John Carpay 20 Nov 2025, 7:30 am

The federal government’s Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU) worked very hard to persuade Canadians to get injected with the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. Modelled after the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team, the IIU uses social psychology and “nudge” theory to test public messaging and implement other public behavioural interventions.

With the arrival of COVID-19, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates, the Government of Canada sharply expanded the role of the IIU to secure widespread compliance with vaccine mandates. The IIU applied behavioural-science research and extensive message-testing to craft a national communications strategy. For example, the IIU tested fictitious news reports on thousands of survey participants to examine how Canadians would react to different messages around the alleged safety of the vaccine and the alleged danger of not taking it.

As explained in a new report titled Manufacturing Consent – Government behavioural engineering of Canadians, the government’s messaging strategies were not designed to support informed decision-making about this new vaccine. Rather, the government had already determined its core message — “the vaccine is ‘safe and effective,’ so get vaccinated” — well before conclusive clinical or real-world data were available on their effectiveness and, above all, their safety.

As explained in the Toronto Star in February 2021, “When Trudeau and the premiers use their podiums … their words don’t just come from hunch or political instincts. Reams of behavioural data are being collected by the government throughout the pandemic, on everything from people’s general emotions about COVID to their willingness to get vaccinated.”

Regarding herd immunity, Susan Delacourt wrote, “Medical science handles the immunity part of that equation — behavioural scientists have to build the herd. For that to happen, the government has to know where and how to administer the nudging.” Ms. Delacourt asserted that this “massive social-science experiment” may have “given government important clues on how to modify citizens’ behaviour for other big global issues — such as climate change, for instance.”

Since 2017, the IIU has experienced rapid growth with 28 active or completed outcomes-based funding projects worth over $725 million, spanning economic, environmental, and social policy domains. It also designed and completed a significant portfolio of behavioural science projects and research, mainly focused on informing the government’s COVID-19 response.

The IIU has conducted public opinion research to see how many Canadians agree with “true statements” like these: masks prevent Covid spread; Covid threatens children; the Covid vaccine stops the spread of Covid; the Covid vaccine is superior to natural immunity; the Covid vaccine has not impacted death rates among athletes; media have reported accurately on Covid’s fatality rate; pharmaceutical companies did not take any shortcuts that compromise vaccine safety when rushing Covid vaccines to market.

As soon as the COVID-19 vaccine became available to the public, numerous reports about vaccine deaths and injuries emerged. For example, 13-year-old Jacob Clynick died in his sleep after getting injected; 27-year-old Jack Last died from a blood clot after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine; and Florida doctor Gregory Michaelter died two weeks after injection. Medical authorities also confirmed early on that boys and young men faced a greater health risk from vaccine-caused myocarditis than they did from COVID-19.

Yet the government continued to promote its “safe-and-effective” message despite early and inconvenient reports of adverse reactions to the vaccine, including death. The government had already decided that the COVID-19 mRNA “vaccine” (Pfizer-BioNTech, also known as Comirnaty), which it had approved in December 2020, was both safe and effective, and evidently would not consider contrary evidence. Emotional triggers — rather than balanced information — were central to the IIU campaign.

Canada’s federal government used behavioural-science trickery (with taxpayer dollars) to push Canadians toward a political position that was (and still is) very much up for debate.

It’s one thing for governments to provide citizens with factual, helpful, and relevant information. It’s quite another for governments to use tax dollars to persuade Canadians of something that may or may not be true.

Behavioural interventions, when deployed without transparency or oversight, quickly become tools of covert manipulation rather than public communication or persuasion. Covert psychological manipulation is a poor substitute for traditional democratic persuasion through open debate and public engagement.

The IIU’s work did not end with COVID-19, but continues at full pace on other issues.

Like the rest of the federal government bureaucracy, the IIU fully embraces the thesis that people control the Earth’s climate. Its 2021-2022 Annual Report declares that the Earth is warming to dangerous levels because of human activities that now cause hotter summers, more intense storms, more frequent floods, and less biodiversity. Of course, the only way to save ourselves from this impending climate holocaust is to produce less plant food (CO2) and thereby drastically lower our living standards, even while China and India make no effort to reduce their CO2 output.

If the next wave of government assaults on our Charter rights and freedoms is carried out under the banner of stopping climate change, we can count on the IIU to carry out manipulative behavioural science techniques to nudge Canadians into compliance and obedience.

John Carpay, B.A., LL.B., is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which has released a report on psychological operations titled Manufacturing Consent – Government behavioural engineering of Canadians.

https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/carpay-how-ottawa-nudged-a-nation-inside-canadas-covert-behavioural-science-campaign/69140