades because they politely ask you to? Ultimately, this was mainly a group of comfortable Canadians who, until they refused to get vaccinated, were used to society having their backs. I’ll also say that I’ve seen a lot of protests by indigenous communities and environmentalists where the rhetorical tone was lower but the willingness to face arrest for their cause was a lot higher.
That said, it didn’t seem at all unlikely that some lone wolf might act out. The most frightening people, to me, were the ones who had been following events on social media, where you could really mainline the invective, and then had jumped into their trucks and driven for hours to get to the farm. Some of them truly seemed to believe that they were coming for the first skirmish of World War III.
Sherrill: There’s a sense in the piece that you couldn’t help but adopt a somewhat suspicious mindset yourself. Even if the Ostrich Army failed to convince you that ostriches hold the key to a secret cure for COVID-19, did they manage to change your mind about anything else?
MacKinnon: I did suspect that the protest camp was being surveilled in one way or another, but, given the so-called freedom movement’s history and rhetoric, it would be surprising if that weren’t the case. But beyond that suspicion, I often found myself agreeing with the ostrich defenders up to a point. For one, I didn’t think the CFIA had adequately explained why there was no alternative to culling the ostriches. And I, too, have concerns about corporate influence. I agree that public-health regulations can conflict with individual freedom. But these conversations would inevitably make a leap. They saw strings being pulled by secretive forces of pure evil where I saw the ordinary application of public-health and trade policies.
Sherrill: As you just suggested, you voice a bit of skepticism in the article about the Canadian government’s response to the bird flu outbreak, specifically their eagerness to opt for a wholesale cull. Do you ultimately think the government made the right call? In other words, was the Ostrich Army potentially right for the wrong reasons?
MacKinnon: The great irony of the campaign to save the ostriches is that it might have succeeded if it had only been a little more “normie.” The kind of bird flu that virologists worry will spill over into humans has now spread from domestic poultry into wild birds around the world. It’s everywhere, and can no longer really be culled into submission. If the Ostrich Army had spent less time painting the CFIA as monstrous harbingers of fascism and more time making the case that a reliance on culling may be outdated, the ostriches might have become the face of that change. There’s a world where all sides could have agreed on the very real risks of bird flu to human health and the ostriches might have been allowed to live, albeit with rigorous testing for reinfection and much stronger biosecurity protocols. Unfortunately for the ostriches, that’s not the world we live in.
Sherrill: There was plenty of pro-Trump sentiment within the Ostrich Army camp. Given Trump’s increasingly (and inexplicably) aggressive posture towards Canada, I wonder if those elements of the Canadian far-right have, since you reported on the confrontation at Universal Ostrich Farms, drifted away from those allegiances?
MacKinnon: Right now, the biggest draw for the far right in Canada is a potential referendum on whether the province of Alberta—the so-called Texas of Canada—should separate from the rest of the country and become a northern homeland of MAGA-style values. The ties to MAGA in the U.S. are so clear that this could arguably be called an annexationist rather than a separatist movement. Still, the rank and file of Canada’s far right is divided over Trump’s threats to the country’s sovereignty. This was already visible during the ostrich controversy. When one Canadian ostrich-farm supporter arrived at the protest camp with two large American flags flying from the bed of his pickup truck, some people cheered, but many others seemed bothered by the gesture. I overheard a man count the stars on each flag and announce, in a relieved tone, that there were only fifty. (Trump has called Canada “the fifty-first state,” and fifty-one-star flags have been available for years online because of campaigns to make Washington, D.C., or Puerto Rico into states.) Support for Trump in Canada has mostly been reduced to something like a default pose for people who pride themselves on being contrarian. I rarely hear about them moving south to live in a red state, though. I hear about Americans moving north.
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