Information & Ethics Committee on Oct. 8th, 2024

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Caputo.

Ms. Shanahan, please go ahead for five minutes.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being with us today.

In my riding of Châteauguay—Lacolle, which will soon be called Châteauguay—Les Jardins‑de‑Napierville, social media platforms, particularly Facebook and other groups, are very popular. Everyone uses them.

Our study is about misinformation and disinformation. The definition of those two terms can lead to confusion.

Mr. Beaudoin, in your own words, can you tell us what those two terms mean?

[C/Supt Denis Beaudoin]

Misinformation is false information.

Disinformation is false information that is intentional.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Misinformation is like a misunderstanding, whereas disinformation has an intent behind it. Intent is what sets them apart.

Can misinformation involve ill intent? In other words, someone might think misinformation is unintentional when, in reality, it isn't.

[C/Supt Denis Beaudoin]

Yes, it's possible.

I have to say that everyone has different definitions of the terms. They aren't in the Criminal Code. Disinformation and misinformation are not criminal offences, per se. The definitions people give the terms can vary as a result.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

I'd like us to raise that problem in our report. People aren't well informed. Even those of us in the public sphere struggle when it comes to having a proper understanding of the terms, so malicious actors can trick us.

Mr. Beaudoin, education is very important not only for the public, but also for private companies across all sectors. It's also important for vulnerable communities, including ethnic communities and communities at risk of being targeted by disinformation for malicious purposes.

Can you give us examples of education initiatives the RCMP undertakes?

[C/Supt Denis Beaudoin]

Let's look at misinformation activities targeting ethnic communities. As I mentioned, any such activities undertaken prior to an election or during the electoral process could be considered criminal.

We've publicized some of our community engagement activities. We try to educate communities and show them that Canadian police services are open and accessible. In other countries, the public can have a negative impression of police or a less favourable view of them.

We try to break the silo culture within communities. We try to educate them on new laws and criminal activity, which they can fall prey to. We also try to educate communities on Bill C‑70.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

How do you do that? Do you put on workshops? Do you do engage with people in community centres?

In the business community, do you meet with chambers of commerce representatives?

[C/Supt Denis Beaudoin]

You did a good job of answering the question for me. Everything you said is true.

I can give you some examples. We went to Montreal in May or June to educate communities in the city.

We also give talks to police services across the country to educate them on foreign interference.

Foreign governments sometimes hire private security firms, so we've given many presentations to such firms. We encourage them to be watchful and help them to recognize the signs of interference, including through the use of social media.

We try to target a large audience. Of course, we don't have the resources to do everything we'd like to at the community level. We try to target certain groups to maximize the impact. We give in-person talks in some communities.

Right now, with the RCMP, we're working with Public Safety Canada and other agencies to deliver seven or eight presentations for specific communities in large Canadian cities. We try to go wherever we can to reach as many Canadians as possible.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mrs. Shanahan and Mr. Beaudoin.

I have a question related to what Ms. Shanahan asked. You talked about disinformation and misinformation, and we've heard several definitions of those over the course of our study. I'm kind of old school. I remember when it used to be known as lying, to be quite frank. You mentioned the Criminal Code and that there was no distinction between or no identification of disinformation or misinformation in the Criminal Code.

What's the equivalent, in the Criminal Code, that police agencies would use for the spreading of lies, etc.? Would it be considered mischief in the Criminal Code? What would you use to apply that?

[C/Supt Denis Beaudoin]

I'm not sure misinformation in itself is a criminal offence, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

It could be a disagreement that you have or a difference of opinion; those are the definitions you stated earlier and what we've heard in previous testimony.

[C/Supt Denis Beaudoin]

Exactly. The biggest difference with Bill C-70 is that if it's a campaign of disinformation with the purpose of affecting government processes, it may become criminal. You won't find these terms under the Security of Information Act; they're not defined in there.

As the member alluded to, it may be something for the committee to see if there's value in defining them, but for police services, we're dealing with harassment, intimidation and threats. For disinformation, if somebody goes through this but at some point he crosses the path and there's a threat, then all of a sudden we investigate the threats, but not necessarily the "lying", as you called it, because oftentimes it may not be a crime.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

I appreciate all of your being here today and providing us with some valuable information.

There was a request by Mr. Green, so I'm going to make sure that the clerk follows up with parliamentary affairs. Generally, I try to put a timeline on the responses, so if you can, please supply those to the committee a week from today, perhaps at 5 p.m. I understand it's Thanksgiving weekend, but there should be ample time to address Mr. Green's questions.

Thank you, gentlemen, for being here today.

I'm going to suspend for a couple of minutes as we get ready for the next panel.

The meeting is suspended.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you for your patience as we switched over to the second panel.

I'd like to welcome our witnesses for the second hour today.

As an individual, we have Heidi Tworek, professor of history and public policy, University of British Columbia. Welcome, Ms. Tworek.

From CIVIX—which I'm familiar with from some local programs in Barrie, as I'm sure other members of Parliament are—we have Kenneth Boyd, the director of education.

In person from the Russian Canadian Democratic Alliance, we have Maria Kartasheva, the director, and Guillaume Sirois, who is counsel.

We're going to start with you, Professor Tworek. You have up to five minutes to address the committee with an opening statement.

Go ahead, please. Thank you.

[Dr. Heidi Tworek, Professor, History and Public Policy, University of British Columbia, As an Individual]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and the committee, for inviting me to discuss this important topic.

I'm a professor of history and public policy at the University of British Columbia, where I direct the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, or CSDI. At CSDI, we aim to understand the past, analyze the present and train for the future, so I'll make three points today—one about the past, one about the present and one about the future.

First is the past. Misinformation and disinformation are a feature, not a bug, of the international system. So, too, is foreign interference in elections. The U.S. feared French interference all the way back in 1796. In the second half of the 20th century, the two Cold War superpowers, the U.S. and Soviet Union, intervened in around 11% of all national executive elections around the world.

The question is not if foreign interference will happen, but rather why some states engage in this practice at particular moments.

Some of my research examined why Germans tried to use the then-new technology of radio to influence global politics from 1900 to 1945. Germans wanted to interfere in foreign information environments because they felt boxed in politically and economically. Losing World War I accelerated those feelings. This obviously did not end well. The Nazis built on decades of experimentation to spread racist and anti-Semitic content, ending in a world war of words as well as weapons.

Without getting into more historical weeds, this shows that analyzing international relations actually helps to predict potential foreign disinformation campaigns. This phenomenon will not disappear, but will wax and wane, so we need systemic interventions to embed resilience through educational initiatives, platform interventions, transparency, research and other measures to strengthen democracy.

Second is the present. The current social media and AI environment has created new economic incentives for misinformation and disinformation. For understandable reasons, these committee meetings are focused on politics, but making money fuels the problem, too.

We need stronger enforcement of electoral regulations on platforms to guard against this during elections. Canada might also coordinate with other democracies facing the same problem. For example, an intergovernmental task force could coordinate on issues like demonetizing disinformation. This could draw lessons from other multilateral institutions like the Financial Action Task Force, or FATF.

More broadly, Canada has much to learn from other jurisdictions, like Finland on media literacy or Taiwan on transparency and combatting disinformation while preserving freedom of expression.

Third is the future. generative AI or gen AI is obviously at the top of most people's minds. I recently co-authored a report released by CSDI on the role of gen AI in elections around the world in 2024. We found that gen AI is currently pervasive, but not necessarily persuasive, yet it still creates problems. We find that gen AI threatens democratic processes like elections in three main ways.

First, it enables deception by lowering the barrier to entry to create problematic content. This accelerates problems that already existed on social media platforms.

Second, gen AI pollutes the information environment by worsening the quality of available information online.

Third, gen AI intensifies harassment. It's far easier to create deepfakes that may be used to harass female political candidates in particular. We should worry about this amplification of online abuse and harassment of political candidates, which is something that I've studied in Canada since 2019. This could target specific individuals or under-represented groups to force them out of politics.

To date, there is little evidence that beneficial use of gen AI in elections will outweigh these harmful ones. Multiple measures are needed to address the challenges of gen AI. Although not election-specific, for example, the British Columbia Intimate Images Protection Act offers one avenue to protect female political candidates from deepfakes. We should look for similar legislation to address other challenges posed by gen AI.

To sum up, the past tells us that disinformation is not going anywhere, but we do have power to mitigate it. The present tells us to grapple with the economic incentives, too. The future warns us to address issues with gen AI, like deepfakes, before they get out of hand.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Professor. You're under your time. We appreciate that.

Mr. Boyd, we're going to you next for five minutes, sir. Go ahead, please.

[Kenneth Boyd, Director of Education, CIVIX]

Good afternoon, members of the committee.

My name is Kenneth Boyd. I'm the director of education at CIVIX, a national non-partisan charity that is dedicated to building the skills and habits of active and informed citizenship. We work primarily with K-to-12 teachers from every province and territory in providing free programs both in English and in French on the themes of democratic engagement, civic discourse and digital media literacy.

Members of the committee may be most familiar with our student vote program, which is our parallel election program for students under the voting age, as well as our rep day program, which invites MPs and other elected officials into classrooms to engage directly with students.

We approach digital media literacy as a necessary component of informed citizenship. Engaging in the democratic process requires that citizens be able to identify reliable and trustworthy sources of information and have the skills to determine the difference between fact and fiction.

We know that the effects of mis- and disinformation online can interfere with engaged citizenship in ways that go beyond being merely misled. For example, in a recent survey that we conducted with 800 teachers from across Canada, we found that 81% of respondents said they believe that mis- and disinformation on social media contribute a “great extent” to the spread of hateful rhetoric in their schools.

Lacking the ability to engage critically with content online thus has downstream consequences in terms of people's ability to have constructive and meaningful conversations about important issues.

To address these problems, we created CTRL‑F, our digital media literacy program that teaches empirically supported verification skills that have been proven to increase people's ability to determine the veracity of claims and identify the motives of unfamiliar sources online.

Since 2019, CTRL‑F has been used by over 5,200 teachers who have taught the program to more than 300,000 students from all across Canada. We are consistently updating our program to address new kinds of mis- and disinformation online, including those produced by artificial intelligence, and are currently adapting our resources for use by adult learners.

While digital media literacy skills are necessary for everyone, it is especially important that students learn these skills at a young age. There are, however, a number of challenges in teaching effective digital media literacy to Canadians. I will note that while we recognize that education is a provincial issue, it is worth highlighting the issues we have seen in our work in schools and with teachers, as they are indicative of problems that all Canadians face.

First, our research has shown that the resources that are available to Canadian educators vary widely in terms of quality. Provinces can mention educational resources but not mandate their use, and many outdated resources are still used in classrooms and used by Canadians nationwide. In some cases, these resources were developed before the widespread adoption of the Internet, and others have even been shown to backfire, making people less trusting of credible sources.

Digital media literacy is also not a singular thing. It is an umbrella term that encapsulates many different concepts and competencies. However, educators and Canadians in general are given little guidance about which resources are available to them and which are of high quality and grounded in evidence.

Second, there is an overall dearth of digital media literacy training. For example, it is a common occurrence to find educators in charge of digital media literacy instruction who have no specific training in the subject matter or who received their last training when studying to become a teacher. Even for those who choose to inform themselves about the latest developments in digital media literacy, the online world moves and changes so quickly that it is difficult to keep up.

In response to these issues, we believe there needs to be a national strategy to facilitate digital media literacy training. Through our work, we have found that in terms of scalability it is most efficient to train educators, as well as civil society organizations and community leaders, to reach as many Canadians as possible.

We also encourage the committee to consider approaching the problems of mis- and disinformation as being a widespread skills issue rather than simply an awareness issue. Merely making people aware of the need to critically engage with content they find online will not help us make any progress. Canadians need access to and training in digital media literacy skills, and that requires a sustained investment from the federal government to ensure high-quality resources are available and programs can continue to operate effectively.

Finally, informed citizenship requires access to high-quality information. In our resources, we say that the online information environment is polluted. Trustworthy information can certainly be found, but mis- and disinformation are mixed in. Disinformation also tends to be free and easily accessible. Indeed, it is in the interest of the purveyors of such information for it to be as easily accessed as possible, so there is a real need to take steps to limit the degree of information pollution online. One way to address this problem is to support journalists, especially local journalists, who are able to provide reliable information and give Canadians better options to find important information online.

I'm happy to address any questions the committee has, and I thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you, Mr. Boyd.

We're now going to the Russian Canadian Democratic Alliance.

You have up to five minutes to address the committee. Go ahead, please. You're good to go.

[Maria Kartasheva, Director, Russian Canadian Democratic Alliance]

Honourable members of the committee, I am Maria Kartasheva, director of the Russian Canadian Democratic Alliance. I am accompanied by our counsel, Guillaume Sirois.

Thank you for your invitation and for addressing the national security threat posed by Russian propaganda and cognitive warfare.

The RCDA is a volunteer-led, non-profit organization created in the wake of Russia's criminal full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Our mission is to support the development of the Russian-Canadian community around the ideals of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Opposing the invasion of Ukraine and Putin's regime is central to our work.

I want to begin by expressing my gratitude for your recognition of the serious threat that Russian information and influence operations pose to our democracy and society. Cognitive warfare aims to manipulate information and perceptions to influence thinking, to destabilize societies and to achieve strategic objectives without direct military confrontation. Russia employs these tactics as part of a broader strategy, viewing itself at war with the west, including Canada. Understanding this context is crucial for developing effective responses to safeguard our democracy.

I myself was a direct victim of this cognitive warfare. Russia sentenced me to seven years in prison for disseminating truthful information about the Bucha massacre while in Ottawa. I even faced the threat of deportation from Canada because of my political activism.

The RCDA, an organization that I co-founded, has been labelled an “undesirable” organization by the Putin regime. This designation puts all our partners and our collaborators, including me, at significant risk. One of our directors felt compelled to resign due to fears of persecution. This situation underscores the urgent need for decisive action to protect not only our democratic institutions but also the individuals who actively work to uphold them.

Meanwhile, despite Russia's long-standing disinformation campaigns in Canada, I have yet to see any individuals held accountable or facing consequences for their actions. Aside from public statements and ineffective sanctions, it appears that Canada is doing little to prevent Russia from gaining the upper hand in its cognitive war against Canadians.

As we have learned, notably in the course of the foreign interference commission, there are four key ways that Russian propaganda is impacting the work of parliamentarians.

First, Russian disinformation is shaping how Canadians, and by extension, members of Parliament, think about, and vote on, pivotal issues, including the support for Ukraine, NATO and even domestic issues, such as inflation.

Second, disinformation fuels fear and hostility, contributing to threats and violence against MPs, undermining their ability to perform their duties safely.

Third, the saturation of disinformation contributes to growing political apathy among the general population, weakening democratic participation.

Fourth, these disinformation campaigns aim to destabilize the very foundations of our democracy by spreading doubts about the integrity of elections, and of our democratic processes.

In response, the Government of Canada must do the five following things:

First, annually assess the scope of Russian and other state-sponsored disinformation targeting Canada, and report the findings to Parliament for transparency and accountability.

Second, adopt a strategy to combat Russian propaganda, focusing on protecting the work of members of Parliament and the Russian diaspora from such disinformation campaigns.

Third, establish an independent body similar to the CRTC or Elections Canada to monitor, to assess and to respond to foreign propaganda, ensuring the integrity of democratic processes is upheld.

Fourth, engage with the Russian diaspora and civil society organizations to help identify and combat Russian propaganda.

Fifth, enforce a decisive foreign policy that curbs Russia's disinformation, with diplomacy and global partnerships ensuring accountability for Russia's actions in Canada.

In conclusion, Russian interference in Canada's democratic processes, as exemplified by the ongoing disinformation campaigns, represents a significant threat that must not be ignored. For decades, Russia has been conducting destructive operations, such as the Tenet Media operation, with relative impunity. By recognizing the gravity of this threat and by committing to serious action, we can protect our democracy for future generations.

Thank you for your attention. I am happy to answer all of your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Brassard]

Thank you.

Thank you to all of our witnesses for very interesting opening statements.

We're going to go to six-minute rounds for each party, and we're going to start with Mr. Barrett.

Go ahead, Mr. Barrett, for six minutes.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Mr. Boyd, I've had the opportunity to engage with your organization on rep days, and I'm aware of how I fared in the local student vote. I'm as pleased with that result as I am with the general election and by-election results that I've had. I'll give a shout-out to St. John Bosco in Brockville and St. Edward in Westport, which invited me to take part in rep days there. I think it's a great program. There are always great questions that demonstrate the understanding these students have as a result of the efforts of your program. That's certainly commendable.

You talked about education being a provincial responsibility. I wonder if you could quickly tell us about your funding. How much federal funding have you received, and how much provincial funding does your organization receive?

[Kenneth Boyd]

I can't tell you the exact percentages off the top of my head. We are a registered charity, so all of our funding information is of course on the public record. I would say that for our digital media literacy programs especially, we receive a combination of funding from the federal government, the digital citizen initiative, private organizations and donors, research centres and provincial governments.

As for this program, I would say that we've mostly received funding from Canadian Heritage and the digital citizen initiative.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

I believe you've expanded your offerings overseas to Colombia and Chile. How are those initiatives funded?

[Kenneth Boyd]

Those initiatives are funded through independent grants that have been applied for by our teams in Colombia and Chile. They received a grant recently from the EU to continue funding their projects. They have taken the work we've done in Canada, especially on digital media literacy programs, and adapted it for an audience in both Colombia and Chile.