Information & Ethics Committee on Sept. 26th, 2024

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you again.

We're going to suspend for a couple of minutes until we flip over here and have our next witnesses come in. Both are ready to come. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Welcome back, everyone, to hour number two. I expect that we are going to have two full rounds, and I would like to welcome our witnesses for the second hour.

From DisinfoWatch, we have Mr. Marcus Kolga, who is the director.

Welcome to the committee. I know we had a bit of an issue last time, but we worked it out, and we're so pleased to have you here with us today.

From Mila, which is the Quebec artificial intelligence institute, we have Yoshua Bengio, founder and scientific director.

Mr. Kolga, we're going with you to start. You can address the committee for up to five minutes.

We expect that we're going to be here for the full hour. I hope you guys are okay with that. I see thumbs-up, which is excellent.

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

[Marcus Kolga, Director, DisinfoWatch]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for the privilege to speak about the threat of disinformation, specifically Russian information and influence operations targeting our democracy.

Over the past decade, we've witnessed a disturbing increase in the Kremlin's efforts to undermine our democratic institutions, erode our social cohesion and advance its geopolitical interest through state media, proxies and collaborators within Canada. While significant attention has been directed toward Chinese government interference in recent years, we've not fully addressed the equally dangerous and sophisticated information campaigns waged by the Kremlin.

The threat to Canada is real, and it cannot be ignored, as recent actions to disrupt these operations by the U.S. government have highlighted. The U.S. Department of Justice recently indicted two employees of Russia Today, RT, a Russian state entity that operates not merely as a media outlet but, as the U.S. Department of State and Global Affairs have noted, as an important component of Russia's intelligence apparatus. This indictment, which implicates Canadians in RT's operations and as its targets, is nothing less than a smoking gun. Canada is a key target of Russian information warfare.

An FBI affidavit that was published at the same time as the indictment details Kremlin documents and minutes from meetings with one of Vladimir Putin's top advisers, highlighting the regime's commitment to weaponizing information. The tactics exposed include developing and spreading lies and conspiracies, manipulating social media algorithms and using Russian and North American influencers to amplify them in efforts to destabilize democratic societies, and that includes Canada.

The objectives are clear: to ignite domestic conflicts, to deepen social divisions, to weaken nations that oppose Russian aggression in Ukraine and to erode public support for Ukraine.

Canadian parliamentarians have also been targets of these operations over the past decade. Following our government's strong stance against Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and our leadership of NATO's enhanced forward presence mission in Latvia, we witnessed Russian information and influence operations targeting Canadian officials and policies. Prime Minister Harper's government was an initial target, including during the 2015 federal election. This was followed by the targeting of then foreign minister Chrystia Freeland and other outspoken parliamentarians.

It's important to note that the Kremlin does not favour any specific Canadian political party. Instead, as the Kremlin documents clearly outline, they seek to exploit existing divisions and create conflict to undermine our democracy and further their interests. This includes diminishing support for Ukraine and weakening international alliances like NATO that oppose Russia's aggression. We've now learned that RT invested $10 million in a company founded by two Canadians aimed at advancing Russian narratives in the U.S. and within our own borders.

A recent poll we conducted at DisinfoWatch with the Canadian Digital Media Research Network indicates that most Canadians have in fact been exposed to Russian disinformation about Ukraine and are vulnerable to it. Canadian influencers play a key role in advancing the Kremlin's narratives in Canada and in the U.S., as do the Canadian academics and activists who collaborate with Kremlin-controlled think tanks like Vladimir Putin's Valdai Club and the Russian International Affairs Council, which are on Canada's sanctions list.

To disrupt and deter these well-documented Kremlin operations and to protect Canadians, the Canadian government, law enforcement and the intelligence community must acknowledge the seriousness of the threat they pose to our democracy and society. We must conduct thorough investigations into Russian collaborators and proxies operating within Canada and hold them to account under our laws. This includes any sanctions laws that may have been violated, including the foreign influence transparency registry and Bill C-70.

Given Russia's ties to foreign intelligence services, Canada must follow Europe's lead in banning all Russian state media from public airwaves and the Internet. This should be extended to Chinese and Iranian state media and state-controlled outlets as well. We should also introduce new legislation based on Europe's Digital Services Act, holding social media companies accountable for the content on their platforms and the algorithms that amplify it.

By enforcing transparency, content moderation and reporting requirements, we can make it significantly harder for hostile actors to weaponize these platforms to spread disinformation in Canada.

Finally, we need to acknowledge and address the rise of foreign authoritarian transnational repression targeting Canadian activists, journalists, diaspora communities and, indeed, parliamentarians.

The persistent efforts of foreign authoritarian regimes to undermine our democracy and social cohesion must be met with equally persistent measures and resources to confront, disrupt, deter and, ultimately, prevent them from succeeding.

Thank you again for this privilege. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Kolga. You can breathe now. That was a wordy, well-done statement. Thank you, sir.

Mr. Bengio, go ahead, please. You have up to five minutes to address the committee.

[Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director, Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute]

Thank you.

I am grateful for the opportunity today to share with the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics my thoughts on misinformation and disinformation based on artificial intelligence.

The past few years have seen impressive advances in the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence, starting with the generation of images, speech and video. More recently, these advances have extended to natural language processing, which the public witnessed with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT model.

Since the end of 2022, nearly two years ago, this last element brought us into an unprecedented technological reality, one in which it is becoming increasingly complex for the average citizen to determine whether they are conversing with a human or a machine when they interact with these models. This state of affairs, by the way, is commonly known in computer science as “passing the Turing test”: We can't distinguish between AI and a machine through a text interaction, and so the boundaries between human and artificial conversations are getting more blurred as these systems become more powerful and advanced after each release.

All of this is controlled by a handful of companies—all foreign—that have the required financial and technical resources. We're talking about over $100 million to train the latest models—and growing—so it's going to be billions pretty soon.

When analyzing the progress and acceleration of AI trends, we see that AI capabilities don't seem to be about to plateau or slow down. Between 2018 and today, every year, on average, “training compute” required to train these systems has quadrupled; the efficiency by which they exploit the data has increased by 30%—in other words, they don't need as much data for achieving the same efficiency of answers; the algorithmic efficiency has tripled—in other words, they are able to do the same computation faster; and the investments in AI have also been rising exponentially, increasing by over 30% per year, and in the last few years were an average of $100 billion, growing quickly towards the trillion.

There was a recent study carried out in Switzerland that I think is very important to the discussion of this committee. It showed that GPT-4, the latest version you can find online, has superior persuasive skills to humans in written form. In other words, they can convince somebody to change their mind better than humans.

What's interesting, and maybe scary as well, is that this advantage of the machine over humans is particularly strong when the AI has access to the user's Facebook page, because that allows the AI to personalize the dialogue. That's just now, so you can expect future generations of models to become even stronger, potentially superhuman in their persuasive abilities, and in ways that can disrupt our democracies. They could be much stronger than what we've seen with deepfakes and static media, because now we're talking about personalized interactive connections between AI and people.

I trust that most large organizations that develop these models make some efforts to ensure that they are not used for malicious purposes, but there are currently no regulations forcing them to do so anywhere in the world—well, I guess China is leading on this—and models, especially when they are open-sourced, such as Meta/Facebook, can easily be modified by malicious individuals or groups to change those models.

For example, they would be stronger at persuasion, helping more to build bombs, perpetrating all kinds of nefarious actions and providing information that can help terrorists or other bad actors. In the absence of a regulatory framework and mitigation measures, the deployment of such malicious capabilities would certainly have many harmful consequences for our democracy.

To minimize these pitfalls, the government needs to do a few urgent things. We need to pass Bill C-27, in particular to label AI-generated content. We need privacy-preserving authentication of social media users so they can be brought to justice if they violate rules. We need to register the generative AI platforms so governments can track what they're doing and enforce labelling and watermarking.

We need to inform and educate Canadians about these dangers to inoculate them with examples of disinformation and deepfakes.

Thank you for this opportunity to share my perspectives. This is an important exercise. Artificial intelligence has the potential to generate considerable social and economic benefits, but only if we govern it wisely rather than endure it and hope for the best. I often ask myself: will we be up to the scale of this challenge?

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Bengio.

We'll begin the first round of questions, where each round will be six minutes.

Mr. Caputo, go ahead, please, for six minutes.

[Frank Caputo, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Great. Thank you, Mr. Chair

I'd like to thank the witnesses for being here. It's appreciated that you have taken time out of your schedule, especially when we're dealing with something so important.

I'm going to focus my time on Mr. Kolga. I've reviewed your testimony.

I'm not sure whether our two witnesses were online for the last round. Can you just give me a thumbs-up or thumbs-down for yes or no? No, you were not. Okay. I apologize.

I'm going to cover some ground that I covered during the last round.

Mr. Kolga, I'm going to present a few things that I think are probably fairly straightforward. I've reviewed your prior testimony and I've reviewed the testimony of a former colleague of ours, Kenny Chiu, on foreign interference. To me, that is one of the central issues of misinformation and disinformation.

Obviously, it's my view—and I hope you will agree, Mr. Kolga—that the government has what we would say in law is an obligation to prevent electoral interference. That obligation starts from the bottom, at Elections Canada and any other enforcement agencies, and goes straight to the top to the Prime Minister.

We have agreement on that, I take it.

[Marcus Kolga]

Yes. In principle, I agree, of course.

[Frank Caputo, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

I'm not trying to trap you or anything. To me, that's really trite.

The reality is that most of us worked very hard to get here. It's not easy. Therefore, when there is interference in an election and there is uncertainty as to whether or not it affected the election—I'm talking about both at the national level and at the riding level—that's going to be a win for any hostile state actors that are intervening. Is that correct?

[Marcus Kolga]

Yes, I would agree.

[Frank Caputo, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

The fact that we're even talking about this shows that the intervention was, to some degree, successful. Is that right?

[Marcus Kolga]

To a degree, maybe.

[Frank Caputo, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

That's fair enough.

Clearly, there was foreign interference in the election in Steveston—Richmond East. The government knew about this and did nothing.

At what point should the government be acting? Should it not be acting immediately and informing Canadians by shining light on this, because that is the best disinfectant—the best antidote, if you will—against electoral interference and the misinformation that comes with it?

[Marcus Kolga]

I should note that at DisinfoWatch, we were made aware of these efforts about two to three weeks into the writ period, and it took us maybe four or five days to analyze the data we received from various different sources, including sources within the Chinese community in Canada. We produced an election alert, which we posted to our website about a week and a half before election day. I think that as an independent civil society organization, we have the ability to act a bit more nimbly and quickly.

Now, did that alert prevent the interference from happening? No. It had already happened at that point. I don't know whether we were able to have any impact. However, I think that in future elections, the government and the organizations being set up inside of that to monitor elections should be much quicker to report instances of interference.

There were very simple instances that could have been reported quickly, including the Global Times piece that was published in Chinese state media, attacking the Conservative Party and its leader, Mr. O'Toole. That could have been reported very quickly.

In future elections, we need to improve those timelines to get that reporting out there. Any instances of interference and efforts to interfere in our elections should be reported much more quickly than they were during the last election.

[Frank Caputo, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Well, certainly. I mean, now we have 11 people who have been identified as either wittingly or semi-wittingly having been assisted by hostile states. We don't know their names. If light is the best disinfectant—we have been slow to react when it comes to foreign interference, and I think we can agree on that—are we not just perpetuating the exact same pattern of the government?

This goes right to the highest level, because the decision is with the Prime Minister. Are we not just perpetuating that more and more by failing to act in this instance right here, right now?

[Marcus Kolga]

I would agree. I think it's at all levels. For quite some time, I've been advocating greater transparency when it comes to collaboration with foreign governments, especially authoritarian foreign governments. I think Bill C-70 will go a long way to helping with that, so yes, I would agree with you—

[Frank Caputo, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

I apologize for cutting you off. I just want to end with this quote from Kenny Chiu.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Please be quick, Mr. Caputo.

[Frank Caputo, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

This is what he said about foreign interference on April 30, 2024:

...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.

I hope every Canadian, regardless of what party they run with, is worthy of protection in the future.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Caputo.

Mr. Kolga and Mr. Bengio, we have a short period of time, six minutes, for questions here. Oftentimes members will reclaim their time or maybe cut you off before you're able to answer, but it's the member's time. They're just trying to maximize that. Please don't take it personally.

I have Ms. Khalid next, for six minutes. Go ahead, Ms. Khalid.

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

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today and for your opening statements.

One thing that I think is quite clear with misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and its role by state actors and non-state actors is the point that the strength of any country or any state is its people. That whole war of using misinformation and disinformation to create disruption, create agitation and undermine the democracy of a state like Canada is troubling. It leaves a lot of the communities that are impacted very vulnerable.

I'll start with you, Mr. Kolga. You mentioned local influencers being used to amplify messages. You used Russia as an example. I'll say that we've also seen stories and articles of Indian influencers who have called upon the Government of India to put money into political parties here in Canada to ensure that a certain political party wins the upcoming election, for example. We've seen Russian bots trying to influence a certain political party and its perception here in Canada as well.

How do we regulate that? How do we hold people to account while also maintaining the sensitivity around local communities that become victims on both sides of the situation, ultimately?

[Marcus Kolga]

Thank you so much for that question.

We have Bill C-70 coming into place now. Ultimately, it comes down to ensuring that it is implemented properly to ensure that we are enforcing the legislation that's already in place.

I mentioned during my opening remarks that Canadians were working directly with RT. The U.S. DOJ indictment about that case clearly indicated that Canadians received payment into Canadian bank accounts. The timelines that were presented in that indictment would indicate that those payments were made during a period when RT was under Canadian sanctions. Services were delivered to RT and payment was made from RT to Canadian bank accounts. That, to me, would indicate a potential violation of our sanctions legislation.

My question would then be this: What is the Canadian government doing about that? Is there an investigation into sanctions violations? Are we going to enforce the legislation that we already have in place? If we don't do that, that will send a message to all of these foreign regimes that engage in foreign influence operations and information operations that it's the Wild West: They can do anything in this country.

We need to begin right now by enforcing the current legislation that we have in place.

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

Thank you very much.

I will continue down that line. What is the responsibility of political parties in this? For example, the Conservative Party was recently targeted with Russian bots to claim that many people had attended a rally that happened, etc. What is the accountability, then, or the responsibility of the Conservative Party, just to use them as an example—there are examples across all parties on this—to make sure that they're not victims or targets, whether wittingly or unwittingly, of this kind of interference?

[Marcus Kolga]

I should clarify one point.

There has been research into the instance that was mentioned and the allegation about Russian bots supporting the Conservative Party after a specific rally. In fact, that has been proven to be untrue. Those bots, according to researchers at McGill University, were experimental; a student was just playing around with bots and happened to latch on to that specific case. Any sort of blame that has been laid or any allegations regarding the Conservative Party, or even Russians, in that case should be discounted. That did not happen.

Of course, I think all parliamentarians have a moral obligation to reject any sort of disinformation and misinformation and to not engage in the use of it. More needs to be done in terms of educating parliamentarians. I strongly support annual training for all parliamentarians and their staff on misinformation, disinformation and influence operations to know what they look like so that they're able to detect them when they see them and run across these sorts of narratives. That's very important.

I've long advocated the creation of a committee inside Parliament where representatives of each of the major political parties would be in attendance. They would get briefed on a weekly or biweekly basis on emerging narratives so that everyone was on the same page and to avoid anyone mistakenly or inadvertently amplifying some of these narratives.

Those are a couple of fairly simple steps that we can take to help parliamentarians. I do believe that most parliamentarians—I would say all parliamentarians—want to do the right thing and fulfill that moral obligation in not amplifying these sorts of narratives.

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

Thank you very much for that. I really appreciate your clarification.

I'll turn to Mr. Bengio for a quick second.

You spoke about the use of artificial intelligence. There was a recent article talking about deepfakes of Justin Trudeau used for passive income ads. There's a video—