Evidence of meeting #38 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 44th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was disinformation.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bardish Chagger
I'm going to pause this really quickly, Mr. Kolga. I know that you are trying to get a lot of information in. I can assure you that we will provide you avenues to provide us more information when we're outside of this hour.
With two official languages, receiving the message in the other language is something we need to slow down for a bit.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bardish Chagger
Okay. We want to hear what you have to say.
I'm going to continue the clock. You are currently at two minutes and 17 seconds.
It's over to you.
Director, DisinfoWatch
Perfect. Thank you.
According to Taiwan's leading disinformation analysis NGO, Doublethink, Chinese state actors often use low-level disinformation disseminated on chat platforms like WeChat and others as a method of attack. The method and content of the narratives spread about former MP Kenny Chiu are tactically consistent with those identified by Doublethink.
After analyzing open-source data and consulting with key stakeholders, we believed and continue to believe that the timing and content of these narratives were consistent with previous Chinese government information operations and indicated the likelihood of a coordinated operation targeting Chinese Canadian voters. We published our initial report on September 14, 2021, and a subsequent report in December. Researchers from the Atlantic Council's digital forensics lab and McGill University later confirmed our findings in separate independent reports.
Now I'll briefly speak a little bit about Russian interference.
Russian information and influence operations are persistent and they are growing. They do not turn on and off with election cycles and have intensified during the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Over the past 36 months, we have observed the Kremlin exploit the COVID pandemic by amplifying vaccine hesitancy and anti-lockdown narratives, a threat that I anticipated at the onset of the pandemic. These were key issues during the 2021 federal election.
Recent Russian information operations have also focused on dehumanizing and marginalizing Canadians of Ukrainian heritage, including those elected to public office, regardless of political affiliation. Deputy Prime Minister Freeland has faced ongoing attacks since 2017 from the Russian embassy and domestic proxies aligned with it that accuse her of being a neo-Nazi.
Russia's primary and full-time focus is to undermine and destabilize our democracy by exploiting the most polarizing issues of the day. Their operations focus on amplifying and legitimizing narratives that support the extreme left and right so as to erode trust and cohesion within our society. These attacks affect our political environment and choices every day, not just during election periods.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bardish Chagger
Thank you, Mr. Kolga. Believe it or not, I gave you an extra 45 seconds, and I can't wait to hear more from you.
With that, we are now going to Mr. Jim Judd.
I'll be a little lenient with you, but try to keep it to four minutes, if you can. Welcome.
Jim Judd Former Director, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, As an Individual
Thank you.
As noted, my name is Jim Judd. I am a retired federal public servant. I retired from the federal government in 2009. I am here today, I assume, because I was asked by the Privy Council Office several years ago to do an assessment of the critical election incident protocol that had been put in place creating a panel of senior officials for the writ period of the election to monitor potential foreign interference in the election of 2019.
I did the work. The report was published two and a half years ago or so. The work was done on the basis of interviews with a large number of people, including the members of the panel, security agencies, academics and former public servants, and a lot of research, mostly in public source material. In the course of doing my work, I did not have access to any of the intelligence that went to the committee and just relied on the interviews to get their perspectives on what had happened.
The review was mandated by the protocol itself, which said that following the election, there should be a review done.
That's essentially the short story, I hope.
Former Director, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, As an Individual
I think so.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bardish Chagger
I appreciate that.
Thank you so much for those words.
We are now going to start our opening round, with six minutes to Mr. Cooper.
After him will be Mr. Fergus, followed by Ms. Gaudreau and then Ms. Blaney.
Go ahead, Mr. Cooper. You have six minutes.
Conservative
Michael Cooper Conservative St. Albert—Edmonton, AB
Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I'll direct my questions to Mr. Kolga.
Mr. Kolga, you spoke about evidence that DisinfoWatch gathered respecting activities on the part of Chinese Communist state actors using social media platforms to spread disinformation against the Conservative Party generally and certain candidates specifically, with a real emphasis on the riding of Steveston—Richmond East and Kenny Chiu.
In the case of Kenny Chiu, and maybe speaking more broadly about this type of interference that occurred during the election, is there any indication that the interference materially affected the outcome of the election?
Director, DisinfoWatch
Thank you for the question.
It's incredibly hard to measure the impact of these sorts of operations on election outcomes. At the same time, we can't dismiss that they may have had an effect, but in this case it's certainly very difficult to measure. We can assume that these operations, which were in the Chinese language, targeting Canadians of Chinese heritage, probably connected with thousands of members of those communities. We can measure the impact on various forums and such. We can see how many people have accessed or commented on many of these posts.
Again, there's no evidence that the outcome of the election, whether in that electoral district or any others where there are high percentages of Chinese speakers, was directly affected or that the outcome would have changed because of this specific attack. The fact is that, again—
Conservative
Michael Cooper Conservative St. Albert—Edmonton, AB
I'm sorry. My time is limited.
But it can't be ruled out, either.
Conservative
Michael Cooper Conservative St. Albert—Edmonton, AB
You were speaking a little bit about the scope of the disinformation campaign. I will give you a bit of time to perhaps expand on exactly what occurred. How was this used? How many people might have come across some of this disinformation?
Director, DisinfoWatch
Again, if we're talking about this anonymous WeChat campaign, what happened was a narrative about Mr. Chiu and his legislation, the private member's bill that would have enacted a foreign influence registry. As I said in my introductory remarks, this legislation would have required actors advocating on behalf of specific foreign authoritarian regimes to register with the government.
This is something the Chinese government would not want to have enacted, so it's entirely possible that the narrative was placed onto WeChat—a platform, by the way, that is largely controlled by the Chinese government—by actors aligned with the Chinese government. WeChat is widely used by Chinese speakers around the world, including in this country.
The overall impact of that narrative is unknown, but the fact that it spread to various other platforms and forums—Chinese-speaking forums here in Canada and local media—does indicate that the narrative was widespread. It's likely to have been seen by tens of thousands of Chinese Canadians, perhaps hundreds of thousands.
Again, whether it changed their voting intent during the election is unknown, but the fact that so many people saw that narrative should be of concern, and I think we can certainly assume that was an effort to undermine the integrity of our elections.
Conservative
Michael Cooper Conservative St. Albert—Edmonton, AB
Thank you for that.
I want to ask you a little bit about the critical election incident public protocol. It is a mechanism that is purportedly designed to be transparent, to bring it to the attention of Canadians that interference is happening during the course of the campaign. It appears—in fact, I think it was established—that the critical election incident public protocol was not invoked. There was no public notification that was provided. Voters in Steveston—Richmond East, etc., would not have been informed about this disinformation campaign, and the threshold is fairly high.
Could you maybe speak to that protocol and the threshold that must be satisfied? Do you have any thoughts on that? On the one hand, it probably should be fairly high, but on the other hand, timing is limited. How can this protocol be used or how can it be improved to provide greater transparency in a timely manner?
Director, DisinfoWatch
Well, the protocol was introduced before the 2019 election, along with several other measures, including the continuation of the RRM, which is critically important to protecting our democracy. I think that was a very good first step. In 2019, it appears to have done its work. Whether it was to deter foreign actors from trying to interfere...it seems to have done its work.
I cannot comment on the thresholds that were put in place. With this incident and the fact that Chinese state media, Global Times, was directly trying to interfere in our election by injecting various narratives into it, I'm not sure how that fits with those thresholds. I unfortunately can't comment on that.
My understanding, from reading the publicly available information, is that when that threshold is met, the political parties involved and the candidates who are targeted are notified, and the public is notified.
Liberal
Liberal
Greg Fergus Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses. I'm less familiar with Mr. Kolga, but I have the utmost respect for his work. I'm quite familiar with Mr. Judd, as well as his work and career in the public service.
Thank you for your service to Canada, Mr. Judd.
Mr. Kolga, your opening statement was extremely insightful and relevant. You said that foreign actors looking to destabilize our democracy exploit polarizing issues that already exist in Canadian society.
Can you tell us more about that? Can you give us any examples? How do foreign actors do that?
Director, DisinfoWatch
Thank you very much for that question.
I outlined how some Chinese state actors were doing that during the previous election. They were using state media outlets such as Global Times, which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. They use platforms like that to inject false narratives into our information environment and the global information environment. The hope for them is that they are picked up by various actors domestically and spread in that way.
Russia, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, has been active on an ongoing basis. Their operations never stop. They never sleep. They are constantly seeking to exploit the most polarizing issues in our society.
Certainly during the COVID pandemic, they were extraordinarily active, promoting anti-vaccination narratives and anti-lockdown narratives. They were promoting anti-government narratives at the same time. During that period, we saw a number of domestic anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown organizations amplify those narratives.
Indeed, all of that crescendoed in February of this year during the Ottawa truck protest. We saw RT, Russia's state media channel—which used to be available on our public airwaves and is no longer, thankfully—broadcasting interviews with extremists inside that protest who were exploiting those protests to promote anti-government narratives. The leaders of these anti-vaccination groups who were given a platform on RT were calling for the removal of our government, in fact.
The Twitter platforms of those organizations, later in February, when Russia invaded Ukraine, switched their narratives from anti-vaccination, anti-lockdown and anti-government narratives to ones that were explicitly anti-Ukrainian. There were certain tweets where those organizations were directly taking statements from the Russian embassy in Canada and retweeting them.
This is the ultimate objective of some of those organizations: to take those state narratives, find local actors who will amplify them, and affect the discussion and local debate on those issues.
Liberal
Greg Fergus Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
Thank you very much for those examples. They were very helpful.
Let's go back six months to what happened during the occupation in Ottawa.
Do you think Russian influence on social media was as impactful as that of the Chinese government or actors associated with China?
Director, DisinfoWatch
I would say, in my assessment, that the Russian government is very effective at finding the most polarizing issues and amplifying them and finding the actors domestically to amplify them.
China is not as sophisticated when it comes to its operations, so I would think that the Russian government's efforts during that period were far more impactful than the Chinese government's.
Liberal
Greg Fergus Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
I have one last question for Mr. Kolga, before I move on to Mr. Judd.
Do you think Russia's activities have as big of an impact on Canadian voters as China's?
Director, DisinfoWatch
For clarification, do you mean during the election? Okay.
It is hard to measure. As I mentioned in my opening statement, Russia's efforts are ongoing. They are persistent, so I think that the overall impact of Russian information operations may have been more significant during that election.
China targeted specific ridings and, in those ridings, the impact was far greater than Russia's. If we're looking at the ultimate outcome of that election, it's hard to say which government would have had a greater impact.
Liberal
Greg Fergus Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
I don't have much time left, but I have the same question for you, Mr. Judd.
Do you think Russian and Chinese influence had the same impact on the election results?