THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY, DEFENCE AND VETERANS AFFAIRS
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Monday, October 27, 2025
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security, Defence and Veterans Affairs met with videoconference this day at 4 p.m. [ET] to examine and report on the impacts of Russia’s disinformation on Canada; and, in camera, for the consideration of a draft agenda (future business).
Senator Hassan Yussuff (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Good afternoon. I’m Hassan Yussuff, chair of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security, Defence and Veterans Affairs. I will ask colleagues to introduce themselves.
Senator Kutcher: Stan Kutcher, a senator from Nova Scotia.
Senator Ince: Tony Ince, a senator from Nova Scotia.
Senator Dasko: Donna Dasko, a senator from Ontario.
Senator Cardozo: Andrew Cardozo, Ontario.
Senator Anderson: Margaret Dawn Anderson, Northwest Territories.
Senator Boniface: Gwen Boniface, from Ontario, sitting in for Senator McNair.
Senator White: Judy White, Newfoundland and Labrador.
[Translation]
Senator Youance: Suze Youance from Quebec.
Senator Carignan: Good evening. Claude Carignan from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Al Zaibak: Mohammad Al Zaibak, Ontario.
The Chair: I want to take a moment to welcome Senator Boniface back. Many of you may remember that she previously served as chair of this committee. I know the committee was fortunate to benefit from her leadership and experience during that time. Today marks a special occasion, as this will be her last time as a member of the committee before she retires.
Hon. Senators: Hear, hear!
The Chair: I know everyone will join me in saying thank you, Senator Boniface, for the thoughtful way in which you guided the work over the years. We wish you the best in the next chapter of your life. Thank you for being here for this important opportunity.
Today, our meeting will continue the work we began during the last session on the impact of Russian disinformation on Canada. We will hear from two panels of witnesses about how Canada responds to Russian disinformation.
For the first panel, we have the pleasure of welcoming Mr. Justin Ling, investigative journalist; and Mr. Simon Hogue, professor, World politics of digital technologies, Department of Political Science, Université du Québec at Montréal. Thank you both for joining us today. We will begin by inviting you to provide your opening remarks, to be followed by questions from our members. I remind you both that you have five minutes for opening remarks. .
Justin Ling, investigative journalist, as an individual: Good afternoon, Senator Yussuff and senators. Thank you so much for having me.
For those of you who don’t know how I am, I am a freelance journalist and columnist. I’ve covered Russian disinformation and influence operations here in Canada, as well as on the ground in Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and elsewhere.
I know this preface is largely unnecessary for the upper chamber, but I wish to reiterate I’m here on a strictly non-partisan basis. It’s always a little awkward when a journalist testifies, but considering that this issue is of national significance, I decided it was in everyone’s best interest. I’m going to try and keep my comments brief, although I know everyone says that.
Last October, I testified on this same subject before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security in the other place, where I recounted my own first-hand experience dealing with an influence agent of the Russian government. I’ll skip over that story for the sake of time, but I am happy to answer any questions you might have on it. Instead, I wish to talk about how Russian information operations are expanding and how our allies are helping to detect and call out these efforts. I think there are some useful lessons for Canada to learn there.
Over the past eight years or so — and this is a topic I have written a fair bit about — Russia has been building out its presence in Africa, particularly in the Sahel and West Africa. Its objectives there are pretty clear. It wants to find new trading partners, evade Western sanctions, plunder the natural resources — especially diamonds and gold — and displace European actors, particularly France. To do this, it has deployed quasi-independent mercenaries and has pumped out a huge volume of propaganda and disinformation.
This past June, France’s Service de vigilance et protection contre les ingérences numériques étrangères, also known by the acronym of VIGINUM, released a detailed, fascinating report about the work of African Initiative. African Initiative is a media organization which covers the continent in five different languages. It produces high-production quality and clearly written news, particularly on politics and security. By the way, African Initiative is also run by the Kremlin. It produces such outright misinformation as the allegation that America runs a clandestine bioweapons facility in Kenya, amongst other grand claims. African Initiative is headquartered in Moscow. It also leans heavily on AI, particularly OpenAI, to pump out memes and disinformation on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, and it has even launched a radio station in Burkina Faso, going old school.
As VIGINUM argues:
[Translation]
African Initiative implements immediate and short-term initiatives to achieve long-term goals aimed at establishing and promoting pro-Kremlin ideology.
[English]
In other words, they are using some short-term methods we can clearly see but with the long-term aim of winning over friends and allies in the region.
African Initiative showcases a hybrid information operation that is significantly more sophisticated and broad than what we’ve seen in the past, thanks largely to AI and social media platforms that no longer seem to care about countering foreign interference and thanks to huge numbers of local actors who want to cooperate as well as Russian entrepreneurs who want to help.
I appreciate the focus of your study is on the impact of Russia’s disinformation operations on Canada and I want to make two brief points before I wrap up.
First, this pan-African operation could easily be replicated and reconfigured to target Canada, America, Europe, the Caribbean or anywhere else. Because Russian disinformation operations have, to date, only had a marginal effect on Canada, we really don’t know how good our defences would be against an effort of this scale or anything like it.
My second point is that Russian information operations which occur abroad — be they in West Africa, South America, Europe or anywhere else — still have a significant impact on Canada. The more that Russia can use propaganda and disinformation to finance its war machine, undermine democracy abroad and recruit new allies for its illiberal bloc, the more hostile and unsafe the world becomes. Ukraine and our European allies understand this. It’s why we know about the efforts, or at least the detail of the effort, of the African Initiative, for example, thanks to France. Even if our defences are still imperfect, we should already be thinking about how we can get on the offensive. Investigating and attributing Russian hybrid operations abroad is a collective responsibility, and Canada is simply not playing its part.
There is clearly also a global demand for high-quality journalism, particularly in areas that have long since been underserved, such as francophone populations in West Africa, the very populations that have been engaging with, reading and enjoying African Initiative. Canada was once a world leader in that regard through Radio Canada International. Unfortunately, Ottawa has basically given up on the idea that we can or should fund objective and unbiased journalism abroad. In that gap, Russia has raced to fill the void with propaganda.
I am happy to take your questions, be they about Moscow’s efforts here, its meddling efforts elsewhere or what we can do to push back. Thank you.
[Translation]
Simon Hogue, Professor, World politics of digital technologies, Department of Political Science, Université du Québec à Montréal, As an individual: Good afternoon. First of all, I would like to thank the committee. It is an honour to be here with you today. In the interest of time, please excuse me for reading my brief statement.
Much has been said about foreign disinformation. There is obviously a risk of repetition. However, I would like to extend an invitation to the committee. From my perspective, which is based on the study of media coverage of war, I would like to invite you to adopt an analytical lens that, paradoxically, departs from the traditional assumptions of security — deterrence, intelligence, criminalization — in favour of a societal approach to disinformation that I think is more useful for shedding light on the complexity of the phenomenon and highlighting possible areas for intervention.
Foreign disinformation is clearly a national security issue. It is carried out by foreign actors, including Russia and China, with the goal of harming Canada. Disinformation is explicitly conceived, particularly in Moscow, as a weapon of subversion with the specific goal of destabilizing Western societies. Its harmful effects are potentially existential, as the Foreign Interference Commission in Canada rightly suggested.
By the way, I want to make it clear that I have no connection, family or otherwise, with the commissioner.
But disinformation is also a message, so it has to be analyzed as such. All communication is a process and the result of a relationship between a message producer, its dissemination and a consumer. To strengthen the resilience of Canadian democracy, we need to shine a light on the seats of power that permeate our media ecosystem and that Russia manipulates to further its subversive goals.
In concrete terms, what does the model of production, circulation and consumption of disinformation illustrate?
First, that the production of disinformation cannot be prevented. Canada has no control over the producer, and production is made all the easier as artificial intelligence reduces costs. Neither diplomacy nor deterrence will put an end to Russian disinformation.
If we adopt a security lens, Ottawa still has defensive measures at its disposal. As such, and unsurprisingly, the 2023 report by Special Rapporteur Johnston and the 2025 report by the Foreign Interference Commission emphasized strengthening the capacity of Canadian security institutions to defend themselves against disinformation, to identify, counter and alert the public to a threat of disinformation, as would be done for a missile attack. It seems to be working to some extent.
Despite the fact that elections were conducted with integrity, I would suggest that the optimism expressed in the latest report by the group of experts responsible for the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol published in early October is clouded by at least one major bias: disinformation extends beyond the time frame of elections.
It could be added that the goal of subversion today is less about having a direct impact on election results — unlike the 2016 U.S. presidential elections that we all remember — and more about tearing apart the fabric of Canadian society. This is a long-term endeavour that requires a keen understanding and skilful manipulation of the contradictions and divisions inherent in our society through the use of the digital media that we are all familiar with. In short, to counter foreign disinformation and preserve democracy, election monitoring, even with the best institutional coordination, is insufficient. The problem is societal and requires a societal response.
However, if Canada has no way of preventing the production of disinformation, it’s important to remember that just because content is produced, that does not mean it is visible. And just because the content is seen, that doesn’t mean it’s believed. By adopting a communications perspective, the questions that need to be asked change. It is less a matter of questioning Russia, even though it remains relevant to highlight production strategies, including what increasingly appears to be an economy of disinformation, than it is of delving into the dynamics specific to Canada’s media ecosystem that cause disinformation to be seen and believed.
What strategies promote circulation? What networks or actors make disinformation legitimate in the eyes of some consumers? Why do people adopt radical ideas? Is there a difference between forms of disinformation? These and other issues focus on the circulation and consumption processes of messages.
From there, the solutions that emerge have less to do with granting new powers to security institutions than with better information governance. In short, what I am asking you to do is reverse your perspective. It is no longer by strengthening national security that we preserve Canadian democracy, but rather by strengthening democracy that we can ensure national security.
Thank you.
[English]
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Hogue and Mr. Ling, for your opening remarks.
As always, we do our best to allow time for each member to ask their question. With that in mind, four minutes will be allotted to each question, including the answer. I ask you to keep your questions succinct in an effort to allow for as many interventions as possible.
I would like to offer the first question to our deputy chair, Senator Al Zaibak.
Senator Al Zaibak: Thank you both for being here.
Mr. Ling, your work has documented how Russian intelligence and proxies target Western democracies by eroding public trust in institutions. In your view, what specific narratives, tactics or influence channels are currently being deployed against Canada’s Parliament and parliamentarians, and how coordinated are they with Russia’s broader geopolitical goals or objectives?
Mr. Ling: I have an answer that will sound like good news, but it isn’t. The short answer is that there was certainly an attempt by Russian disinformation channels, both through quasi-official or official channels, be they the former staff of the Russian embassy, at least one of whom has been expelled from the country, or through media apparatuses. There was an effort and, certainly for a time, I think, a somewhat sustained effort to target Canada and to undermine faith in the liberal order, our democracy and our support for the Government of Ukraine.
I think there has largely been an abandonment of that effort. I mean, we have not seen it in any kind of sustained and systematic way over the last number of years, where Russia talks about Canada or focuses on Canadian issues or the Parliament of Canada. It often comes out as an afterthought. Largely, the simple answer for that is that Russia has found significantly higher returns from using its resources to target countries that are more easily persuadable or countries where there are more obvious cleavages. You have seen Moldova, Romania, Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic and other countries where Russian disinformation and propaganda efforts have been far more pointed and effective.
The short answer is that we’re not seeing a lot of it right now, that I’m aware of. That is not to say it won’t happen in the future, but I do think that, to date, Russia has been busy enough elsewhere.
Senator Al Zaibak: Are there any specific media channels that not only parliamentarians but the Canadian public should be aware of?
Mr. Ling: Yes. There are a number of channels you can point to: Russia Today — RT — being the most broad-based, multi-lingual, including English, efforts from the Russian government. There is also Sputnik, which was their attempt for a digital media platform. It was often called the BuzzFeed of Russian propaganda, not entirely flatteringly. Of course, you’re seeing things like the African Initiative.
Increasingly, what you’re seeing from Russia is a tactic that was to some degree pioneered by the Internet Research Agency in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, which was to create dummy accounts on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, wherever, increasingly stuffed with AI-generated images, and even voice in some cases, which, by the way, makes it easier. For a long time, Russia had a problem delivering English-language content from native English speakers. AI has solved that problem for them. You’re seeing these sorts of astroturf accounts, but the trouble with many of these things is you may come across them while scrolling or looking through YouTube, but they don’t tend to make a grand effect. They’re not entirely convincing or credible as organizations, so it’s hard to flag them as being something we ought to look out for.
Beyond that — and this is, to my mind, the bigger threat of Russian interference or disinformation seeping into our system — it is via Western outlets that are either happy to take the propaganda or get paid for it. Of course, we all saw the indictment of Tenet Media, founded by a Canadian couple. Tenet Media represented a number of prominent Conservative influencers in the U.S. that allegedly, according to the Department of Justice, at least under the previous administration, was taking considerable cash from an agent of the Russian government. Efforts like those are much harder to identify and disrupt, but I think we have to be aware that that is a possibility.
Senator Cardozo: I would like to ask both of you what you are seeing with regard to Russian intervention in Canada and that of China or other countries and how those compare, particularly focused at the Ukrainian-Canadian community.
[Translation]
Have you observed any interference targeting the Ukrainian Canadian community?
Mr. Hogue: The Russian and Chinese approaches to disinformation are different. Both are present, but China is more focused on controlling the opinion that the Chinese diaspora in Canada might have of China rather than seeking to undermine and subvert.
Russia’s subversion strategy has been in place since the Soviet Union. It is an old strategy that continues to be relevant today. The idea is not to give a positive image of Russia, at least certainly not in Canada, but to ensure that there is in fact an internal conflict.
As such, the strategies are fundamentally different.
I’m sorry; I forgot the second part of your question.
Senator Cardozo: It was about interference against the Ukrainian Canadian community.
Mr. Hogue: With respect to Ukraine and the Ukrainian community, the goal is to undermine Ukrainian courage and seek to have Ukraine’s defeat accepted as a fact, if not accomplished, then inevitable. This rhetoric devalues the Ukrainian war effort and promotes a peace that is somewhat artificial because it is limited. President Zelensky’s claims to control Crimea, reclaiming Ukraine’s territory, its borders outside Crimea, in their entirety, the entire Donbass, are being undermined. This kind of rhetoric strategy that doesn’t necessarily reflect a positive image of Russia — unlike China — is rather intended to show that the efforts, resources and time invested in supporting Ukraine are wasted.
Senator Cardozo: What methods do they use? Is it social media, because Russian television doesn’t exist?
Mr. Hogue: Indeed. They are very active on social media, particularly X. In fact, there is a strong Ukrainian community working to counter disinformation, including with several members of the Ukrainian Canadian community. Some of you may have heard about the NAFO group — which plays on the acronym NATO — a group that is active in countering Russian disinformation about Ukraine, both within Canada and globally, because it has international reach. They also raise funds in support of the Ukrainian state and the war effort.
Senator Carignan: Perhaps along the same lines, with respect to the Russian diaspora in Canada, what is Russia’s strategy for reaching not the Ukrainian diaspora, but the Russian diaspora? Are they spreading disinformation among that group?
Mr. Hogue: That’s an excellent question. I’m going to have to tell you that I don’t know. My colleague seems to have an answer.
[English]
Mr. Ling: I have somewhat of an answer for you. There was an association, possibly the Canadian-Russian friendship association — the exact title of the group escapes me — but it was a group that was certainly friendly with the Russian embassy as it was a number of years ago. For example, in 2016-17, it sent out a series of letters, one open letter and many direct letters to many members of Parliament, basically advocating for a relationship reset between Canada and Russia and voicing a handful of conspiratorial misinformation claims about the true nature of the conflict with Ukraine. This group had headquarters in Toronto. They had ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, which, at the time, was forging deeper relations with the Kremlin. But as best I can tell, this organization has largely gone defunct. It hasn’t done much over the last number of years.
It does generally seem like Russia is not particularly in the business of using its diaspora abroad, I think in no small part because the Russian diaspora abroad is not terribly fond of the Kremlin so it can be hard to find witting participants in this sort of effort. There may be some research I’m not aware of on that, but that has been my involvement in interactions with the Russian diaspora here.
Senator Kutcher: Thank you both for being here.
My question is for whoever wants to take this and is along the lines of how Canada can best set up a structure to protect itself from Russian disinformation and other forms of disinformation. The issue of information governance is a fundamental one.
Since the Doppelganger campaign of 2022, we have seen a very interesting phenomenon on social media in Canada where toxic populism now has taken on that campaign. No longer is Russia directly involved in the disinformation campaign, but the toxic populists have taken it on. We have this group of people who are anti-vax, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant and pro-Russia, and they constantly feed Russian information or disinformation out throughout all of Canada.
The question is, how can Canada deal with that? Their goal is to create division in Canada and question our governance. We saw that with the convoy and, Mr. Ling, you did incredible work with that. What kind of structures can the Canadian government help put in place? Because it can’t just be government but also civil society, but even in our government, we don’t have a plan. There is nobody in charge of how we deal with this. I would be interested in your thoughts about that.
Mr. Ling: I’ll try to cram a lot into a short answer.
It is important that we only make the accusation of foreign interference when we’re quite certain. I saw a lot of careless allegations that Russian money or propaganda was not just an add-on or a band wagoner to the Freedom Convoy but was actually an instigator or active participant, and there just is no evidence for this. There never has been. I’m certainly not saying that is the claim you’re making. I think it was always a thing worth investigating, but beyond some news reports that I think, frankly, went largely ignored, Russia did not have a significant influence over the Freedom Convoy. I’m sure they were cheering. I’m certain they were. They always cheer on any cleavage that happens in the West. But I do think it is important to be precise in our language when we talk about these things. The danger is that we discredit the process through which we identify foreign interference.
To that end, it is important that when we do have credible evidence, we come forward and publish it in as open and rigorous and attributable way as possible. The previous government’s decision to create a rapid response mechanism through the G7 to identify and to, ideally, disrupt foreign interference was a good one, but it was always lacking the public attribution and the transparency to that allegation. Too much of that rapid response mechanism is supposed to be internal without that transparency to let the public know. Fundamentally, if you want to create a system that can actually stop, prevent and disrupt foreign interference, you have to bring the public in with you. If you do not trust the public enough to give them that information, then you’re fundamentally not defending yourself.
Finally, I can get into detail about the mechanism itself later, but any effort to detect and deter that sort of interference has to run through the social media companies because these social media companies are the roads on which disinformation is entering the country. Unfortunately, there has been a total lack of cooperation. There has been some voluntary disclosure from companies like Meta and Google in the past. We don’t know if that is going to continue. Especially if this foreign interference happens to align with the goals of the current administration in the U.S., we really have no guarantee that these companies are going to continue to be as forthright as they have been in the past.
To that end, there will have to be some sort of mandatory disclosure or, ideally, mandatory transparency on, say, advertising spending, on algorithmically generated accounts or on foreign accounts masquerading as local actors. There has thus far been no rubric for how that gets disclosed, and it’s important that there be transparency there.
Senator White: Thank you, both panellists, for your presentation here.
My question is for both of you, and it’s in two parts. First, I’m wondering if you could provide your insights as they relate to the disinformation narratives targeting Canada compared to other G7 nations. Are we more or less impacted? Second, how effective have other G7 countries been at detecting and responding to Russian disinformation campaigns?
Mr. Ling: Like I said, in the past, Russia has taken opportunities to jump on Canada. For example, there was a story a number of years ago when wildfires out West were straining our ability to respond. Russia made the offer — totally farcical, not a real offer — to send over water bombers, and the Government of Canada declined. They ramped that up as a big, “Look, Canada is so Russia-phobic that they won’t even take our help.” They’ll take any opportunity they can. They’ll also jump on any narrative that becomes popular. Again, that’s why you see them covering, positively, the Freedom Convoy.
Thus far, they’ve kind of used the same brush to go after the entire G7: “The War in Ukraine is not your war,” “American Imperialism is leading you by the nose,” things like that. I really have not seen a ton — at least not over the last number of years — of uniquely Canadian narratives, but I don’t think that means we should be blithe to the NATO-wide and G7-wide narratives. We are part of both of those groups, and we should be doing our part to push back against narratives that target the entire alliances.
[Translation]
Mr. Hogue: I support your answer. Essentially, it is in Canada’s best interest to ensure that the liberal international order remains as it is at present. Threatening it through the Europeans or the United States is also threatening Canadian interests.
To answer the other part of the question, I think that Canada is lagging behind Europe in its ability to detect threats and equip itself to deal with disinformation.
To answer your colleague’s question at the same time, I believe that Canada has every interest in looking at the model of digital services legislation proposed by the European Commission, which legally requires platforms, particularly major platforms, to closely monitor all information and content circulating on the platform, especially disinformation. Through a series of measures that we could possibly revisit, the main interest is that these are binding rather than prescriptive measures. There are also financial penalties. Even for Canada, it is of particular interest to see a legal framework like this in place. We can draw on it to quickly and effectively develop our own. There is much to be said for such a project. Clearly, Canada is lagging behind its allies.
[English]
Senator Dasko: Thank you, witnesses, for being here.
Mr. Ling, at the beginning of your comments, you said you had told the other committee a story about your experiences. Could you share that with us?
Mr. Ling: Sure. I’ll try to keep it relatively brief, but it’s a bit of a long story. In 2015-16 or so, I had sent an interview request to the Russian embassy and ended up getting a message back from a guy named Kirill Kalinin, whose official title was press secretary. I think I learned quite a bit later that he probably had a second title internally, notably, information officer, or as the Canadian government later called him, a spy. We chatted back and forth for quite some time. He offered to furnish me with documents proving the existence of a sort of pervasive community of Ukrainian neo-Nazis who were living in Canada. We actually went for beers on several occasions here in Ottawa, with me under no illusion of the nature of the relationship. He later made all sorts of kind of ludicrous claims about the nature of the revolution, dignity in Ukraine, Canada’s support for Ukraine and so on and so forth.
Ultimately it was through him that he shopped the story of Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather being, as he put it, a Nazi. It was a claim that later kind of percolated up through several other channels that I have strong suspicion originated with him. I published a story in detail at the time, as did to some degree did The Globe & Mail and others, and, of course, he was later expelled from the country for his involvement in these information operations. We kept in a little bit of contact subsequently, but have lost touch over the years.
All this to say it was a fascinating inside look at the way the embassy became a hub for some of this stuff. He had good linkages with alternative media in helping shop around stories that were beneficial to the Russian narrative. It’s a tactic, both through their social media accounts but also through their personnel, that Russia uses in many other countries. I think we’re actually benefiting a lot from not having those officers here in Ottawa.
Senator Dasko: Thank you.
I wanted to pursue your comments about your analysis that you don’t think Russia is spending as much time dealing with Canada right now. Why would that be? Is it because the divisions here maybe aren’t as exploitable as we might have thought? I tend to think our country is divided in some ways that are quite significant, but perhaps we’re not, compared to other countries in Europe. Is it that, or is it because we’re not as important for them in the current geopolitical environment and the world? When I think about Canada, obviously there’s a huge Ukrainian diaspora. This country is very positive in terms of supporting Ukraine, and that’s quite obvious. In any case, why do you think this would be? Is it a passing phase?
Mr. Ling: The short answer is that I think they have tried and I think they’ve found that maybe there are cleavages here and there is polarization here and they’re not terribly good at exploiting it, but the second part is that I think Russia often thinks in terms of hemispheres and regions and not necessarily individual countries. The same tactics they are using to target America, the U.K. and Europe, they’re using to target us here. Just because they’re not bespoke and properly Canadian doesn’t mean that they’re not also generally going out with the intent of attracting Canadian audiences.
[Translation]
Senator Youance: Thank you to both our witnesses for being here.
I’m mixing up your opening remarks a little bit. You mentioned the example of Africa and how that example can be replicated in other countries. Could this be the case for Canada?
[English]
Mr. Ling: I think the short answer is yes. To date, Russian disinformation efforts have been really slapdash. If you go back to 2016, the effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. wasn’t actually run by the Russian government. It was run by an oligarch named Yevgeny Prigozhin, and it was Prigozhin’s effort that really started this astroturf control operation. It was actually Prigozhin’s operation that started in the Sahel region in West Africa. The Russian government merely took it over after Prigozhin fell out of the sky, so to speak. To that end, I think the Russian government is still learning how to do this properly. The Russian government, as we know, is wildly corrupt, often completely incompetent, and it often requires the work of oligarchs or business interests to really make their mark and for the Kremlin essentially to steal their tactics.
To that end, I think that part of Africa has been a real testing ground for these efforts, and now that Russia is in control of an operation that includes, by the way, cultural centres, the embassies, radio stations, movie screenings, cultural events, social media, television, now that they have this wraparound 360 effort, there really is no telling what they do with it next. I’m still skeptical that they think the money is going to be worth it to do it in Canada, but it could certainly be globally targeted, or it could be targeted towards our hemisphere, South America, the Caribbean, you name it. I think it is something we should definitely be keeping our eyes on.
Again, to keep re-upping the work of the French government, the fact that we know so much about it and the fact that we have such a good detailed analyze of this is thanks to the French government. It is sort of embarrassing that we’re always learning these things through our allies and not taking initiative on our own front, because this is certainly work that the Canadian government could have, at the very least, helped on. The Australian government gets a shout-out in the report as being one of the helpers. That could have easily been us and, unfortunately, it wasn’t.
[Translation]
Senator Youance: You also mentioned the information gap that is being filled by Russia and the significant impact of the closure of Voice of America radio. How can broadcasters prevent this gap from occurring here in Canada?
[English]
Mr. Ling: I wrote a column in the Toronto Star a few weeks ago making this case, but I think the return of Radio Canada International would be an absolute asset in this regard. Radio Canada International, known as RCI, had a huge audience in francophone Africa. That same audience now is looking for high-quality, well-produced news, and they’re unfortunately turning to things like African Initiative. There’s really nothing stopping us from going back into that business. There’s really nothing stopping us from replicating what DW does for Germany, what the BBC international service does for the U.K. and what Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America used to do for America. Unfortunately, they’ve been shut down by the Trump government. It would be absolutely a boon.
What’s more, the more that Canada can get back into the business of actually having Canadians abroad reporting the news, the more it actually helps us here at home to better understand the world and to do it through the lens of Canada as opposed to that of a foreign government.
Senator Boniface: Thank you, both of you, for being here.
I’d like explore a follow-up to Senator Kutcher’s question around Russian disinformation. I’d like to hear your view of it in terms of the administration in the United States and what the opening that is creating for Russian information through North America.
[Translation]
Mr. Hogue: Russia’s first opportunity to benefit from the U.S. is the closure of the Global Engagement Center, or GEC, which was closed by President Trump when he took office. It is now an institutional administrative loophole, a protection that the United States no longer has. Otherwise, it’s indirectly the administration, but it’s the transformation of social network X under its new owner, Elon Musk. When we said earlier that content management by platforms was voluntary, we now see the dangers of a platform that stops doing the job and even promotes certain content.
Russia therefore has the opportunity to spread its messages through the removal of protective measures on a platform that is not doing its job of providing protection. The danger lies in the normalization of extremist discourse. That’s often overlooked. However, the major distributors of content are not just platforms and algorithms, but rather political leaders who normalize extremist, polarizing and destabilizing discourse. We are seeing it right now with the Trump-Putin summit, where President Trump is repeating this type of discourse.
[English]
Mr. Ling: I agree 100% with everything my colleague just said, so I’ll try to say something different.
Taking it even further, the clear chill on disinformation research, for example, is having an effect already. Many colleagues and sources in the States are now finding themselves either out of a job or without research funding for what was critical work about the state of disinformation. You’ve also seen Russian disinformation narratives become the official line of the U.S. government.
I spent a lot of work — some might say too much work — following one particular disinformation narrative that bubbled up through QAnon, the U.S. conspiratorial movement, a couple of years ago. It claimed, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that Russia was actually invading to destroy American bioweapons laboratories. This claim was kind of cobbled together thanks to disinformation that had been put out over the years by both the Russian and Chinese governments and had been packaged into this new narrative, produced by an American, fully, by a guy living in Virginia. It was later trumpeted by the Russian Minister of Defence; Tulsi Gabbard, who is now the Director of National Intelligence; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now the Secretary of Health and Human Services; Kash Patel, Director of the FBI; amongst others. There are civil servants in the U.S. who, through this narrative, have been accused of creating bioweapons and targeting ethnic Russians, who are now working for the government that seems to believe these things. You see this around the narratives that Russia has endorsed, for example, around trying Anthony Fauci for treason.
It’s kind of impossible to figure out how to deal with this in the moment, given that so many of these narratives that Russia has helped push over the years have now become the official line of the Trump administration. To that end, to go back to my comments about Canada not being particularly targeted by this, they don’t have to be because America already owns the social media networks on which we rely; the TV stations and the newspapers, which we all read; and the sources of discussion and conversation, in which we all participate. To that end, Russia has been extremely successful.
The Chair: If I may, obviously, writing about this is really important, but, equally, in the context of what we have seen in other countries and how they are approaching and dealing with this, not just in the context with Russia but generally on disinformation, what can we learn? What can you recommend to the committee that we should consider as a way forward? One of the points you made earlier was that during the election, the government did disclose this disinformation campaign, especially around the election. They actually named the source. Why can’t they do that on an ongoing basis, given that this is a service they felt was important for Canadians to know about in the context of our democracy?
Mr. Ling: You’re exactly right. Why can’t they? They absolutely should.
The way in which these systems have been designed always seemed to prioritize the preservation of, in CSIS’s case, sources and methods, or, in the RCMP’s case, the sanctity of the prosecution. They’re treating for an interference much in the same way they would treat, say, an investigation into national security, terrorism, treason or whatever. That’s the wrong way of thinking about things. In reality, the vast majority of cases involving foreign interference would never lead to a prosecution.
Really, the remedy is the response, and the response has to go through the general public. You’re exactly right. There is no reason why we can’t disclose and attribute these meddling efforts. In fact, you’ve seen other governments do this. I keep going to France as an example, but the U.S., previously, and other countries are also great examples.
As one example, when Emmanuel Macron’s email was hacked in the early 2020s, the French government publicly disclosed this and actually warned that there would probably soon be a leak of these emails. The French public, in turn, knew basically to ignore it, not to trust it, or, at the very least, to appreciate it as the byproduct of Russian meddling. I thought that was extremely effective.
You can also look to the United States. One of the most effective ways through which they combat not just foreign interference but also foreign-source disinformation and transnational repression is through their very particular system — and I know this is very American — of using speaking indictments. That is, when they make an arrest and file charges against one of these actors, particularly foreign actors, they file the indictment and at least the available non-national-security evidence. They put it right out there when they make the arrest. The release of those indictments immediately, as opposed to after weeks or months of trial or procedure, is extremely useful for journalists covering these cases. I realize our court system is built in a bit of a different manner, but there could be a world in which we require the automatic disclosure of some of this evidence as soon as charges are laid or an indictment is filed.
[Translation]
Mr. Hogue: I fully agree that Canada needs to be much more transparent when it comes to all defence security issues, including disinformation. In addition to transparency, however, two important factors must be kept in mind. The first is the target audiences.
For most audiences, learning that there is a disinformation campaign can be reassuring and can lead people to be vigilant about the situation and more receptive to various safety procedures. For those who are already radicalized, this may have very little effect, if not only to fuel conspiracy theories. As a result, depending on the target audience, transparency doesn’t have the same effect.
Another important factor is that when the Canadian government does engage in transparency, it has relatively little impact. I am sorry to say this, but the government is not a good communicator in the digital age. At the very least, it needs to learn the digital codes when communicating on social media, or ideally work more closely with established media partners whose independence is recognized by the public. This would add credibility to the government’s message to a segment of the population that is increasingly distrustful of public institutions.
The Chair: Thank you.
[English]
Senator Ince: Mr. Ling, you indicated that you believe that Russia’s activities in Africa might be more of — you used the word “experiment,” I think.
Mr. Ling: “Testing ground.”
Senator Ince: “Testing ground,” yes. Given the fact that they are also using AI platforms and algorithms, how concerned are you with them going in that direction, and how successful do you think they would be?
Mr. Ling: It’s impossibly hard to game out, but what we can do is look at how effective they have been in their operations thus far in the Sahel in West Africa, both through Prigozhin’s Wagner Group and now through official government channels, Africa Initiative and what they call the African Corps. The Russian government has helped topple no fewer than four democratic governments. They’ve created a space for their mercenary organizations but also have supported, with the use of money and heavy weaponry, the juntas that rule those countries now and are both plundering natural resources and exerting a huge amount of influence on that region, and there’s a real risk. Some analysts have called this the “Coup Belt,” and there is already worry that this could spread further.
I don’t want to criticize the idea that we should be worried about ourselves, but part of the issue I do take with the idea of studying foreign interference is that it often becomes quite insular. The fact is, foreign interference doesn’t only matter when it happens to Canada. Canada becomes less safe and less prosperous, and we have more things we have to worry about when, for example, a significant part of Africa has fallen both to military dictatorships but also to ones that profess allegiance to the Russian government.
By the way, it’s also very bad for Ukraine and, in effect, all of Eastern Europe when Russia has a way to evade Canadian sanctions, when it has areas that become a big information relay, especially for information especially in French, and where they have the ability to replicate that, whether it’s elsewhere in Africa, whether it’s in South America, whether it’s in Asia.
To that end, whether or not they ever use that here — if they did, I think it wouldn’t be a problem. I tend to think we are more resilient than we give ourselves credited for. I tend to think Canadians have better media literacy than sometimes we acknowledge. But whether or not it actually happens here, we still have to be alive to that threat and still be willing to counter it as though it were happening here.
The Chair: Colleagues and panellists, here is a real test of your skills. We have four people wanting to ask a question on a second round, so each of you will have one minute, which includes the answer. If you are all succinct in your question, less than 30 seconds, and 30 seconds for the answer, we can get all the questions asked.
Senator Al Zaibak: Professor Hogue, the closing paragraph of your opening remarks resonated with me quite a bit. Would you mind repeating that? I think the natural inclination of governments is to go against such kinds of threats through tightening free speech and putting on some restrictions that serve the agent and the ultimate goals of our adversaries. Do you mind repeating that?
[Translation]
Mr. Hogue: Yes, of course. What I’m suggesting is that the solutions that emerge are less about giving new powers to security institutions than about better information governance. In short, what I am inviting you to do is reverse the perspective. It is no longer by strengthening national security that we preserve Canadian democracy, but rather by strengthening democracy that we ensure national security.
The Chair: Thank you.
[English]
Senator Kutcher: The 3rd EEAS Report just came out in 2025, and maybe I could ask our analyst to find that and share it with the rest of the committee. I think that would be helpful. They use a matrix instrument in order to scan for and identify disinformation. What they have reported is that the amount of Russian disinformation is way more than ever was thought and is very destabilizing. Do you think Canada would benefit from using these types of tools that we don’t seem to be using and that identify this in a great way?
Mr. Ling: The short answer is that I don’t know. What we call the “firehose of falsehoods,” the Russian model, relies on putting out so much stuff that is low quality, that is high volume, and that is not really designed to convince anyone. It’s often designed to create cynicism and distrust, and it is sometimes to provoke overreaction by the governments it’s targeting. It’s often through this “firehose of falsehoods” that they’ll figure out one or two narratives that bear plucking out and financing. To call out each individual bit is not always the most effective tactic. It could be a good tool, but I don’t know that it’s necessarily going to be the most effective.
Senator Cardozo: Do I understand that what you’re suggesting is that there are two kinds of disinformation that Russia engages in? One is regarding Russia, Russia-Ukraine, and the other is just destabilizing our country on the issues that we’re dealing with here?
Mr. Ling: Yes. Oftentimes, it is whatever they can do to push down trust in our own domestic institutions but also to create an inability of response to the real kinetic threat that they’re posing in Europe. That’s a pretty good summary.
Senator Cardozo: Do they actually pay people money here in Canada to do that, grants and stuff?
Mr. Ling: We do know through the Tenet Media indictment, again talking about the speaking indictments that, according to the Department of Justice and the FBI, there was somewhere to the tune of $10 million paid to a Canadian-registered company, although largely working through the U.S., with U.S. commentators, not necessarily to echo Kremlin talking points but merely to continue the work they’re doing, which is reactionary, largely pro-Trump, conspiratorial, often Ukraine-skeptical but not necessarily. Some will say there are others accepting this money. We’ve never seen evidence of this, so I think we have to wait until there’s solid evidence of such, but we’ve certainly now seen that as a tactic, yes.
Senator Boniface: I’m interested in your comments around Africa because I did some work in West Africa. What do you think is the impact of the withdrawal of USAID and how that affects it?
Mr. Ling: Not even just USAID but the withdrawal of Voice of America and some of the global broadcasters. To me, it is enormous. There’s going to be enormous opportunity now for Russia to enter in much the same way as they have in a handful of countries: Malawi, Central African Republic and others.
It bears noting as well that part of the reason why Russia is so impactful in that part of Africa is because there was a general cynicism that France was helping. France, despite sending in military assets and significant amounts of money, was doing a very poor job of pushing back against both the threat of Islamist extremism and other separatist movements. The fact that France — despite promising to — cannot provide security left a huge opportunity for Russia to swoop in and provide a source of revenue, sanction evasion and, in some cases, fighters, et cetera.
Suffice to say that it certainly doesn’t help that we’re going to provide even less in terms of humanitarian aid, public health and security assistance.
The Chair: This brings us to the end of our time with this panel. I would like to thank both Mr. Ling and Mr. Hogue for taking the time to meet with us today. We greatly appreciate your contribution and the time you took to share your knowledge and expertise with us.
For the next panel, we are pleased to welcome the Honourable Chris Alexander, Distinguished Fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute; and Aengus Bridgman, Director, Media Ecosystem Observatory and Assistant Professor (Research), Max Bell School of Public Policy, McGill University.
I thank you both for joining us today. We will begin by inviting you to provide opening remarks, to be followed by questions from our colleagues. You each have five minutes for your opening remarks.
Hon. Chris Alexander, P.C, Distinguished Fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute, as an individual: Thank you, chair.
[Translation]
Senators, I am happy to be with you today. Thank you for this invitation.
[English]
Let’s look at the big picture. Last year, the World Economic Forum — not always everyone’s favourite source of insight on issues but, on this issue, deserving of our attention — did a global risk report and said that in the coming two years, so in 2025-26, the greatest risk to the entire world, to the international system, was foreign and domestic actors leveraging misinformation and disinformation for nefarious purposes. The issue you have chosen is not a sideline or peripheral issue; it is a core issue for how our society — not just Canada, but every society on the face of the earth — is functioning today.
Since 2006, the number of populist governments has soared around the world. The number of democracies has fallen. The remaining democracies are performing less well. I would argue that Russian disinformation, influence operations and active measures — using social media as their principal vector of dissemination — are a principal cause of these trends. In some national cases, I think Russia’s malign impact on the political system of these countries in Europe, Asia and elsewhere is the principal cause of a decline in the quality of democracy or an actual lapse from democratic status into non-democratic status.
Let’s look at how the Kremlin delivers this impact. Everyone is involved — the president, core advisers and Sergei Kiriyenko, a former Prime Minister of Russia who ran their nuclear sector for years. For several years, he has been in charge of influence operations around the world. He has budgets of hundreds of millions, billions of dollars and euros to spread around to have an impact in places like Moldova, where Russia, according to the best estimates we had, was prepared to spend up to €300 million to steal an election from the people of Moldova. Imagine how much money was being spent by bona fide democratic politicians in Moldova compared to that Russian spending.
That kind of spending, if it came to Canada, would dwarf the spending of our political parties. We have no evidence that they’ve spent that kind of money on Canada, but they spend a lot of money on these things in all countries, especially in the English- and French-speaking world, so we better take it seriously.
This is not the full budget. Russia’s classified budget is $148 billion. Most of that is to fight the war in Ukraine. A lot of it is for influence operations in Ukraine and elsewhere. Within that $148 billion budget, $49 billion is for their security intelligence services: the FSB, SVR and GRU. We don’t know how they spend all that money, but we know a lot of it is outside of Russia, maybe even most of it. A lot of it is directed against the democracies they are desperate not to see helping Ukraine in a decisive way or countering Russia’s corruption in our political systems in a decisive way.
What is the impact of this disinformation? Russian influence is a make-or-break factor, as I mentioned, for many candidates and parties in almost every native democracy. I’ve experienced this. You’ve seen it. It is hard to win an election in any democratic jurisdiction if the Russian bot armies are against you online. Many people make their Faustian bargains, their deals with the devil. They get onside with one issue or not — I’m going to oppose support for Ukraine — and they get that support, and it helps them.
Russia-directed assets discredit largely centrist politicians and policies while fueling populism and extremism. Trump’s two victories, Brexit, the rise of the AfD in Germany, La France insoumise, the National Front/National Rally in France, would not have happened without continuous large-scale, long-term Russian influence campaigns.
In Canada, we know Russian influence operations supported anti-vax and anti-immigration movements, including extreme varieties of those movements, White supremacists, anti-Ukrainian and anti-Semitic propaganda, as well as western and Alberta separatist movements, and pro-Hamas demonstrations more recently. We know Russia Today still has a web page dedicated to the truckers blockade from early 2022.
I’ll leave that as my opening remarks and come back to some solutions as we move on, Mr. Chair. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Alexander. We will have many questions for you.
Aengus Bridgman, Director, Media Ecosystem Observatory and Assistant Professor (Research), Max Bell School of Public Policy, McGill University, as an individual: Hello, everyone. My apologies I’m not there in person. Thank you for the invitation to come and speak before you today.
My name is Aengus Bridgman. I am a professor of research at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. I direct this institute called the Media Ecosystem Observatory, which is the largest information ecosystem study organization in Canada. We write the major public-facing reports and analyses of how our information ecosystem is evolving over time. You might have seen some of our work related to the elections that surfaced during the Foreign Interference Commission and the recent election.
I absolutely agree with my colleague. Russian disinformation is an enormous problem. He is well positioned to speak to the particularities of the case, the international context and all of these things, and I know you’ve heard from other colleagues, including those in my research network, focused on Russian disinformation.
What I wish to talk about is the current opportunity for Russia and other actors to exploit enormous vulnerabilities in our information environment. They aren’t distinct to Russia, but it’s important context to understand in order to think about the vectors of attack, the way in which Russia is going to be thinking about this and the way China and other countries are going to be thinking about manipulating our citizens and our democratic politics.
There is a key feature of our information environment today which makes it incredibly challenging for any citizen, parliamentarian or policy-maker to look at the information ecosystem and understand what’s going on.
When we say Russia has interfered directly in Canadian politics, how do we understand that? How do we draw evidence? How do we understand whether or not an election is subject to manipulation at scale?
We know there’s attempts. We know what is going on online to a very superficial extent. The data necessary to make that assessment — for example, for the critical election protocol, the body of civil servants tasked with calling out if there is significant manipulation during an election based on which they can make their decisions — is limited.
The theme I want to emphasize today is one of transparency. To demonstrate the current state we’re in, it’s useful to talk through a couple of recent cases.
Last year, some of you may remember there was an incident in Kirkland Lake. Pierre Poilievre had spoken at a rally. A few days later, thousands of bots on X flooded that platform with ChatGPT-generated messages saying, “Hey, this was a great rally. We were so happy to have been there.” It turned out to be bots. There were a few media cycles about it. It was a national story for a while. X took down many of these bots. How many? Three parliamentarians from the lower house wrote to X and Musk asking for some transparency. Where was this coming from? Was this a Russian operation? Who did this? No public response, no clarity. Canadians are left in the dark. That’s example one.
The second example is last year’s Tenet Media case. Through a Canadian company, $10 million was funnelled from Russia to six prominent right-wing influencers in the United States and Canada. One of them, Lauren Southern, testified before a lower house committee as well, talking about being an underfunded media organization. That came to light because of an investigation in the United States, but the money was flowing through Canada. Again, there wasn’t that transparency. Coming out of that, those influencers are all still active and have shown no shame or repentance about where that money came from and how they were potentially being used as useful idiots in the Russian information campaign.
For the third example, we just had a federal election. Maybe some of you have seen these scam ads on Meta, YouTube and other platforms that use artificial-intelligence-generated images and videos of politicians. During the election, you couldn’t get CBC, Global News, CTV, Radio-Canada, or La Presse on major social media platforms, but what could you see is websites that looked like them that were using the likenesses of politicians, had political content advocating for one or another party and were being shown to thousands of Canadians.
Is that one minute or is that time?
The Chair: You’re getting close to time for you to wrap up.
Mr. Bridgman: Okay, yes. Meta took down many of those ads. We still don’t know the scope and scale. They have not been forthcoming with that information. We were able to document hundreds of cases with hundreds of thousands of Canadians who viewed these. Again, there is this lack of transparency.
All of these provide enormous opportunity for bad actors or somebody trying to influence the information environment to do so right under our noses and we’re not able to see it, so the first step is to think about the new architecture of our information environment and the actors of our information environment and to say, “Actually, transparency is completely necessary.”
We just hosted a conference here in Montreal called “Govern or Be Governed.” Be governed by whom? Be governed by social media platforms. Be governed by other states, including the United States.
This is really a call. We need to talk about transparency. We need to talk about our ability to govern and be sovereign in this moment.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Bridgman.
We’ll now proceed to questions. Mr. Alexander and Mr. Bridgman will be with us until around 6:10. In that time, we will do our best to allow each member to ask a question. Four minutes will be allotted to each question, including the answer. I ask that you keep your questions succinct in an effort to allow as many interventions as possible.
Normally, I would allow our deputy chair to ask the first question, but our colleague Senator Boniface is only going to be here a short time. I would like colleagues to allow her to ask the first question because she will be leaving shortly.
Senator Boniface: Thank you very much, colleagues, for your indulgence.
Mr. Alexander, I appreciate your comments. You have a long history in both diplomacy and in the House. How much confidence do you have in your former colleagues in the House of understanding the depth and breadth of this issue? How do we ensure that they’re educated so that they actually can distinguish and then help come up with solutions?
Mr. Alexander: That’s a great question.
I do have confidence. I’ve heard from members from the three parties in the last Parliament and from the Bloc Québécois as well on these issues. There are people who have a lively interest in this. There is not a single member of the House of Commons or the Senate, I don’t think, who is not interested in the integrity of our democracy. That said, as the other witness, my colleague Mr. Bridgman, was just saying, we can’t expect parliamentarians or even our elected Prime Minister and ministers to be fully on top of this issue because they don’t have the machinery of government to serve them on this yet.
On this point, I think it’s important to say that the U.S. had taken some steps under Joe Biden with the Global Engagement Center and other steps. They uncovered Tim Pool and these other people being paid, one remove straight from Moscow, huge sums of money to produce propaganda. That institutional machinery is gone, so we in North America, in this huge media environment, are more defenceless than we were a year ago.
In Europe, it’s a mixed bag. France, a couple of years ago, set up a national agency to look at this. It’s not performing brilliantly. It’s better they have it than not. The U.K. has done less. The best examples I think are the Czech Republic and Sweden. Sweden is probably the best at the moment.
We need to think ambitiously in terms of our machinery of government. How do we detect the kind of inauthentic behaviour that Mr. Bridgman is talking about? How do we increase transparency and expose what the Russians are doing? Because they are doing things in Canada that we haven’t tracked fully. Our machinery of government — although there are some good people and good initiatives in Public Safety and Global Affairs, in the Privy Council Office and elsewhere — is not enough. The scale is not there, and the focus is not there. I’ll come back to how we can move in that direction later in the discussion.
The Chair: Senator Boniface, you still have a minute left, if you wish to ask another question.
Senator Boniface: Mr. Bridgman, you talked about transparency, and I wonder if you have any suggestions on how to build the upcoming generation into the system. I watch my 11-year-old grandson, and I worry about what he believes and doesn’t believe about what he sees. What are your thoughts on that?
Mr. Bridgman: That is a brilliant question for just one minute remaining, and it is one that is very much occupying the research community. I’m a father to young children as well and really concerned about this.
I think the transparency needs to happen, but then I think there is a particular, distinct thing for youth. Absolutely, we need to be taking this much more seriously than we are now. Canada has been a laggard legislatively in this space, and there is enormous harm occurring to youth in online spaces today. It goes to Russian interference, but it goes beyond that. It goes to self-harm, and it goes to all sorts of things. It goes to chatbots. This is a serious and major issue.
In this generation’s defence, there is a degree of sophistication in spending a lot of time online and being able to discern to a certain extent in a way that you or I cannot necessarily because we did not grow up in that space, but I don’t think that’s enough. I don’t think we can rely on people’s intuitions. Intuition is not enough. There needs to be structured information provided, and people need to be aware of what’s going on and how these platforms and operations are working.
Senator Al Zaibak: Mr. Alexander, it is good to see you again.
Russia has used a consistent toolkit in conflicts, including attacks on civilians, energy systems and independent media. When Russia has invaded Crimea and helped the Syrian regime back in 2015, we didn’t see much reaction from the Western world. What lessons should Canada draw from the lack of early and unified global response in Syria and Crimea back in 2014 and 2015, and how can we ensure that our current support for Ukraine does not repeat those mistakes?
Mr. Alexander: That’s a brilliant question, senator, and thank you for putting it to us all.
How many people around the table know what Russia considers to be active measures? This is their term from the KGB playbook going back to the 1960s and championed notoriously by Andropov when he was the long-time head of the KGB before he became general secretary in the early 1980s.
Basically, the Russians decided, after Korea, that it was going to be hard for them to recruit Westerners to be pro-communist, to have that motivation for giving them information, for being loyal to them, the way Philby and some of the earlier spies had been, so they decided they needed to be more sophisticated. They needed to interfere in our countries or influence our countries on a number of levels. Now we’re calling that “hybrid war” to some extent; they call it “active measures.” It means propaganda and disinformation. It means political corruption. It means finding Tim Pool, your podcaster, who is not an ideological friend of Vladimir Putin but who is happy to receive $400,000 U.S. a month to produce podcasts, and do it along the lines that the client wants, in a sense. They’ve exploited the openness of our societies, they’ve built up networks of proxies over decades, and then they use them to pursue their objectives.
How does that relate to Syria, Libya before that, and Afghanistan? They use it to ensure that we don’t do what they fear we might do. In Libya — we can debate that conflict all day — Saddam went, our last major NATO military operation, Canadian general — there was no follow-up, and one of the reasons for a follow-up is that Russian propaganda and active measures emphasized that we don’t do nation building. We have to bring our troops home. We don’t want to get involved in these “forever wars.” These are the kinds of political messages which worked and that they used to get us not to ensure there was a stable regime in Libya after that military operation and then to ensure we did nothing in Syria and did nothing to prevent Russia from being involved in Syria and did nothing to prevent Trump from doing a deal with the Taliban, which pulled the rug out from under a legitimate government in Afghanistan, sent NATO packing and made all of us look weak. That is what set up the big invasion.
I would argue that the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was partly triggered by our inaction in Syria. That was a signal of weakness, which Putin then used in going into Crimea. Then our even greater weakness in pulling out of Afghanistan and letting the Taliban come back to power, basically, was his signal to do it big.
They use active measures on all of these fronts, not just with regard to specific support for Ukraine but with regard to a whole range of issues — they call it “reflexive control” — to limit our options politically and to put in play more political parties and political voices that are taking their position or criticizing the policy positions that they don’t want to see pursued. They constrain us in these ways, and it’s very sophisticated and very long-term, and we aren’t fighting it effectively at the moment.
[Translation]
Senator Carignan: Good afternoon, Mr. Alexander. It’s always a pleasure.
I asked my question earlier to the members of the other panel. However, they did not have the answer, so I will ask you. First, is Russia using the Russian diaspora in Canada to achieve its disinformation goals? If so, how? I know you wrote an open letter denouncing a documentary by Anastasia Trofimova. She’s Russian Canadian. Can you tell us a little more about these points?
Mr. Alexander: Thank you for the question.
Unfortunately, I think it is obvious to almost all experts in this field that Russia is exploiting its diaspora around the world. There is a large diaspora in Canada. It’s part of their game. This exploitation, these efforts to exert influence, has been going on for a long time. The Orthodox Church in Canada had priests who had been recruited by the KGB. We know this very well.
In one sense it’s more difficult for them, but in another, it’s easier because they have propaganda tools that didn’t exist in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Russian television media is no longer available to most of us. Fortunately, because it’s propaganda. However, it is still available in Canada because it can be accessed online. The people who watch this television are mainly Russian-speaking. Sometimes, they are English speakers, too. Russia Today targeted an English-speaking and French-speaking audience. Everyone who watches it daily is under the influence of very strong propaganda. It’s easier to influence these people. They will have completely different ideas from ours than what is happening in Ukraine now.
If you ask them to do something, to try to influence their MPs or to go to a demonstration, people will tend to agree. If they refuse, the Russians have other tools. They might say: “Is it true that you have family in the Urals and Siberia? Would you like your uncle to receive his pension?” You’ll do it. This is part of a larger phenomenon of transnational repression affecting Canadians of Chinese, Ukrainian and many other origins where there is a repressive regime with a dictator in power in their country of origin.
Senator Carignan: In addition to social media, does Russia use subsidies for documentaries, cultural activities and sporting events to promote its regime?
Mr. Alexander: The Trofimova phenomenon was related to our policy of Russia Today marginalization, which was available on Rogers and Bell at the time. With the large-scale invasion, we decided that this was no longer acceptable in Canada. This was part of the sanctions regime put in place by the G7 countries and other countries. It became more difficult for Russia Today to reach a large audience in Canada. Margarita Simonyan and other leaders of this television channel, who had invested heavily in their capacity, asked themselves, “How can we find our audience? We’ll do it through film festivals.” Trofimova was part of this initiative. This sparked controversy.
[English]
Senator Cardozo: Thank you to both of our witnesses for being here.
Professor Bridgman, I was also at the conference you mentioned — “AI: Govern or Be Governed” — which was talking about AI. One of the things that struck me is that when we look at our systems of internet, social media and artificial intelligence, the entire system is owned by the Americans. We don’t own any part of the system ourselves. Do you think we can build a Canadian infrastructure so that we have control and digital sovereignty?
Mr. Alexander, you talked about Russia aiding the blockade and pro-Hamas movements. Could you share a bit more information on those?
Mr. Bridgman: Thank you for the excellent question.
This is the Canadian tech stack kind of question: Are we able to build a social infrastructure that competes effectively with what is now a U.S.-controlled infrastructure that is not necessarily friendly toward Canada? There are two parts to this.
The first is that the concern regarding foreign interference has been directed at China, Russia, India — to an extent, Iran and other places. That has been the framing concern. When the Foreign Interference Commission report came out last year, those are the countries identified and talked about. At the same time, the United States has emerged as a global disinformation actor. This is well recognized in Europe with American influencer engagement and attempts to influence U.K. elections, French, German, the EU elections. There is a concerted effort by the United States to export the exact type of politics that has thrived there globally, and they are being successful in doing that. That presents an enormous vulnerability, and this is reflected in the survey data. We survey Canadians regularly, and what we find is that Canadians are the most concerned and believe the most foreign interference isn’t happening from Russia or China but from south of our border, from the United States. Canadians are deeply concerned about this. They are aware that there is this possibility.
In terms of our ability to go it alone or build a Canadian sovereign infrastructure, there are many people trying to build alternatives to these major platforms. This is obviously a very difficult thing. These things are locked in. These platforms have really attracted audiences. We saw this with the potential TikTok ban in the United States where people went to RedNote, a Chinese alternative, during the week-long block of TikTok. Many young people see these social platforms as essential parts of their lives and would be hostile toward any government that was trying to take that away from them, so there needs to be credible alternatives.
One way we do this is we start to work with our reliable democratic partners internationally, including the Europeans, who are investing and trying to build an alternative European social space. That’s one avenue.
The other thing is to just say we’re still a large market for these major social platforms, and we’ve struggled in the past to effectively govern, so we need to think very strategically and actively about how to do it, but again, these are questions of national sovereignty. When it comes to national sovereignty in terms of physical defence, there’s a red line, but when it comes to our informational infrastructure, people will say that it’s a little uncomfortable and they don’t know. Actually, it’s the same thing. It’s a form of hybrid warfare now, and it’s something we really do need to think about.
I’ll stop there to give some time for the second question.
The Chair: Unfortunately, you used up all your time.
Mr. Bridgman: An awkward thing to say. My apologies.
The Chair: I’m sure we’ll get back to you in the second round.
Senator Kutcher: Thank you both for being with us.
If you don’t have enough time to answer this question, we would appreciate your written submission to the committee so that you can go to greater lengths. One of the things we are tasked to do is to give recommendations to our government about what they could actually do about this — concrete stuff, not just talking about it. What are a couple of things that you think that we can do concretely to start to deal with the volume of this disinformation?
Mr. Alexander: Invest heavily in media literacy. This should be taught in schools, in partnership with provinces and territories. We’re not going to ban all the platforms overnight. Teachers are already doing this in many cases, because they see the need. There should be a national vocation, mandate, for doing it, on the model of Finland. There are other countries. They have very high PISA scores like Canada. Why not have good defence against disinformation and propaganda in Canada as well?
We must enforce existing hate crime laws online. I’ll just leave that there. I think it’s not happening; it should happen.
We should establish, as I have mentioned already, a lead agency for disinformation, aiming to be the G7 leader in the field, and that should be part of stronger efforts on national security and public safety, democratic civil society resilience, digital sovereignty and oversight, which Aengus was discussing, and national defence, including by committing to Ukraine’s success and, ultimately, victory. That is part of this campaign. Everything the Russians do is to pull us away from that. When we support Ukraine, when we tell the truth about what Russia is doing in Ukraine, when we give principled support as Canada has done and is starting to do on a larger scale, we are pushing back against Russia’s capacity to literally undermine our democracy.
We should have a whole-of-government cycle for detecting and handling these issues. Sweden has a sixfold cycle. The centre for excellence for hybrid warfare in Finland has four Ss that they follow. We should implement a Canadian version of those all-of-government cycles for staying on top of these issues.
Mr. Bridgman: I would not disagree with any of that. These are all recommendations that I’ve made in other contexts as well. There absolutely does need to be a concerted effort.
I am a researcher, so if you ask me, I always want more data. I think data is incredibly powerful at telling stories and helping people understand the scope and scale. We need to do that, and we need to start seriously thinking about what our strategy is in terms of engagement with the platforms.
I can’t stop thinking about the ad that’s caused the announcement of increased tariffs on Canada by Trump and by the Americans. We have been tiptoeing around social platform transparency and accountability. We’ve been tiptoeing around it in the interest of a trade war, which is capricious, and we cannot say that we will just sacrifice all of these national priorities, we’ll sacrifice kids’ safety, we’ll sacrifice information integrity, and we’ll sacrifice our ability to have a sovereign information environment in the hopes that the capriciousness will slow down. That is simply not going to happen. We need to pursue our national agenda and our national interests with regard to the information environment, come what may. This is a critical issue. This is about the future of our country. Of course the economy matters, but so does information integrity, and we can do both. That needs to be a priority, and it can’t be just, “Let’s build capacity in Canada.” We need to be more muscular in regard to transparency and accountability. Social media giants are the largest and most valuable companies in the world, and they are the least regulated. They are the least regulated here, and they have enormous influence. We need to be careful about that.
[Translation]
Senator Youance: Thank you to the witnesses for being here.
You have partially answered my question, Mr. Alexander, so I will clarify it further. You referred to Moldova, where I was recently for the parliamentary elections. In the second round of the parliamentary elections, the outgoing president lost. There was also a referendum on integration into the European Union, which had a very close result. In your opinion, to what extent is the victory in Moldova linked to Russian propaganda? Furthermore, what lessons can Canada learn from this experience?
Mr. Alexander: I think the question is very well put.
If Russian propaganda had not been circumvented, if there had been no opposition either from the United States before Mr. Trump’s second term or from the European Union during the most recent elections, there would no longer be democracy in Moldova. The parties linked to Russia would have won and retained power without limits or time limits, much like in Georgia. A similar situation occurred in this country, where the anti-Russians lost and were not supported in the same way by Europe, other democracies or the United States. There will be no more democracy in Georgia until further notice, unless the current regime in Moscow falls or there is some kind of revolution in Georgia. It is a very sad situation in Georgia.
It is comforting for all of us to see what has happened in Moldova, but we must understand that they acted with great determination. They outlawed several political parties because they were receiving huge amounts of funding from Moscow, and they took this decision before the elections, not after. That was very important. Without it, the results would have been different.
Right next door, Romania held elections that its Supreme Court declared illegitimate because of Russian influence channelled through TikTok, Twitter or X, and so on. So, after new elections without Russian candidates and with a much more determined approach, democracy continues in Romania.
What will happen in Germany? Will the AfD continue to be a real alternative, even if funding and support come from Moscow via social media? Would France act in the same way towards parties that are openly supported by Russia? There are still huge questions to be answered, even if we are happy that the way of life in Romania has been preserved.
[English]
Senator Dasko: Thank you both for being here.
Mr. Alexander, you said that the Russians are all in in terms of messaging and getting messages out and delivering them on various platforms and so on. A number of these messages must fall on dead ears. I’m just assuming that because, knowing Canada as I do, some of these things just wouldn’t fly. For either witness, what do we know about the effectiveness of the messaging? Do we know anything about that? What is actually working and to what extent, or not? That’s really my first question, just to get a sense of what we know about that.
Second, I have a smaller question for Professor Bridgman about Kirkland Lake. I understand your other two examples; I know them. What was it about Kirkland Lake that attracted the bots? What was that little story all about? I’m really curious. Why Kirkland Lake? Why that event?
Mr. Bridgman: Maybe I could answer briefly on Kirkland Lake. We did a detailed investigation. This is an automated pipeline of news to ChatGPT to Twitter bot. This was an experiment by, likely, just a single actor. As we evaluated it, it was very unlikely to have been a state actor. It was somebody trying to build capacity in the space. We knew that because we found, across the thousands of bots, a pattern. A certain percentage of the bots were consistently reporting on various Canadian news stories and putting in a particular prompt to generate these messages. There wasn’t anything about Kirkland Lake in particular. There wasn’t some effort to convince Canadians that something happened at Kirkland Lake. It was incidental. But what it did show was the capacity and ability to do that, and that’s what we’re really concerned about.
If I may, on the first question, how do we know? It’s very fraught. I’m a political scientist; I study political behaviour. It’s very fraught to understand how a single information campaign can yield distinct results.
In general, the literature shows us repeatedly that single information campaigns are not successful and they tend not to change opinion, but we also have enormous documentation of online communities and online spaces that have come under threat and influence by Russian disinformation, efforts that have manipulated many thousands of people. It’s hard to reconcile these two things. How do you reconcile, in the aggregate, whether 40 million Canadians are absorbing these materials?
To that, I would say it actually doesn’t take many. It doesn’t take many who fall down that pipeline. We are talking about many in terms of certain Russia propaganda about Ukraine, but it doesn’t actually take many who sincerely believe that, for example, the government is out to get them, that the government is corrupt and here are the ways in which they’re doing it. It doesn’t take many to block a bridge or occupy central Ottawa, to engage in activism that can be hugely impactful in a democracy. So we do know that it matters for certain small communities — there’s really good documentation of that — and because of that, in the context of a democracy, this is a real threat.
Mr. Alexander: Disinformation and active measures aim to discredit, divide, demoralize and disempower. You can see by the health of our democracies how effective it has been.
Russian-directed assets are major players on all the main platforms. X or Twitter because of its owner, TikTok because of its ownership, Telegram because of its ownership — they are basically hostile environments where Russia and other autocratic regimes can do what they want. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube — they don’t belong to Russia or China, but it’s a permissive environment for them. Those are the main vectors they use.
Senator Ince: Thank you to both witnesses. This is very interesting.
Mr. Alexander, you had mentioned the enormous amount of money Russia has put into this. We seem to be focusing so much on Russia. Professor Bridgman has mentioned China and India. Can you give us an idea how much money they have invested in this as well?
Mr. Alexander: Considerable. I’d be interested in Aengus’s views as well.
TikTok has a lot of Chinese influence, and much of it is state influence. Iran has a presence on TikTok and other social media; they invest heavily. Pakistan, the Gulf States, many states, especially autocratic states, pay for influence on all these platforms. Because they’ve seen the success of Russia and others, they think it’s just part of having a foreign policy these days, right?
I think most of the experts agree that, in sophistication, in scale, in persistence, in targeting on certain issues, in combining social media presence with paid proxies — for example, Tucker Carlson, I was reading today, is talking about how Putin is the best person in the world and how everyone around the world respects Putin — combining those forms of influence, still no one can match Russia.
Our view of what Russia does is incomplete because we see it as Marine Le Pen. We see it as an extremist party in Germany. We see it as MAGA. These are all national political forces, no question, but Russia has invested in each of them. Their influence, their dominance, I would argue, along with Trump’s two electoral victories, owe a great deal to Russia. When you talk about our truckers’ blockade and how it was influenced, Russia Today covered it. The evidence is there for us all to see. There were lots of people online, I would guess Russia-directed, supporting this who were not really Canadians, but most of the support came from MAGA, which made it hard for CSIS and others who were trying to track what was happening to figure out because if the U.S. has not come to terms with Russian influence in MAGA, how are we supposed to come to terms with that?
Mr. Bridgman: The short answer is that we don’t fully know the dollars invested by India and China and a few other states. We know there’s considerable effort, and we are starting to see these things pop up, but we don’t know. We know there’s a big impact, and I agree that Russia is still the one widely viewed.
I know it’s uncomfortable, but I will keep banging the drum: In terms of the views and attention of Canadians, the United States is, by far, in my view, the more dangerous source of foreign interference. We have seen major influencers repeatedly mischaracterize Canadian politics and what is happening in the country in order to disinform and inflame. RT is small; it’s consequential and it matters, but somebody like Tim Pool or Lauren Southern or Benny Johnson, all funded by Russia, also have enormous American audiences and enormous budgets.
I want to emphasize this because when we think of an influencer, we think of an individual. In the Canadian case, to a certain extent, that’s what it is because it isn’t the same money. In the States, when we say influencer, we mean a specific media organization with a very strong editorial stance with a team of researchers, editors and video producers who put out content continuously. We’ve talked about Tim Pool a few times today. A two-hour-a-day podcast coming out. Who consumes this? It is an enormous volume of content. That is only made possible by a large, taxpaying media organization. When we think about influencers, they are media entities that are able to operate in our new, digital environment with almost no oversight. We don’t have the legal infrastructure to address them in any way.
I think it’s a more complicated issue in the United States and it goes back decades, Canadian interdependence with the United States. Russia, we need to continue on that, but we also need to face reality in terms of the United States.
Senator White: Thank you to both panellists. It’s a fascinating discussion, and frightening, quite frankly.
My question is for Dr. Bridgman. At the risk of repeating a number of questions that have come before you, I’m trying to distinguish Senator Kutcher’s question. As it relates to approaches that Canada can take, I’m looking specifically at what evidence-based approaches can strengthen Canada’s resilience to all the influences that we know are affecting the public discourse and trust in our institutions while maintaining openness and freedom of expression.
Mr. Bridgman: You’ve hit the nail on the head. There is this sense that any demanding of transparency, accountability and adjustment of platforms is an infringement on freedom of speech. In Canada, we even use the freedom of speech language. I always catch myself. It’s not freedom of speech. We’re talking about freedom of expression. There is a nuance. But that is such a strange framing in a context where these platforms are not neutral actors and are not making neutral decisions.
If I go on X and I post, I will get 100 views on that content. I have the right to do that. I can speak. Benny Johnson, if he goes on, will get a million views. We both have freedom of speech, but in practice, the impact and the influence is highly different. It’s not a free marketplace. This isn’t an innocent case of the all-knowing algorithm sent down from heaven has decided to do this. There are platform preferences that more emotive, provocative content and misinformation are more likely to spread faster. Those are decisions made by the platforms to maximize time spent on them. Those are not neutral venues.
We have this romanticization — and I still hold deeply to it — of socials collectively being the public square where we can have a conversation. For any one of you who has spent time on social media, does it feel like a public square? Is there any public square happening there? Or is it people being inflamed or misled? There is enormous power.
I’m a techno-optimist even after all this time, but TikTok has an enormous capacity to unite and mobilize young people and get them interested in things, but it’s not a neutral platform.
Getting back to the source of that question, there needs to be very clear transparency about how these platforms work. Canadians need to understand that. Where appropriate, that algorithm, the way that works, can be adjusted and changed. Without compromising freedom of speech, everyone can still write what they want, but we’re not going to produce an environment where the most sensationalist, misinforming, emotionally evocative content will automatically be seen by the most people. These are the changes the platforms themselves make.
Mr. Alexander: I agree with everything Aengus has said. Restoring the public square, restoring that sense of trust in social media, in each other and in our democratic processes can be done. Every country in the world has gone through this. Some countries have gone off the edge and are no longer democracies. Look at the United States. But I’ll go back to Sweden. They have a psychological defence agency. We would probably choose a different title in Canada. It is renowned. It publishes works that lay out what the Russians are doing. It has some of the best researchers in the world, and then it has this six-cycle, government-wide, policy-review framework that it uses to figure out what forms of attack are taking place and counter them systematically and get the algorithms back on track, get the emotive, extremist, hot-button issues back in perspective where they belong and restore the ability of citizens to actually engage with each other calmly and sensibly on democratic issues. You have to do that if you want your public square to be intact. We have not done nearly enough. We need to be ambitious and make a big move to restore this or risk further deterioration of our own democracy, which we don’t want to see.
The Chair: I have a question.
Trust in government is a critical element of getting the public to listen, to partake and to appreciate what government is trying to do and guarding in terms of protecting the democracy. As we’ve seen, the measurement of trust in government varies from time to time across the provincial, municipal and federal levels. If we have any hope of getting our governments to be consistently engaged in this, Canadians need to have greater trust in their government. At the national level, we could all agree that the federal government has a greater responsibility, but it’s not the only level of government in regard to how we can deal with the challenges we face as a democracy. There are also the provincial governments, the territorial governments and municipal governments. How can we accomplish this in a succinct way that will bring some coherence to what we’re trying to do? Mr. Bridgman, you said many times — those of us will agree who looked at the Finnish model — that they have done something so incredible in an age where information is so proliferated. They accomplished something, living next to the giant Russia, and are able to sustain it on an ongoing basis. How can we do something of similar consequence that will aid and vitalize this democracy? Because if we don’t, we will corrode it to the point it has less relevance if a citizen has no faith in its government and the information they consume.
Mr. Alexander: Thank you for the question, chair.
A lot of it comes down to the leadership of bodies like this, of our government, having the courage to tell the truth and being well informed enough by their experts inside government and outside to say that, “We have been under attack.”
The Russians consider themselves at war with us. I mean, obviously they’re in a kinetic war with Ukraine. They don’t want us to join that fighting war because they know they will lose against all of us, but to keep us out of it, they are in an information-cognitive war with us. I’m not saying we declare war on Russia, but let’s recognize how they see things and the resources they expend in really trying to upset or disrupt our democracy and undermine trust.
If we go back to three or four major issues that undermined trust in Canadians in government — take public health through COVID and vaccination and immunization. There was huge, polarizing debate, and the extreme perspectives for and against all were supported by Russian assets online, and similarly in lots of other issues — immigration, multiculturalism in Canada. The Russians will always take the extreme position, amplify it and magnify it so that the centre falls away and government doesn’t know what to do. Trust in government falls. Let’s acknowledge that this is happening and then dedicate ourselves to being one of the best in class at responding.
There really have only been two times when our allies countered Russian active measures effectively. The first was actually surprisingly under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. From 1981 to 1991, there was something called the Active Measures Working Group, which Democrats and Republicans today would say was fantastic. It went alongside with Reagan’s emphasis on National Defence. It exposed what the Russians were doing to divide America at those times. They did public reports. It’s all online. You can see how effective it was. Then it got shut down in 1991, end of history, peace, we didn’t need to do this anymore. The Russians continued, not strongly in the 1990s but strongly later. Biden tried to put this back in place. The Global Engagement Center existed for a few years up until 2022. Now it’s gone because of Trump.
The only other successful example is the European institutions with their manipulation of information and foreign influence framework, which the commission uses, but member states also use. They’re still at the beginning, but they have had more success than the English-speaking world who are not part of the European Union. None of our countries — the U.K., Canada or the United States — has a framework like that. We would do well to have one that works for Canada, that restores trusts in government, that speaks the truth about what forms of attack we’re under and that restores the public square in a way that we will all recognize as having integrity once again.
The Chair: Thank you.
This brings an end to our time with the panel. I want to thank Mr. Alexander and Mr. Bridgman for meeting with us today. We greatly appreciate your contributions and the time you took to share your knowledge with us. At the end of the day, this will greatly enhance our study.
Senators, we are at the final item of today’s agenda, which is a discussion of upcoming work. It is agreed that we will now proceed in camera to have our discussion.
(The committee continued in camera.)