Information & Ethics Committee on May 7th, 2024

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Professor Loewen, I'm going back to you on recommendations to this committee on the mandate of this topic. Do you have additional recommendations that we should be considering?

[Peter Loewen]

I think you should consider whether you want to vigorously restrict the spreading of known falsehoods during elections. I don't have an opinion on that per se, but I know that there is some work.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Why do you have no opinion, sir?

[Peter Loewen]

It's kind of a political question in some sense, Mr. Green. That question does balance out the rights of free speech against other considerations, and where you strike that balance is a political question.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I would put this back to you. Given your subject matter expertise, do you believe that there is a reasonable limitation of expression that would outweigh the potential harms that you've identified in your work?

[Peter Loewen]

I think it's worth exploring whether political candidates should be banned from spreading falsehoods about other candidates' biographies, yes.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Mr. Frank, do you share that assertion, or do you have a different one?

[Dr. Richard Frank]

I'm still collecting my thoughts. I apologize.

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Mr. Al-Rawi, do you think that there should be a prohibition of propagating falsehoods during elections by politicians and political parties?

[Dr. Ahmed Al-Rawi]

I don't think that's possible. I agree with Professor Loewen on this. It might infringe on freedom of expression. You are free to say whatever you want, but of course, there should be some kind of repercussions if you are telling lies.

To address your question, what I suggest is that there needs to be more transparency from the MPs about what they are claiming to say and also—

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I'm going to end there.

I would say for your consideration, with my 30 seconds left, that for the good and welfare of the committee, we're calling on you as subject matter experts to help us contemplate these issues. You will have a week, likely, when this is done, to reflect on what's just been said and the testimony that you've provided.

I will share with you that we have codes of conduct. I will share with you that if a minister came to this committee and lied, we would have the ability to provide accountability in that regard to safeguard the information that we have in order to make informed decisions.

I'm going to put this on the table to you in a very clear and candid way. I need you to consider this question with seriousness, and I'm going to request that you consider submitting back to this committee in writing recommendations explicitly stating what you would do in this situation. Otherwise, we're just identifying what we already know to be true.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

We'll take that as a formal request of Mr. Green to our witnesses to submit some solutions. I like putting timelines on it. If you do feel the need and want to respond to Mr. Green's request, I will ask you to submit your recommendations in writing to the clerk by a week from today at five o'clock, if you don't mind, gentlemen. I would appreciate that.

We're going to go to two five-minute rounds. I have a question for Mr. Frank that I am going to ask at the end of these interventions.

Mr. Kurek, go ahead for five minutes, please.

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Thanks very much, Chair. I appreciate the conversation that we've been able to have here today, dealing with big issues. I'll offer a reflection before I jump into a few specific questions.

I find it a shame sometimes that we don't have newspapers anymore, because at least when somebody would open a newspaper, they'd be confronted with columns they might agree with and columns they might disagree with and everything in between. I think that sometimes that need for critical thought and evaluation is lost in political discourse. I offer that as an observation from somebody who's passionate about not just politics but the political process and what that means to our democracy.

Mr. Loewen, you said that there are challenges. Your wording, I believe, was “poorly positioned” to respond to some of these things. Quite often, when we are talking about dealing with misinformation, disinformation and balancing the need to protect freedom of expression, especially because I don't think anybody around this committee would want to limit a free and open political discourse.... You used the term “poorly positioned”. Can you expand on that to explain exactly what you meant, and how we strike that right balance to ensure that we're not limiting political discourse but at the same time encouraging honest and thoughtful debates?

[Peter Loewen]

Thank you for the question. I appreciate the chance to clarify.

I would say three things very rapidly.

One is that when I look at the opinions of Canadians versus people in other countries, there's just less political room in terms of support from Canadians for government to regulate or try to regulate the online space. There is also less trust that Canadians have in other actors to regulate, whether it's the tech companies or whether it's civil society groups that take part in that regulation.

It's like we're in a little bit of muck here, trying to figure out, if we want to regulate online platforms, how we're going to do it, Mr. Kurek. That's the first point.

The second one is that it took us a long time to get to the place where we are in terms of campaign finance, where we limit donations pretty severely, we limit the spending and we try to constrain debates and elections largely to parties and candidates. I think most MPs would agree that this works, in that it allows for a focused conversation during elections, if you will.

We have legal precedent to do that, but that model is not going to work in a world in which a lot of speech can be generated by non-humans and be generated very cheaply. The two mechanisms you use, via money—who can speak and how much they can speak—don't apply in the online space. I think that's a difficult position.

I think, just candidly.... This is a political comment, which I'm a bit reluctant to make, but why not? I'll make it.

I think it's difficult to deal with these issues when the.... It's not the legitimacy of an election, because our election was legitimate, but the question about why the last one or two elections turned out the way they did is itself contested by the subject matter. It makes it hard for all of you as parliamentarians to sort through this.

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

I appreciate that.

I have one final question, if I could, for Mr. Loewen and Mr. Frank. Hopefully, there's time here.

We saw two examples and, of course, everything is political around here. One is Justice Hogue's report, and we've talked a lot about that.

Also, the Deputy Prime Minister posted a video that end up being flagged on Twitter as being edited. It was a montage, basically, of former Conservative leader Erin O'Toole and a few different things he had said over the course of a more extensive conversation about health care. It was posted as if it was saying something that certainly was not what was intended and certainly not what was said in the context of the larger sentence.

Just quickly, how do we make this balance? Often when somebody disagrees with you, they say that it's misinformation, disinformation or hatred, yet when it comes to their opinion, if you oppose that, the whole conversation gets über-torqued and emphasized to the 10th degree.

How do we make sure that we bring it down to say, “How do we deal with the facts?”

Could both of you take maybe 15 seconds?

[Peter Loewen]

Very quickly, Mr. Kurek, I think that example is a good one about the system working in some sense.

Politicians frequently torque what their opponents have said. They'll take little turns of phrase. In that case, the Deputy Prime Minister was sort of caught out, in a sense, for having put out a video that I think probably unfairly pieced those words together. She had to spend some time explaining that.

In some sense, I think that's how you want the system to work. If you're going to not truly represent what your opponent said or stands for, you get caught out for it and then you have to explain why you did it.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Loewen.

I'm sorry, Mr. Kurek, but we have to move on.

I'm allowing a little extra time here because this is an interesting conversation.

Mr. Fisher and Ms. Khalid, I understand you're going to be splitting your time. I'll give you a two-and-a-half minute warning.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I appreciate it.

I appreciate all our witnesses and our subject matter experts being here.

I probably only have time for one question.

I just want to say, Mr. Frank, that you commented that misinformation is designed to spread, and very quickly. We're seeing that every single day.

Mr. Al-Rawi, I love the idea of this non-partisan initiative you have. I seem to recall, back in the day—in 2017 maybe—we had a thing called the “baloney meter”. As unscientific as that might have been, it was a really great, non-partisan explanation of what politicians said and whether it was partially full of baloney or completely full of baloney. I tell you, I miss the baloney meter

You had the word of the day, Mr. Al-Rawi—“edutainment”. There are all of these little things going off in my head when you use that term.

My question is going to be for Mr. Loewen. You are a subject matter expert on partisanship. I wonder if you could comment on the current climate of partisanship in Canada.

In Canada, it seems to be mostly focused through social media, but maybe compare it to.... I was in Washington in the United States a couple of years ago during mid-term elections and I had a chance to see what they have on their TV as advertisements during mid-terms. I will tell you that I hope and pray that we never, ever get there, but I see us sliding very quickly towards that example.

Could you talk a little bit about partisanship in Canada and maybe compare it with what we see in the U.S.?

Could you be somewhat brief, so that we can share time with MP Khalid?

[Peter Loewen]

Yes, I would refer you to work by my colleague Eric Merkley at the University of Toronto, who studies affective polarization, which is how people feel about each other. While we don't have issue polarization in Canada—we still largely agree on most stuff, actually, when you get down to it—we are seeing increasing degrees of affective polarization, which means that people have bad feelings for other people because of what their political views are.

To me, that's not a very good outcome for a society.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

You have three minutes, Ms. Khalid.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much.

I really appreciate the testimony today. We heard today that disinformation propaganda has always existed, and we realize that social media have given actors the ability to spread their messages at lightning speed, and it gets harder and harder to bring those messages back.

I'll share with you what the implications of that have been for me.

In 2017, I became the victim of a disinformation campaign among the Conservatives during their leadership campaign. They were sending out fundraising emails asking people to give them five dollars to stop MP Iqra Khalid from bringing sharia law into Canada. That spiralled into a massive social media campaign against me, to the point where I had police patrolling my residence, because somebody had released my address and people were being encouraged to kill me. I had right-wing extremists hanging out at my constituency office, terrorizing my community staff, and 90,000 emails in my inbox, etc.

It took a very long time, and I still to this day deal with lots of the consequences of that fundraising campaign that the Conservative leadership in 2017 had led to.

I really am curious to know where the responsibility lies here. Was it the Conservative candidates raising money off my personal safety and security by spreading disinformation? Was it social media platforms that allowed this to happen without removing it, without fact-checking, or is it media, in general, that are not playing the role of the watchdog that they perhaps used to in the past?

I'll start with Professor Loewen and then go on to Mr. Al-Rawi.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

You have a minute.

[Peter Loewen]

I'll say that's a very hard question to answer, Madam Khalid, about who is responsible for spreading a lie and for the downstream effects of it. That doesn't mean it's not serious, but I think it's probably a responsibility that's shared among people all the way down that chain.

However, if politicians are spreading active falsehoods about other people, they have some responsibility for what people do with that information politically.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Mr. Al-Rawi, would you comment?

[Dr. Ahmed Al-Rawi]

Thank you.

I'm very sorry to hear about this. I actually wrote two peer-reviewed research studies mentioning you.

I believe that social media is to blame partly, but also people's ideological beliefs that would prompt them to do so. Unfortunately, this is the case. There is a lot of polarization happening, and some political parties use what I call disruptive identity politics, so they work on that issue in order to mobilize some segments of the communities to probably win votes or create tighter communities, unfortunately.