THE LATEST | CANADACanada is now part of a global discussion about how governments use behavioural science to shape public behaviour during crises. A new report, Manufacturing Consent, published by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), details a coordinated effort by the Government of Canada to deploy behavioural science and psychological conditioning to manipulate public opinion and compliance.
According to the report, Ottawa has quietly moved beyond traditional governance to a model of “behavioural engineering,” utilizing psychological “psy-ops” and “nudge” theory to bypass rational debate.
By pivoting from public information to covert manipulation—most aggressively during the Covid-19 pandemic—state officials systematically prioritized “winning” compliance over transparency, effectively manufacturing consent for controversial mandates through emotional conditioning rather than evidence-based persuasion.
The report claims that the federal government relied on behavioural techniques during the pandemic without giving Canadians a clear view of what was happening behind the scenes.
The focus is the Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU), a behavioural-insights team created to sharpen policymaking through experimentation. Units like it exist in the UK, the EU, and Australia. During COVID-19, the IIU supported public-health messaging—but the extent of its involvement has never been fully explained.
What the Report Uncovers
- During COVID-19, the IIU allegedly designed and tested messages explicitly to boost adherence to public-health rules and promote vaccination. According to internal documents cited by the JCCF, officials ran large-scale message experiments to find which emotional appeals would most effectively increase compliance.
- The IIU reportedly used constructed news stories in its testing: fictitious scenarios designed to probe how Canadians would respond emotionally to different narratives about vaccine safety and side effects.
- Ottawa’s “safe and effective” vaccine message was adopted very early — before substantial long-term data on real-world vaccine safety were fully available.
- Behavioural framing was used to minimize perceived risk: adverse-event reports were presented in ways that made them seem less serious or less threatening, in order to reduce public anxiety.
- In one experiment, the IIU tested “operational transparency” — messages that reveal what is going on behind the scenes (e.g., how vaccines are developed) — to see whether this increases vaccine confidence among unvaccinated Canadians. According to Impact Canada’s own research, these transparent messages did improve self-reported vaccine intentions. Impact Canada
- There was a lack of informed consent: the public was largely unaware they were subjects in behavioural-science experiments.
- The report raises constitutional and ethical concerns, warning that behavioural operations may infringe on freedom of thought, informed decision-making, and expression.
- Crucially, the report says there was no dedicated independent oversight (parliamentary or otherwise) over the IIU’s pandemic-era behavioural activities.
- Finally, the report demands a formal ethical framework to regulate how behavioural science is used in public policy, calling for full public disclosure of experiments, independent review, and robust democratic accountability.
The Stakes—for Canada and beyond
Behavioural-insights units like Canada’s IIU are not novel — governments from the UK to Australia routinely use behavioural models to design policy and communications. But what the Manufacturing Consent report calls out is a shift during a national crisis: from advisory experimentation to what it describes as psychological operations without adequate transparency. For democracies around the world, the case raises urgent questions: how do we ensure that behavioural science remains a tool for innovation — not manipulation?
If governments can run large-scale behavioural experiments on their own populations — especially during emergencies — without public debate or oversight, the democratic contract is undermined. The report calls for a reset: elected officials must reclaim authority over psychological-policy tools, and citizens deserve clear visibility into how behavioural science is shaping the messages they receive.
TCE