Information & Ethics Committee on April 30th, 2024

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Good morning, everyone. I'm going to call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 114 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(h), the committee is commencing its study of the impact of disinformation and of misinformation on the work of parliamentarians.

Before we begin, I would like to remind all members and other meeting participants in the room of the following important preventive measures.

To prevent disruptive and potentially harmful audio feedback incidents that can cause injuries, all in-person participants are reminded to keep their earpieces away from the microphones at all times.

As indicated in the communiqué from the Speaker to all members on Monday, April 29, the following measures have been taken to help prevent audio feedback incidents.

All earpieces have been replaced by a model that greatly reduces the probability of audio feedback. The new earpieces are black in colour, whereas the former earpieces were grey. Please only use a black, approved earpiece.

By default, all unused earpieces will be unplugged at the start of the meeting. When you're not using your earpiece, please place it face down in the middle of the sticker for this purpose, which you will find on the table, as indicated. Please consult the cards on the table for guidelines to prevent audio feedback incidents.

The room layout has been adjusted to increase the distance between microphones and reduce the chance of feedback from an ambient earpiece.

These measures are in place so that we can conduct our business without interruption and protect the health and safety of all participants, including the interpreters. Thank you all for your co-operation.

Today’s meeting is taking place in a hybrid format. In accordance with the committee’s routine motion concerning connection tests for witnesses, I am informing the committee that all witnesses have completed the required connection tests in advance of the meeting.

Again, I want to make sure that you wait until you're recognized before speaking. I also remind you that all comments should be addressed through the chair. I don't want to see any cross-table comments.

I would like to welcome our witnesses today for the first hour.

From the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, we have Jakub Kalenský, deputy director, Hybrid Influence COI. Welcome, sir. From the Media Ecosystem Observatory, we have Aengus Bridgman, assistant professor. As an individual, we have Mr. Kenny Chiu, a former member of Parliament.

Thank you all for being here.

Mr. Kalenský, you have up to five minutes to address the committee. I'd like you to go first. Please start.

[Jakub Kalenský, Deputy Director, COI Hybrid Influence, European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats]

Thank you very much, and let me thank you also for inviting me here. It is an honour both for me and for the centre of excellence.

In the limited time, allow me to address only two very brief points: one, what the hybrid CoE is and what we are trying to do to help our participating states to counter the threat of disinformation; and two, what the best practices are in countering disinformation that we have identified.

The centre of excellence is an international organization for EU member states and NATO allied countries, so Canada is a member as well. Until recently, we had a second colleague from the Canadian government here. Currently, we have 35 participating states, so out of the group of EU NATO countries, we are missing only the last one.

Our mission is to strengthen the participating states' security by providing expertise and training for countering hybrid threats. In order to achieve these goals, we have different products, you could say. We publish reports. We organize events like conferences, seminars and workshops. We run tailored products like training and exercises. We have these products also in the disinformation file, which is my responsibility.

Recently we published a report on the role of humour in countering disinformation. We published a report on the Ukrainian countermeasures against Russian disinformation, because Ukraine is the country that has the most experience with Russian disinformation. We published a report on the impact and success of disinformation campaigns, because we saw that this is a topic that our participating states frequently struggle with: How can we estimate what the impact is, what the effect is of the work that the information aggressors are doing?

We also run a workshop for practitioners in countering disinformation. Every year, we gather the people from our participating states in Helsinki and have them exchange best practices, lessons learned, what works, what doesn't work, what the gaps are and what more needs to be done. We are also designing a brand new disinformation exercise where we would try to bring the knowledge to the capitals to do some capacity building there, train 30, 40, 50 people in a country on countering disinformation.

I'll move to the second topic, regarding what are the best practices we have identified. Let me kick it off with the observation that I believe it is necessary to implement many countermeasures simultaneously. Some people seem to think that one countermeasure will solve the whole problem. Some people think that about media literacy. Some people think that about strategic communication. I even registered people who are working just on mocking disinformers and saying that this is the only tool we need and nothing else is necessary. I don't believe it's true. I think we need to apply more countermeasures, because each of them will solve only a part of the problem. If we want to solve the whole problem, we need more countermeasures. Whole-of-society problems require whole-of-society solutions.

In the group of countermeasures, we identified four bigger groups. I call it four lines of defence. First, it's about detecting and documenting what is happening in the disinformation space. It sounds primitive, but unfortunately we still don't have a full idea, especially about the quantitative aspects. How many disinformation channels are there? How many messages per day do they spread? How many people do they persuade? Imagine if you were fighting the COVID pandemic without knowing how many people got the virus, how many people were vaccinated, how many people died. It would be almost impossible. Unfortunately, we are in this situation with disinformation. It's very difficult to design adequate solutions when we don't have this data.

The second line is about raising awareness. Whereas in the first line we are trying to get more data, in the second line we are trying to spread this information among more audiences. Here I believe the number of actors is really key, because each of them has only a very limited audience. The audiences nowadays are significantly more fragmented than they were 10 or 15 years ago, and therefore we need more actors who will be addressing the fragmented audiences that we have nowadays.

The third line is about trying to repair the systemic weaknesses in the information ecosystem. This is where media literacy comes in. This is where strategic communication comes in, in order to prevent the distrust of the population towards their institutions, which is a weakness that the disinformers are very often exploiting. This is also where the pressure on social media companies comes in, because the social media environment, unfortunately, is still a weakness that gets exploited by the information aggressors.

Finally—

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

I'm sorry, Mr. Kalenský. We're over time.

[Jakub Kalenský]

I'm sorry about that.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

If you want to pick up any of those points, you can do that during Q and A.

I'll go to Mr. Bridgman now.

Mr. Bridgman, you have up to five minutes to address the committee. Go ahead, please.

[Aengus Bridgman, Assistant Professor, Media Ecosystem Observatory]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, everyone.

My name is Aengus Bridgman. I'm an assistant professor at McGill University, where I direct the Media Ecosystem Observatory. We're Canada's leading research entity dedicated to understanding and addressing online harms. We also anchor the Canadian Digital Media Research Network.

I will focus my comments on two thoughts today. The first is around this idea that misinformation and disinformation are an existential threat, and that they are the existential threat facing democracies today. There's been some recent international polling that suggests people are very profoundly concerned about this, and for you as parliamentarians and, of course, for the study in question, this is a real concern.

Research over the last five years that I and my team and colleagues have done has really shown that misinformation and disinformation are part of the Canadian information ecosystem. They are there—and I'm really looking forward to hearing comments from the third speaker today about some of the impacts of it—but this is not something that is changing the outcomes of elections or dramatically altering Canadians' attitudes and behaviours.

There are a few reasons for that. First, most Canadians, most people are quite inattentive to politics. Individual stories, especially misinformation and disinformation stories, float by unheeded. Those who do hear them tend to already be predisposed to hearing that information, and maybe already have attitudes in line with that misinformation. What you're seeing there is this dynamic. Yes, it is occurring, but the actual systematic impact is relatively low. We studied that by looking at large-scale digital trace data coupled with nationally represented survey data. We did studies in the last two federal elections and the last Quebec election, and for all three we concluded that the role that misinformation played was relatively minor, although we did document numerous instances of it.

That gets to the second point I want to highlight, which is that there's this tendency to think of misinformation and disinformation from a harm perspective, from a securitization perspective, that they are something we need to protect against. There is value in that sort of thinking, but it's not the only way to think about it. I think it's very important to try to understand instead that misinformation and disinformation—false information—are a regular, consistent part of the information ecosystem and of politics, and their existence does not mean that we need to stamp them out or that we need to fight them. The mere fact that they exist does not mean that they are deserving of combatting.

Instead, we can think, “Okay. This is an information ecosystem. This is something that can be studied. This is something that can be made more resilient.” We can inform the population and do media literacy, of course, but there are other ways we can prepare our population. We can say, “Okay. This is the type of information you're going to encounter while you're using digital media and while you're trying to understand the political world. Here are some of the dynamics.” We can better understand those dynamics and better try to address them collectively as a society.

The first point is that misinformation and disinformation are out there. It's not that it's inconsequential—it does matter—but it is not existential, at least not yet in Canada to the extent that there is this pervasive feeling that this is deeply damaging. It matters. We need to study it, address it and think about it in a holistic way, but we don't need to stamp it out. Even the notion that it could be stamped out or addressed in that way is spurious.

I'm happy to talk about either of those points during the question and answer period.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Bridgman.

Mr. Chiu, you have five minutes. Go ahead, please.

[Kenny Chiu, Former Member of Parliament, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ladies and gentlemen, as we navigate through the labyrinth of disinformation and misinformation, I am compelled to share personal experiences that underscore the urgency of our task. Whether concocted by state actors, malicious groups or individuals, the intent is very clear. The intent is manipulation. It seeks to sow discord, erode trust and undermine the foundations of truth. In the crucible of Canada's electoral process, truth and deception collided, leaving lasting scars on our democracy.

What is misinformation? Let me give the example of assault rifles and campaign literature.

Imagine the quiet streets of Steveston—Richmond East during the last election. Concerned and engaged Chinese residents approached me and my dedicated volunteers. They brandished a card dropped in the mail. It was an innocuous piece of paper in their native Chinese language, advancing a dangerous falsehood. It asserted that a Conservative government would revoke the prohibition on assault rifles. This was a chilling prospect, especially for many community members who hailed from a culture with strict firearms prohibitions.

Here's the twist: It was untrue. The Conservatives had no such intention, yet misinformation, akin to a stealthy intruder, permeated our community, sowing seeds of fear and mistrust.

Let me tell you another cynical story. This time it's about disinformation. Like an architect crafting an elaborate facade, complete with fictional walls, doors and windows, disinformation constructs an entire structure from scratch to intentionally deceive its audience.

Now, let me introduce my former opponent. In my view, his ascent to power was paved with disinformation. Perhaps it was through a calculated strategy or, at the very least, he was a willing participant in a now proven disinformation campaign. He willingly embraced and propagated accusations targeting Conservatives, including our then leader Erin O'Toole and me, accusing Conservatives of racism and of harbouring anti-Asian sentiments. Exploitative and manipulative, these allegations linked to foreign states reverberated through biased media channels and chat groups.

If holding the Indian government accountable for alleged actions in Canada is not anti-Indian, why would countering the confirmed clandestine and deceptive efforts of Chinese Communists in Canada ever be considered anti-Chinese?

However, there's more. He publicly pledged to the Chinese audience that he would not support a foreign influence registry. This promise directly contradicted the then minister of public safety's announcement back in 2022 and 2023.

As we gather here, I'm reminded of the diabolical propaganda techniques employed by authoritarian regimes throughout history, which involved repeating colossal falsehoods until they became an accepted truth. Ordinary citizens bombarded with these orchestrated lies found their minds ensnared in a web of deception. Hatred and prejudice flourished as the strategy took root.

Today, we face an even vaster digital battlefield where disinformation thrives. Our diaspora cultural communities, often isolated and insular, bear the brunt of these campaigns. Their reliance on ethnic media and foreign apps, while essential for maintaining connections, renders them vulnerable. Whether foreign regimes aim to meddle in our electoral process or domestic actors plot to mislead Canadians, the consequences are dire.

To counter this manipulation, we must champion a vibrant and engaged ethnic media community—one that distinguishes facts from allegations, empowers informed debates and refuses to be silenced. Let us heed the lessons of history, fortify our defences with media literacy and stand firm against corrosive forces that seek to manipulate our minds and fracture our unity.

Thank you for your attention. May our commitment to democracy in action guide us toward a future where the light of truth dispels the shadows of misinformation and disinformation.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Chiu.

Thank you, everyone, for your opening statements.

We're going to start with our first six-minute rounds. For that, we'll go to Mr. Cooper.

You have six minutes. Go ahead.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chiu, it is well documented that you were the subject of a disinformation campaign directed by the Beijing-based Communist regime during the 2021 election, which targeted the Chinese diaspora in your riding. Even though the government had information that you were being targeted, that information was not passed on to you, and voters in your riding were kept in the dark.

Based on your experience, would you agree that the measures put in place by this Liberal government, supposedly to counter foreign interference, failed?

[Kenny Chiu]

I think there has been much commentary on this. I agree with some of the commentary that says that obviously the Liberal government set this up to catch the Conservatives benefiting from Russian disinformation, and they were caught by surprise by the Communist Chinese campaigning to help the Liberals themselves.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Beijing's disinformation campaign attacked your character and spread outright lies about your position and the position of the Conservative Party on a range of issues.

Can you speak about that and what impact this disinformation campaign has had on your reputation in your community?

[Kenny Chiu]

I think there is a problem with your question, sir, because it presumes that disinformation and misinformation are spread only during election time. As a matter of fact, that is not true. Even in the public inquiry into foreign interference, when the hearings were being conducted, there was disinformation.

For example, when MP Han Dong testified, there were articles written that said that Mr. Han Dong was persecuted in Canada because of his mainland Chinese background. This is completely untrue. We, as Canadians, know that, but many in the communities don't because of the parallel universe they live in.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Not only did the mechanisms that the Liberal government set up to counter foreign interference completely fail to counter the disinformation campaign in your riding, but based upon what I am hearing from your testimony, it's even worse than that. Insofar as I understand it, the Liberal Party took advantage of Beijing's disinformation narrative, amplified it and even created complementary misinformation and disinformation products targeting the Chinese diaspora community in Steveston—Richmond East.

Is that a fair characterization of what happened? Could you elaborate upon that?

[Kenny Chiu]

That's my observation in the riding that I ran for re-election in, Steveston—Richmond East in B.C. Certainly, that's what I observed and felt.

I always put myself in my opponent's shoes. If I observed disinformation being propagated against him, a character assassination, I would actually stand to defend him because it is not true. It is not the right way to conduct our democracy.

However, unfortunately, that was not the case during the election in 2021. It was obvious that there was a targeted campaign attack against me and that I was basically alone.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

It's very disturbing to learn that the Liberal Party actively amplified Beijing disinformation. They were not a mere bystander to it. It's worse than turning a blind eye, that's for sure.

Now, it came to light at the public inquiry on foreign interference that during the 2019 election, the Prime Minister's department, the PCO, detected disinformation about Justin Trudeau in an article circulating on Facebook. The Prime Minister's department asked Facebook to remove that article because they said that it risked threatening the integrity of the election.

By contrast, when the Prime Minister's department was asked about the disinformation targeting you and the Conservative Party that was circulating on WeChat during the 2021 election, and about why they didn't ask for that disinformation to be taken down, a representative from the Prime Minister's department said dismissively that “the content would likely only reach Chinese diaspora readers.”

What do you make of that explanation, and what does it say about how this government operates?

[Kenny Chiu]

It touches my very inner identity to its core, because I always believe that the Prime Minister is wrong that Canada does not have a systemic and structural discrimination against a certain group. However, what I heard during the hearings shook that a little bit because it looks like there are some Canadians who are more valuable and worthy of protection than others.

Canada has a multicultural society, and definitely every Canadian deserves to be protected. It looks like the mechanism they put in place does not handle disinformation and misinformation being spread using non-official languages.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Chiu and Mr. Cooper.

We go now to Mr. Housefather for six minutes.

Go ahead.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Kalenský, my first question is for you. On October 7, Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, creating the biggest massacre of Jews since the Second World War and the Holocaust. Since then, there's been a great increase in anti-Semitism all across the world, including here in North America, where today college campuses are being occupied by people spreading anti-Semitic messaging. How has Russia been involved in fomenting that happening?

[Jakub Kalenský]

Russia is always happy about any single opportunity where they can increase the polarization of the audiences. Obviously, this conflict is one of the most polarizing topics, so they will be using it to do their work. The aim with which they are doing it is probably to spread more of the anti-western, anti-American sentiment, with the U.S. still being the chief target of their disinformation campaigns, and probably with the logic that Israel is perceived as the biggest ally of the U.S.

I think the motivation is this primitive. In order to denigrate the U.S., they will be spreading a lot of anti-Israeli sentiments.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

They're joining with Iran in doing that. How is Iran involved in terms of Iran's sponsorship of terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah? How are they working with Russia to spread disinformation on social media?

[Jakub Kalenský]

I have to admit, I do not have good information on how they co-operate. There have been some reports about Russia co-operating with China in the information space, but I'm not aware of reports about the co-operation with Iran. However, I would not be surprised if it was happening. Russia is happy for any help it can get.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

When people can create divisions in North American societies, for example by amplifying, as Russia does, on social media tropes such as that Jews control the world or that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own countries, how does that help foment dissension and division in North America, creating an opportunity for Russia to divert the world's attention from the war that it's launched against Ukraine?

[Jakub Kalenský]

This will be definitely part of the reason why they're doing that. If more people focus on what's happening in the Middle East, fewer people will be focusing on what's happening in Ukraine.

The way they'll try to increase the polarization will be to spread very extreme messaging, but sometimes they're doing it from both sides of the barricades. We saw the Russians organizing both pro-Muslim and anti-Muslim rallies in the United States. We saw them spreading both radically feminist messaging and very anti-feminist messaging. We saw them spreading both aggressively pro-migration content and anti-migration content.

The point is to portray the other side of the barricade as unreasonable and something you cannot agree with. If you exaggerate the demands or the statements of the other side, then you decrease the possibility of reasonable discussion.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Have you seen evidence of Russia amplifying and increasing its social media reach following the October 7 attack on Israel?