Evidence of meeting #120 for Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was content.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Nathaniel Erskine-Smith
Thanks very much.
With our second seven minutes, we'll go to Mr. Kent.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
Thank you, Chair, and thank you all for your testimony today. It's very helpful and adds to our accumulation of testimony.
This study has revealed the vulnerability of the electoral process pretty well anywhere in the world, and not only to the sort of psychographic microtargeting that we heard about in the Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, AggregateIQ situation, partially developed and assisted by Christopher Wylie and then revealed when he believed that they were going too far and he blew the whistle. It's also shown us about the movement of data and campaign strategies across national borders; money in and out; the creation of a multitude, or a number, of third parties to avoid spending limits and laws; and the anonymity of social media advertising in the British Brexit referendum and in any number of American political situations.
I'd like to come back, Ms. Krause, to you. You touched on it in your opening statement. I wonder if you could connect the dots for us in terms of the relationship, in the Canadian political context, between Tides Canada Leadnow and the Dogwood initiative.
Researcher and Writer, As an Individual
Sure, I'd be glad to.
Let's start with Tides Canada. The American Tides Foundation, based in San Francisco, incorporated in British Columbia in the late 1990s and then changed its name to become the Tides Canada foundation. The American Tides Foundation, I think it would be fair to say, is the parent organization of Tides Canada.
The Dogwood initiative was initially created out of the American Tides Foundation. Initially it was called Forest Futures, and then it changed its name around 2004 to become Dogwood.
Leadnow, if I'm not mistaken, began around 2010 as a not-for-profit. Dogwood itself is also a not-for-profit, but it has been funded by at least 10 registered charities over the years. As I mentioned, one of the charities that funds it is the Salal Foundation. It was created by the same people, including the former chairman of the board of the Tides Foundation. For 12 years, it was dormant. It was inactive. Then, in 2012, it basically sprang to life, and Salal's revenues have now gone from about $200,000 to more than $1 million. In fact, last year, the number one top recipient of funds from Tides Canada, if I'm not mistaken, was Salal, which got $488,000.
I think what we're seeing is that in the tar sands campaign, the campaign to landlock the crude from western Canada, more than 100 organizations have been funded in the U.S., Canada and Europe. The number one and two, the top one, is the Sisu Institute Society, which funds Leadnow, and Dogwood.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
Does your research give any suggestion of the total amount of foreign funding, American funding it would seem primarily, that has been delivered to these various associated and aligned groups?
Researcher and Writer, As an Individual
These are big-picture numbers. I've traced more than $600 million that has come into Canada, mostly for large-scale conservation initiatives. Of that, at least $90 million was earmarked specifically for efforts to restrict oil and gas. That's not including 2017 and 2018. Tides Canada, for example, has had more than a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue since 2009. At least $90 million of that is from outside Canada.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
In a number of your writings, you have suggested that it's easy for a political party to claim to take the high road in its campaign when it has third party supporters that can do the mudslinging. I'm paraphrasing the mudslinging part; I mean doing the dirty work. Is that your belief, from your research?
Researcher and Writer, As an Individual
I've never used the words “mudslinging” or “dirty work”, but I would say that groups like Leadnow and the Dogwood initiative influence elections primarily in two ways. One is by what you might call framing the narrative, establishing the issues on which the election is fought. The second is by targeting first-time voters, people who have never voted before, young people especially, and getting them out to vote.
Conservative
Researcher and Writer, As an Individual
It's a combination. They refer to the synergy between offline and online, and creating what they call offline events like protests at MPs' offices, marches, etc., and then photographs of those are taken and used online. Sometimes those photos are done in such a way that it looks as if there were a lot more people there than there actually were.
It's the combination between the offline events in real life and how those are then used online.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
You commented on the Canada Revenue Agency's interest, or lack of interest, in some of these third party organizations. At one point, the CRA was auditing a number of not-for-profits.
Researcher and Writer, As an Individual
Registered charities—this is what the CRA audited.
Conservative
Peter Kent Conservative Thornhill, ON
In the CRA minister's mandate letter, there were a couple of interesting statements: “Allow charities to do their work on behalf of Canadians free from political harassment”, and “This will include clarifying the rules governing 'political activity,' with an understanding that charities make an important contribution to public debate and public policy.”
Do you believe that it was interpreted by the CRA minister to shut down the audit of some of these charitable organizations?
Researcher and Writer, As an Individual
I don't know how the CRA interpreted that, but the fact is that the CRA has come out with a report saying it audited 42 charities for their political activity, and 41 out of the 42 were not fully compliant—41 out of 42. Since then, nothing has happened. My understanding, just from what I've heard in the media, is that the national revenue ministry has instructed the CRA to basically stand down and not follow through with any of the audit findings, and it had recommended the revocation, in other words, the complete shutdown, of five charities.
I would suggest to the committee that if you want to do something to better protect the integrity of elections, the place to start is at the CRA. The reason I say this is that in 2016 I spent eight months writing a report, which I submitted to Elections Canada. They then flew some investigators out to Vancouver and after four hours with them, basically, it was clear that Elections Canada can't do anything if the CRA allows charities to Canadianize money. Then, when those charities report their spending in their third party election reports, they report it as Canadian, because the charity has been Canadianized through charities like Tides Canada.
Conservative
Liberal
The Vice-Chair Liberal Nathaniel Erskine-Smith
Thank you for that.
I would note that I also post pictures to make it look as if there are more people at my events, when I post them on the Internet.
Liberal
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
Thank you very much.
This has been a fascinating study, because we're trying to look at protection of the integrity of the electoral system, but we're starting to, I think, deal with much larger issues that are going to be much more complex for parliamentarians to consider.
Mr. Harris, I am a digital addict. My wife has called me out on that many times, especially Friday nights. I'm not allowed to go on Facebook and Twitter when I get home after a week, just to try to civilize me. I've checked my phone probably 12 times since you were talking. But I did spend half my life without digital—as a kid reading comic books, climbing trees, listening to vinyl, spending time outside the principal's office without a phone—and I'm addicted, and I accept it.
I'm concerned about the picture you're painting of the massive level at which we are jacked into these systems that are growing stronger all the time. I look at young people, and I look at kids I see in the grocery store whose mothers have given them a phone to play with. What do you think the larger long-term impacts are on brain development, on the ability to have young people develop internal spaces, about the ability to imagine and the ability to remember? Are you concerned that, as we're jacked into these much larger systems, we're actually rewiring our internal spaces?
Co-Founder and Executive Director, Center for Humane Technology
Yes. I'm so glad you brought this up.
There are a number of issues to be concerned about, so I'm going to try and figure out how to formulate my response.
One way to look at this, if you think about protecting children.... Marc Andreessen, who is the founder of Netscape, has this insight that says software is eating the world. That means every single industry, domain, whether that's the way that children consume media or the way we get around in Ubers versus taxis, technology, if you throw it into that domain, will do the thing more efficiently. So software will continue eating the world. However, we don't regulate software, so what that really means is “deregulation is eating the world”.
I don't know how it works in Canada, but in the United States I think we still have protections about Saturday morning cartoons. We recognize there is a particular audience, which is to say, children, and we want to protect them. We don't want to let advertisers do whatever they want during the Saturday morning cartoon period.
As soon as you basically offload that regulated channel of television and formal Saturday morning programming, and say let's just let YouTube Kids handle it, then you get algorithms, just machines, where the engineers at YouTube have no idea what they're putting in front of all of those 2.2 billion channels, of which several hundred million are for children.
That's how to see the problem. We have a five-second delay on television for a reason. There are 100 million people or 50 million people on one side of the screen and a couple of people who are monitoring the five-second delay, or the editorial. If some gaffe happens, or there is profanity or something like that and you want to protect...you have some kind of filtering process.
Now we have 2.2 billion channels. This is the same, whether on the other side of that channel is a child or a vulnerable person in Myanmar who just got the Internet and is basically exposed to vulnerable things. The unified way of seeing this problem is that there is a vulnerability in the audience, whether that audience is a child, someone in Myanmar, or someone in an election. If we don't acknowledge that vulnerability, then we're going to have a huge problem.
The last thing I'll say, just to your point about children, is that when the engineers at Snapchat or Instagram—which, by the way, make the most popular applications for children—go to work every day, these are 20- to 30-year-olds, mostly male, mostly engineers, computer science or design-trained individuals, and they don't go to work every day asking how they protect the identity development of children. They don't do that. That's not what they do. The only thing they do is go to work and ask, “How can we keep them hooked? Let's introduce this thing called a “follow button”, and now these kids can go around following each other. We've wired them all up on puppet strings, and they're busy following each other all day long because we want them just to be engaged.”
NDP
Charlie Angus NDP Timmins—James Bay, ON
That's where I want to go with that, because it's a question of vulnerabilities. There is the vulnerability of our electoral system to be undermined, which we're seeing can happen.
There is also the vulnerability of addictions. One of the seminal moments in the battle with cigarette companies was the revelation that they had the nicotine delivery systems built in there to continue addictions. They couldn't just say, “Well you chose to smoke. You like smoking. You're responsible for smoking.” It was the actual addictive intent of the companies.
As someone who has worked for Google, as an ethicist, what do you think we need to be looking at in terms of the addiction delivery mechanisms that are being written into code?
Co-Founder and Executive Director, Center for Humane Technology
The first thing to say is that this is because of the attention economy and the race to gather human attention. As it gets more competitive, it's not enough that you use the product. Where I used to get your conscious choice to use it, I have to crawl deeper down the brain stem and get you addicted to it. I need to create an unconscious habit inside of you so that you basically use it every day for that 30 minutes—to own that 30 minutes.
What started with no one using these sort of slot machines, where you check your phone like a slot machine and pull down to refresh it, the second that one person does that and it works really well at keeping people hooked, other people now have to start creating all of the slot machines.
If you think of it game theoretically, each player has to go deeper and deeper down the brain stem to do this. What we need to think about is how would we regulate that addictive process and instead protect human agency and dignity, instead of basically trying to erode it deliberately.
The companies have not been honest about this, as you've said.
