Thank you to the committee for the invitation.
I'm pleased to be here on behalf of the Media Ecosystem Observatory and the Canadian Digital Media Research Network, two entities that monitor the Canadian information environment, with a particular focus on trying to understand overall trends and information manipulation. My remarks are focused on the information environment generally and not on the foreign agent registry more specifically, given my expertise.
My hope is to talk about two things today. My first purpose is to talk about the 2025 election—with the scope and scale of foreign interference, as we typically think about it, and to contextualize it a little bit. My second purpose is to talk more generally about the vulnerabilities in the Canadian information environment—Emerson just alluded to some of them—that make this a pretty important moment for continuing to invest in and focus on protecting the information environment against foreign interference and, more broadly, information manipulation.
During the 2025 election, foreign interference was top of mind for Canadians. This came, of course, out of the commission on foreign interference. Over half of Canadians were particularly concerned about foreign interference—yes, from China, India and Russia, but the number one country was actually the United States. There was real concern.
We documented and catalogued different instances of foreign interference and information manipulation during the campaign. Overall, I would say the impact on the election was minor. There were several efforts, but they were small, sporadic, low-engagement and generally ineffective efforts. There's an important caveat that I'll talk about in a couple of minutes.
Generally speaking, U.S. political content coming from influencers, from officials and from the structure and shape of the information environment was far more impactful in the Canadian political discourse during the election. It was really the U.S. channel, and Canadians can correctly name that and are concerned about it.
That said, there were a number of institutional improvements during this past election, including the SITE task force and the regular communication with Canadians, the work of the research network, and the continuous monitoring and updating of the Canadian population, which were real strengths of the Canadian response. They helped blunt the limited FI activity. However, we are in a state today in which, while we can look at the past few elections and say there may not have been a determining impact on the election results, there are clear structural vulnerabilities.
There is a real crisis and failure of platform governance. There is very poor data access, very weak and inconsistent enforcement, and almost no transparency coming from the platforms. There's been a retreat from meaningful co-operation with civil society and government. It's a huge challenge. There are of course domestic vulnerabilities that amplify some of the FI risks: partisan echo chambers; online influencers without accountability, who are spreading huge amounts of misinformation in our information environment; and increasingly cheap and widely available digital manipulation tactics. This is part of technological acceleration.
We can talk about AI. We can talk about the ability to cheaply procure bots and artificial accounts across social platforms. Finally, we can talk about poor transparency, reporting and detection by platforms.
These are all vulnerabilities that we live with and that make work in this space incredibly difficult. They create an environment in which even small interference attempts can have second-order effects that rapidly change the discourse and potentially have huge impacts on the outcome of an election.
I have a single recommendation today—out of many. We are in a state in which there is such poor data transparency that, as the entity with the best data and the best ability to monitor FI.... I'm saying to you that we do not have sufficient access. It would have been very possible during the last election for something to occur that we were not able to detect. A major platform in the United States could have made a decision. There could have been a major campaign by Russia or China that was dissimilar to ones we've seen. I urge the committee to take mandated transparency seriously.
I'll leave it there.