It’s bad enough Oswald shot Kennedy and terrorists drove airplanes into the World Trade Center. It’s awful that human beings are affecting the climate on a planetary scale and bringing on a mass extinction.
But there are people here in Toronto who want, or perhaps need, something other than the reality we have.
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A billboard now sits on top of Steve’s Restaurant – a place at Bathurst and Wilson which serves a great breakfast – broadcasting a strange message.
On it, a man with round-frame spectacles pokes at airplane contrails with a weirdly elongated index finger. “Are you kidding me,” the caption says. “Water vapour?”
The woman behind the billboard is Suzanne Maher, who was born and raised in North Toronto but moved to Muskoka after being diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder.
Maher has come to believe metal particles are being sprayed behind airplanes by a worldwide conspiracy of governments and the powerful to engineer “global supremacy and military domination.”
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Why this would happen is vague, and the evidence for chemtrails is nonsense, but believers in “geoengineering” expand their alternative reality to include things people like me justifiably fear, such as Alzheimer’s and Monsanto Corporation.
Maher, who also arranged chemtrail ads on the Yonge-University subway in 2015 and 2016, says many in Toronto are open to what her group, ByeByeBlueSky, can teach.
“Once you find out about it,” she says, “you can’t unlearn it.”
I asked if she’s ever doubted the truth of what she’s learned, even for a moment, and no, she hasn’t. Neither have others who believe in chemtrails.
I’m afraid for them. The shattering “truth” they’ve embraced – governments are poisoning them for profit – takes hold of their lives. How could it not?
In a world of “alternative facts” and weakened traditional media, we can expect more of this.
This April, Maher’s group has a booth at Toronto’s Green Living Show for the first time.
Back on Bathurst, there’s no telling how many people coming in for eggs benedict or carrying bags from the No Frills across the street will fall down the rabbit hole by then.
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