A video shared online that is said to show a doctor revealing a Canadian government strategy to transform the country into a totalitarian state has been created using false information.
The footage (here), posted to YouTube on Oct. 23, features osteopath and Rashid Buttar, who has previously spread videos with conspiracy theories (here, here) , reading an email that he says was sent to him by a woman called “Denise”, who claimed to have detail on Canada’s plan.
“This is based upon what actually happened at a meeting in the legislative bodies on the Liberal side in Canada,” Buttar tells the camera as he reads the message that is taken verbatim from an Oct. 14 post on The Canadian Report, a news aggregator and blog site (here). The post, itself, also resembled an email, and claimed to have been sent by an anonymous member of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Among the claims in the post quoted by Buttar was that the sender was part of a “strategic planning committee” being “steered” by the prime minister’s office (PMO). During this committee meeting, the sender said, plans were revealed for future lockdowns along with a scheme involving the International Monetary Fund (IMF) giving cash to Canada to eliminate debt. In response to this debt elimination, Canadian citizens would agree to stipulations to guarantee unrestricted travel and living arrangements. This included agreeing to a vaccination for COVID-19 and a secondary disease called COVID-21, while also giving up ownership of their property and assets forever.
The alleged email as read by Buttar reads: “What we were told was that in order to offset what was essentially an economic collapse on a international scale, that the federal government was going to offer Canadians a total debt relief […] This is how it works: the federal government will offer to eliminate all personal debts (mortgages, loans, credit cards, etc) which all funding will be provided to Canada by the IMF under what will become known as the World Debt Reset program. In exchange for acceptance of this total debt forgiveness the individual would forfeit ownership of any and all property and assets forever […] The individual would also have to agree to partake in the COVID-19 and COVID-21 vaccination schedule, which would provide the individual with unrestricted travel and unrestricted living even under a full lock down (through the use of photo identification referred to as Canada’s HealthPass).”
These claims are false. There is no evidence of an IMF-backed plan to give cash to Canada in return for Canadians’ freedoms, nor does a strategic planning committee discussing these topics even exist. A spokesperson from the PMO’s office told Reuters there was no such committee in existence (here, here) .
Secondly, the reference to the “World Debt Reset program” is misleading. The World Economic Forum pitched the idea of a “great reset” on capitalism in June after noting the pandemic was increasing inequality (here) . It encourages three components, including asking governments to improve fiscal policy, implement overdue reforms (such as on wealth taxes), and pushing for the efforts that have boosted health sectors this year to be replicated across other sectors to bring about an industrial revolution.
Similarly, the IMF has published its vision of a “Global Economic Reset,” which promotes the idea of an “inclusive recovery” from the pandemic. This includes encouragement of public investments into healthcare to protect the most vulnerable, time limited debt service suspension for the world’s poorest countries (here), and tax reforms (here) .
Neither of these mention plans to donate money to provide any single nation with “total debt relief,” nor a strategy to push people into agreeing to a global vaccination plan for COVID-19 and COVID-21. The latter only exists as the name of a low-budget movie (here) .
Costas Christou, the IMF mission chief for Canada, confirmed to Reuters that the claims were irrelevant to the organisation’s advice. Commenting specifically on the alleged email posted to The Canadian Report, he said: “The information shared in this report neither is related to nor is part of the IMF’s policy advice or finance initiatives to its membership”.
After reading out the email in his video, Buttar questions the veracity of COVID-19 before claiming it is the government’s goal to make sure everyone would eventually test positive. He says: “They’re basically amplifying the PCR test to the point that every human being will test positive. That’s what their goal is.” There is also no evidence to back this claim.
PCR tests are very specific and are widely used to test for COVID-19 in an individual. They do so by identifying the specific genetic material of SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes the disease – in a sample from the patient. This genetic material is then amplified within the sample for scientists to detect it (here) . Meanwhile, governments globally are using restrictions on socialising and travel as a means of trying to reduce the number of people testing positive for the virus (here , here ).
VERDICT
False. The email Buttar was quoting verbatim has already been proven false. There is no such committee in existence that the claims were said to be a result of, and the IMF has confirmed there is no such strategy to give away money in return for freedoms. There is also no evidence to suggest there is a goal to make every human being test positive for COVID-19.
Read more about our work to fact-check social media posts here .
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.