GOP Rep Falls For Conspiracy Theory Of Canadian PM Fleeing To US
February 2, 2022

The Texas Republican repeated some nonsense he'd seen online that Canada's Prime Minister had fled to the United States to avoid a "massive" trucker protest against vaccine mandates to cross the border. In reality, Trudeau is at home, sick with COVID. And the massive protest is nothing more than a few hundred disgruntled truckers in an industry that is already 90% vaccinated.

Source: CNN

Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, has twice in the past three days promoted a fictional online rumor that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fled to the United States because of a protest in Ottawa by a group of truck drivers and others opposed to vaccine mandates, Covid-19 restrictions and Trudeau himself.

Roy even called for Trudeau, who was not in the US, to be deported.

Facts First: Trudeau never fled to the United States; no remotely credible source has made this claim, which was initially circulated by an anonymous Twitter account. Trudeau, who announced last Thursday that he was isolating for five days after being exposed to Covid-19 and on Monday that he had tested positive for the virus, was in an undisclosed location in Canada's capital region on Saturday and Sunday, his official itineraries said. He then held a televised virtual news conference on Monday from the Harrington Lake official residence in Quebec, near Ottawa -- a news conference that began more than two hours before Roy baselessly tweeted that Trudeau might be "hiding in the United States" and posted a graphic that said, "DEPORT TRUDEAU."

One of his inane tweets.

And a debunking by Daniel Dale.

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