An independent Member of Ontario’s Provincial Parliament, Randy Hillier, has suggested that the Canadian federal government is planning to convert COVID-19 quarantine sites into internment camps or prisons in order to detain Canadians in them.
On October 8, 2020, while asking a question about this issue, the MPP stated that the Provincial government “must be in negotiations and aware of these plans to potentially detain and isolate citizens and residents of our country and of our province.”
The MPP went on to ask the provincial government “Where will these camps be built, how many people will be detained and for what reason can people be kept in these isolation camps?”
The YouTube video where these claims are made by the Ontario MPP has been viewed 106, 199 times and at least 850,000 Facebook users have been exposed to it. The video has been shared by accounts on social media that identify with QAnon and some that align with foreign regimes, including Russia. One post has been shared over 500 times.
As of June 2020, Canada renewed an order that requires international travelers to quarantine themselves for 14 days. Hotels have been primarily used by the federal government to quarantine travelers who are unable to provide their own accommodations. A spokesperson for Health Canada told AFP that “In general, those are hotels, so I don’t really know where the notion of internment camps comes from.”
