Information & Ethics Committee on May 2nd, 2024

[Matthew Green, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you. I think that's the end of my time.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Yes, it is, Mr. Green.

Thank you, Mr. Khanna and Mr. Finkelstein.

Mr. Green, at the beginning, you mentioned that Mr. Nimmo should be afforded the opportunity to answer the questions. I'm going to suggest that all members' questions be forwarded to Mr. Nimmo. I feel he got a little shortchanged today because of the votes, so I want to make sure that he has the ability to respond as well. However, in typical committee fashion, we want to make sure that we have a response within a timeline, so I'm going to suggest that we get it by next Friday.

Madam Clerk, if we can share the questions with him and expect his response by next Friday, I think that would be an appropriate timeline.

If there are any other questions that need to be submitted to the clerk, or questions that are similar to the ones being asked today, I'll ask you to do that as well.

That concludes our first round. It was a very interesting round.

Mr. Brock, you're going to start us off in the second round, with five minutes.

Go ahead sir.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen, for your attendance today and your very thoughtful and productive commentaries.

Starting with you, Mr. Finkelstein, I think you get the sense right now that the way committees work here in Canada is far different from how our U.S. counterparts work there. We are limited by time. At best, we are looking at five to six minutes, and you can get maybe two or three good questions in with appropriate responses.

I've been listening very carefully. Time has run out for a number of members who asked you some questions, so I'm going to give you a bit of a runway. Are there any additional thoughts, based on previous questions put to you by my colleagues, sir, that you would like to complete?

[Joel Finkelstein]

I have too many of them.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Perhaps you could speak about the most important question, in my opinion, the one that was put to you by Matthew Green in terms of recommendations, whether they be policy or legislative recommendations. At the conclusion of this particular study, we have a mandate to report to the House of Commons. We look to the experts in the field—you being one of those experts—to help us and to guide us in preparing that report.

[Joel Finkelstein]

The platform that needs to be constructed for democracies isn't some faint ideal that we ought to do. It's increasingly clear to me that the lack of this organ comprises a national security crisis. The absence of the ability to make sober determinations about how democracies are being manipulated is creating an escape velocity for those manipulations, because it's disrupting the function of democracy faster than democracy can manage that dysfunction. This is a cat-and-mouse game, so what's needed is a civic network to be instantiated rapidly.

This is not needed as an idea that has to happen at some point because it would be nice. It was needed years ago. This function was needed years ago, and the goal is to step into the hardest conversations. Now, the thing about very hard conversations is that we're so concerned about them, yet the conflict is all people tend to look at. The conflict, when it's had honestly, is the solution to the problem. The conflict is the solution.

When you've structured an investigative capacity that's manned by people who are credible as good-faith actors for trying to create the most honest representation of the conflict they can create, and they're feeding that forward so we can distinguish between what's noise and what's signal here, how bad is this? Let's talk to the people who are on the other side. Let's understand what they really think about this. That's going to be an urgent thing for law enforcement to know. It's going to be an urgent thing for understanding who is really in support of our constitutions, who's really in support of the threads and the fibres that hold together our civic bonds of trust, and who are people who are seeking to deliberately undermine them.

Understanding the difference between those kinds of narratives is absolutely crucial for the functioning of democracy, so I think having a capacity to resolve the threats that bad actors, those that are hostile to democracy, are enjoying, and being able to spotlight them, we can say—

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Thank you, sir. I'm sorry; I'm going to have to cut you off. I could listen to you for hours. This really is fascinating material.

Mr. Khanna, I'm going to give you that runway as well. I know that you deliberately cut off your recommendations to this committee when Mr. Green presented the same question to you, so you have about 45 seconds, sir.

[Sanjay Khanna]

I think parliamentarians need to understand what resilience means, and they have to have an understanding of what you're building resilience to.

You have to look at Canada's strategic industries and how mis- and disinformation might be used to disrupt our agri-food system and food security, our national energy policy and the resilience and networks there, and, of course, election security.

I think you have to look at what our adversaries want to do to disrupt our ability to meet our own needs as well as the needs of our export markets and those sorts of things. I think there needs to be a strategic piece here that protects the Canadian economy, and I think there's a profound economic aspect to this that also needs to be looked at.

This committee does need to understand that resiliency is not infinite. What doesn't kill you sometimes does not make you stronger. Sometimes it weakens you, and the pandemic has weakened Canada. It's weakened our health status and, in national security terms, the status of the physical and mental health and resilience of each individual is seen to be the biggest defence against mis- and disinformation. That's in that doctrine. It's been the mental health and cognitive capacity of each Canadian to figure out how to act in the face of that. Thank you.

[Larry Brock, Conservative, Brantford—Brant, ON]

Thank you. That was helpful.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Brock and Mr. Khanna.

Mr. Bains, you have five minutes. Go ahead, sir.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses.

I did have the opportunity to learn a significant amount of information from Mr. Finkelstein and Mr. Nimmo, who's now gone, and Mr. Khanna in an earlier intervention.

I'll ask Mr. Finkelstein to expand on something he talked about in his recommendations.

I think we can all appreciate that the threat is real. Our way of life, the stability of our systems and all of those things are under threat, as Mr. Khanna talked about, in a number of different capacities, whether it's our food security, the way we operate Parliament and all of these things.

I want to talk a little bit about the alert system you talked about. We already have cybersecurity teams. Where would the alert system or the independent commission of some sort come into play? Who would they alert? Would it be the social media platform providers?

Please expand on that.

[Joel Finkelstein]

It's a great question.

Let me just say that I'm a neuroscientist by training. I finished my Ph.D. at Princeton and was studying animals and virtual reality to reverse-engineer how their brains work using laser beams. I was not really bred in the world of intelligence, but I found that understanding how the brain works is really helpful for understanding the intelligence process.

I now train analysts, who join the FBI or CIA, at Rutgers, where I teach advanced courses on threat analysis at the Miller Center for secure communities.

What I found in that process was that when it comes to what it is we do and how to create a kind of alert function on it, it really requires that we designate the category of threat that we're talking about in ways that give it a clear set of parameters.

Really, what we're looking at is not just cybersecurity. It's social cybersecurity. Social cybersecurity is really what we train in, and the threats that pertain to it are any threat that could possibly afflict a vulnerable community or democracy.

I can give you some examples from NCRI's research as to how wide-standing that could be. This could be computer-generated hoaxes and malicious information in the wakes of mass shootings. It could be Spanish alt-right networks glorifying crusader memes. It could be bot-driven gold rushes and inauthentic social media on crypto. All of these—

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

The objective is to mobilize people. Both of the things you're talking about intersect.

[Joel Finkelstein]

They do, and what they show is where the social risks are accumulating in ways that the institutions can't keep up with. Wherever that's happening, there needs to be an investigatory function that acts as a support system to democracy.

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

Maybe talk about what the framework around that would be and give some simple steps.

[Joel Finkelstein]

The framework would be to endow and create protections for an independent entity to be permitted to amass data, especially from social media but also other other forms of database aggregation. This would create essentially a fusion centre, and it would be able to look at social cyber risks. These are risks about invasive ideologies from hostile nations invading our universities.

Across the board, it needs the capacity that's usually resolved for intelligence agencies but in ways that allow it to be aligned psychologically and aligned clinically with democracies they are protecting, and it would need protections from those democracies in order to do its job.

That's really the process. It's to create a fusion centre capacity with individuals who are reputable within the societies in question, who are aligned with the societies in question and who show clear evidence of co-operative antagonism. It would be adversarial relationships that are bought inside, not outside, in order to be credible to the vast majority of citizens, that this is something that could credibly be representative, or as close to that as possible, for the real conflicts they experience, with all the capacities—

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

I would like to give Mr. Khanna a bit of time to expand on this, if he has anything to add.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

You have a very brief amount of time, sir.

[Sanjay Khanna]

Again, I'm going to get back to what the resiliency is that we need to protect for Canada and Canadians. How are you going to support your houses of Parliament and citizens to be clearer about how they protect themselves from these sorts of risks?

[Parm Bains, Liberal, Steveston—Richmond East, BC]

There's an education piece there.

[Sanjay Khanna]

There's an education piece, but I think there also needs to be a rights framework there.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, sir.

Thank you, Mr. Bains.

We are going to go to two and a half minutes for Mr. Villemure and two and a half for Mr. Green.

I have a budget that has to be approved for this study. If there is interest in more questions, just signal that to me and then I'll make arrangements for time to do that.

We now go to Mr. Villemure for two and a half minutes.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to turn to Mr. Finkelstein once again.

Earlier, I asked you whether TikTok was a tool for disinformation, and you answered. Now I'd like to ask you another question along the same lines. Does TikTok lead to a conditioning of the mind?

[Joel Finkelstein]

This is unpublished, but the data we have on this is very convincing that that is the case. I won't get into all the details, but what we see is that there is an anomalous level of belief in authoritarian ideology that's prevalent in TikTok users that is not as present on other platforms. There's an anomalous level of anti-Semitism.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

In a publication, one researcher hypothesized that information about questioning one's gender identity may have been the result of TikTok propaganda aimed at creating chaos.

Is that reasonable to believe?