Conservative Rally Creates Totally Legit Online Buzz. Not Sus! Legit!

There is a town in north Ontario with weird X bot memories to spare.

A poorly lit Pierre Poilievre addresses supporters, none of them AI-generated, in Kirkland Lake. (Screengrab/CTV News)

Gazillions of people all around the world tuned in to watch the Summer Olympics this year, way more than did the are we sure we really want to do this? 2020 Tokyo Games in 2021. But Paris apparently got some brief competition in attracting international interest from a remote mining town in northeastern Ontario.

A recent Conservative rally in Kirkland Lake featuring party leader Pierre Poilievre generated a LOT of buzz over on the Space Nazi’s failing microblog, with a huge number of accounts based in China, India, the United States, and even nations that don’t have reputations for getting all up in other countries’ business bursting with enthusiasm after seeing Peewee in the flesh.

Kirkland Lake is known for attracting hordes of mosquitoes in the summer, not hordes of Conservative supporters from overseas, so people noticed.

This town of around 10,000 people is part of the Timmins-James Bay electoral district ripe for the picking by the resurging Tories after its lefty NDP member of Parliament, Charlie Angus — a scrappy Bernie Sanders type and the original bassist of punk rockers L'Étranger — announced he was retiring after repping the blue-collar riding for 20 years.

Angus was one of the first to call shenanigans, noting at least one account said they had to "brave the cold to attend" the event, which isn’t usually a concern during wildfire season.

But most instead gave variations of the same boilerplate endorsement and were so in synch you’d think they were Justin Timberlake fanbots instead:

Just got back from Pierre Poilievre’s rally in Kirkland Lake and I’m still buzzing from the energy! As a northern Ontarian, it’s refreshing to see a leader who actually listens to our concerns and wants to empower our communities.

Just got back from Pierre Poilievre’s rally in Kirkland Lake and… (Image: @The280Times)

The rally was held at a local community center with a seating capacity of 72 and standing room for 100, so clearly we’re talking about bots here. If it looks like a bot and tweets like a bot and has zero followers like a bot, it’s probably a bot.

(And no, Canadians don’t pronounce “a bot” as a boot; we don’t actually pronounce “about” like a boot either and are collectively baffled about how the cliche manages to endure, eh. The only fellow citizen I’ve ever heard pronounce “about” that way is right-leaning YouTuber and Washington Post contributor J.J. McCullough, and I’d bet my last loonie it’s an affectation.)

Unlike most people or Twitter bots, I’ve actually spent time in Kirkland Lake and can vouch for MacLean’s assessment of the place when reporting on a since-abandoned proposal to truck Toronto’s trash to town and toss it in in one of its many abandoned mines:

Kirkland Lake is not a pretty town. Old buildings with warped roofs and stained siding line the main street. "For sale," "Reduced" and "For rent" signs are in the windows of abandoned homes and stores. The lake, tiny and hidden behind commercial concrete, was filled with mining tailings years ago and only recent dredging has renewed its status as a body of water. This northern community has no pretensions to charm — it was built out of necessity, catering to the thousands of workers employed by the gold and iron ore operations and named for an official with the provincial mining ministry.

I hitchhiked there at 19 to spend a summer working as a treeplanter, and the main takeaway was locals were VERY proud of being the hometown of Alan Thicke. Pretty much every business in town featured a prominent framed photograph of the proprietor posing with the actor, who at the time was riding high as the lead on the hit sitcom “Growing Pains.” But he wasn’t available to potentially lend his star power to the Tories, having died eight years ago in the most Canadian way possible after keeling over playing hockey at age 69, and it really isn’t fair to blame the guy posthumously for how Kirk Cameron turned out. Dr. Jason Seaver was not Mike Seaver’s real dad.

Although he does bear some responsibility for how his son Robin turned out. (Screengrab/2013 MTV Music Awards)

The NDP is now demanding a full Parliamentary investigation, while the Conservatives deny having anything to do with it.

"It is unsurprising that the NDP is once again spreading baseless conspiracy theories and that the CBC is choosing to amplify it," CPC spox Sarah Fischer told the CBC, the national public broadcaster her boss has vowed to eviscerate if elected prime minister. “The CPC does not pay for bots and has no idea who is behind these accounts.”

Which may even be true! Pretty much anyone can hire an army of bots for pennies on what’s left of Twitter nowadays. It certainly seems like the sort of sneaky shit the CPC would pull — Canadians never received the full story behind the Pierre Poutine voter suppression scandal from 2011 — but it could just as easily be Russia. Or China. Or India. Colluding with hostile foreign governments is kind of a touchy subject right now after a non-partisan Parliamentary committee recently released a report confirming an unspecified — and still unnamed — number of MPs and senators were “semi-witting or witting participants in the efforts of foreign states to interfere in our politics.”

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Although maybe it was just some 300-lb rando sowing chaos from a basement somewhere. The CBC helpfully gave the likely future holders of their purse strings an out through followup reporting:

Academics who study social media say a suspected bot campaign associated with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's recent speaking event in northern Ontario likely was the work of an amateur. A rapid analysis conducted by Toronto Metropolitan University's Social Media Lab (SML) concluded the bot campaign does not have the fingerprints of a sophisticated actor, but didn't say who might have been behind it.

But they sure don’t make it easy to think of the folks running the campaign as pros though. They’re certainly not putting out banger press releases like Team Kamala is and instead give off serious Four Seasons Total Landscaping vibes with some of their dumber decisions. Such as the accusation leveled a few days ago that their Liberal rivals were being “lavish” by staying at a “swanky” Holiday Inn in Sudbury for their Ontario caucus meeting. (No, seriously.) Even a Holiday Inn manager would probably be too embarrassed to use adjectives like these in an anonymous TripAdvisor review.

Kirkland Lake doesn’t have a swanky Holiday Inn of its own, let alone a Four Seasons, so they must’ve had to make do with one of the dozen or so lesser establishments during their stay in the Timiskaming region.

Although they more likely got the hell out of town as soon they were able to. Like Alan Thicke did.

[CBC / Canadian Encyclopedia / Sudbury.com]