How Three Big Conspiracy Theories Took Root in Canada (2/3 proven correct btw)

This was posted in /r/CanadaPolitics, the last leftoid Canada sub in a sea of . It's about 15 paragraphs of smug pseudo-intellectual preamble before it actually gets to the meat of the argument. Here's an excerpt from the intro:

Conspiratorial thinking can act like quicksand. Even the most seemingly benign conspiratorial belief can suck the believer deeper into morass and closer to hateful, sometimes nakedly fascist, figures. The roots of conspiracism run deep in Canada, and the trajectories of several intellectuals and pseudo intellectuals show how easily these ideas can be harnessed by fringe political movements and have pulled the educated, respectable, and influential into alliances with noxious elements of Canadian politics.

Horrible.

1. Canada Doesn't Have a Constitution

I don't know anything about this and I'm not really interested in it at all, so I'm just going to skip it. You guys can go through it. Seems very similar to the "sovereign citizen" movement in the US.

2. The Anti-Fluoride Movement was started by a fascist

This part is when it actually gets ridiculous. The author attributes fluoride skepticism to a famous literary scholar (who also happened to be an antisemite and anti-multiculturalism), Watson Kirkconnell.

In the 1920s, he proposed banning interracial marriage, prohibiting so-called non-white immigration, creating unemployed labour camps, and sterilizing the “unfit.”

Sounds like your average Canadian tbh.

What the author fails to mention at all is that fluoride skepticism didn't stem from Kirkconnell and is, in fact, a prominent topic of discussion WORLDWIDE in the scientific community. This is from an article on the NIH website:

The controversy over fluoridation of drinking water supply began as early as the 1960s, approximately a decade after the American Public Health Service officially launched the National Fluoridation Program. The controversy has gained momentum over the years as more research is released to support the stance of the antifluoride lobby. Several factors have spurred the present-day controversy. The irreversible, debilitating effects of fluoride toxicity, the transient effects, and hence the continuous need of exposure to fluoride to maintain caries resistance and the fact that benefits of topical use of fluoride are as good as ingested fluoride are some of the leading contributing factors.

3. NWO/anti-vaccine conspiracies were started by (you guessed it) a fascist

This part again focuses on one anecdote of an academic having antisemitic views to prove that any theories of a New World Order or shadow government are wrong.

A notable proponent of New World Order conspiracies was also a pioneer in Celtic studies in Canada: Robert O'Driscoll, a distinguished academic whose credentials were eagerly exploited by evangelizing antisemites and neo-Nazis.

It's funny how any academic who buys into any right-wing beliefs must have been "manipulated" or "exploited". There's no way an educated person could have come to those conclusions on their own.

O'Driscoll's understanding of the global conspiracy was complex and involved wild claims about the usual suspects: Jews and Masons and Catholics, all of whom were allegedly conspiring to shape a global government. He saw the tentacles of conspiracy on campus, thinking that the accusations of antisemitism he was facing were somehow also part of the same plot that he believed was inducing the chemistry department to bioengineer an HIV-like supervirus.

Pack it up boys, this one guy whose 40-year-old theory of a GMO supervirus didn't come to fruition, so any further criticism of vaccines is hereupon DEBOONKED.