Supremacist survivalism: coming to a bunker near you

The recently announced luxury doomsday condos being built near Halifax are a signifier of the wealthy’s anticipation of an inhospitable future, and based on how the elite are behaving, I doubt there’s much moral consideration when investing in doomsday plans.

Halifax-based entrepreneurs recently refurbished what was once a Cold War bunker into a luxury doomsday shelter an hour north of Halifax. The Diefenbaker — described on its website as a tribute to former Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker — is a self-declared “elite sanctuary” launching this year. The price isn’t even revealed to interested buyers until they pass a vetting process.  

Unfortunately, with a stated goal of bringing “great minds” together “to shape a more certain and prosperous future,” the developers are sending a message that the elite are counting out the 99 per cent from their future plans.

“The bunker business is booming globally,” Paul Mansfield, the co-owner of the bunker development, told CTV News. 

Entrepreneurs like Mansfield are banking on the wealthy to focus their attention — and spend an undisclosed amount of money — on a bunker that includes a cigar lounge and spa. Why prevent the end of the world when you can make it enjoyable instead?

The fact that these condos are being built at all feels like eerie foreshadowing. 

“The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating,” climate justice professor Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) and activist Astra Taylor (The Age of Insecurity) wrote for The Guardian in 2025.  

A burgeoning bunker business proves that the powerful are investing in an inhospitable future in more ways than one. 

“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it,” wrote George Orwell in his book of narrative essays, Facing Unpleasant Facts. Similarly, the potential to profit from apocalyptic anxiety will surely incentivize negligence with our current reality. 

Relentlessly, the wealthy trade the survival of humanity for capital, knowing they can invest in a subterranean backup plan. The most affluent human grubs are beginning to occupy the underground, while maintaining, as the local option’s brochure says, “an elevated lifestyle no matter what happens outside.”

The success of the doomsday market also validates the dystopian warnings of politicians on the left, like the leader of the B.C. Green Party Emily Lowan, who argues that oligarchs have given up on Earth’s natural prosperity. The world’s most powerful couldn’t be more shamelessly imperial and at the service of corporate oligarchy.

Those influential corporate leaders, who are economically glazed by politicians like Donald Trump and Mark Carney, surely have an astral escape plan or luxury doomsday bunker built right into their business plan.

They’ll sit in their bunkers accumulating profit from a war overhead, or rolling in the cash gained through the environmental abuse that caused the very natural disaster that traps them. 

As Klein told Rolling Stone: “The people who are advancing this agenda are also building their luxury bunkers and their spaceships to Mars.”

The ideologies of American venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan — who is already advocating for humanity’s exit — is a prime example. 

“A company or a country is in decline, you can try voice, or you can try exit,” Srinivasan said. “Voice is basically changing the system from within, whereas exit is leaving to create a new system.”

This view shows just how willing the one per cent are to reject civilian responsibility. They are advocating for Earth to be as easy to exit from as one of their companies. 

But not every average Joe needs to worry about being left behind. Soon, the market will catch on, and the upper-middle-class will be battling for the honour of investing in a second-rate doomsday bunker. For those less liquid who still want to follow the trend, get yourself a good shovel and start digging.

Those leading the way seem unburdened by criticism, so don’t worry about how your friends will feel about your lack of hope in maintaining a livable Earth. Just trust in the elite as the captains of our collective ship, and disregard that none are willing to go down with it.