The Canadian Military Wants To Shape Our Behaviour

Think Canada is a beacon of freedom and democracy in the world? Well, as was revealed today in the National Post in a story titled "Military leaders saw pandemic as unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on Canadians, Forces report says":

The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for “shaping” and “exploiting” information. CJOC claimed the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.

One has to wonder why the military is performing exercises on behaviour modification techniques on Canadian citizens. The military is supposed to defend our country from foreign enemies. To treat the people the military are supposed to protect and serve as enemies is a dangerous path that will lead us away from democracy and towards authoritarianism. In order to have a free society for all of us, we must be the ones shaping that society. When our society is shaped from the top down, that is when freedom ceases and disobedience arises.

This is a serious revelation that just so happens to have been released after the recent federal election. The timing is likely not a coincidence. This is still a fresh story and we will learn more as time goes on but we must not lose sight of it among the chaos that is our society today being made worse by climate change, economic inequality, and the pandemic. Strengthening our democracy is the only way we are going to begin to solve these problems and doing so is a daily, continuous task that we must all participate in, lest it be taken from us while we are not paying attention.