Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 16th, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 28 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3), the committee is meeting on its study on the current state of civic resilience in Canada. Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the Standing Orders. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.

I would ask all in-person participants to consult the card in front of them that contains a short video about the health and safety of all participants, especially our interpreters.

All comments should be addressed through the chair. For members in the room, if you wish to speak, put up your hand and, for members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” feature.

I'd like to welcome our first panel of witnesses. As individuals, we have Aengus Bridgman, assistant professor, McGill University, and Taylor Gunn, fellow, national centre for critical infrastructure protection security and resilience, Carleton University. Online from QuietWire, we have Chris Blask.

We'll start with Taylor Gunn for five minutes, please.

[Taylor Gunn, Fellow, National Centre for Critical Infrastructure Protection, Security and Resilience, Carleton University, As an Individual]

Thanks so much for having me back. I was here about 4,500 days ago, 12 years, when there was a bill that was put forward that would have had the unintended consequence of disempowering Elections Canada from participating in civic education activities for elementary and secondary school students.

I had a really positive experience at the committee. You were clear-headed. You shared similar concerns with me and others, and an amendment was made, so thank you. Because of that, I trust this institution, and I admire your work. I wonder whether, on rainy days here at PROC, members would like something good to put in their pockets. I wanted to give you something tangible that at least came out of that work that you did with us and others.

I want to let you know that, after that change, Elections Canada was able to support what you might know as the student vote parallel election program a year later. This relates to all the witness testimony that's taken place so far on your topic. There were 7,600 schools that registered, and 920,000 Canadians under the voting age cast a student vote ballot. In 2019, just under 10,000 schools registered, and 1.2 million students cast a student vote ballot. In 2021, there were 7,600 schools, with 810,000 students who cast a student vote ballot in the third week of September, which was about the worst time to do anything in schools.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry—Soulanges—Huntingdon, QC]

Excuse me, Mr. Chair.

The interpreter tells me that she hasn't received the text and the witness is reading it so quickly that she can't keep up.

Can the witness provide the interpreter with the text?

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

We didn't receive prepared remarks in advance. I've just asked the witness if he could just be a little slower. We appreciate that for our interpreters.

Thank you.

[Taylor Gunn]

That's no problem. Could I be slow and also, maybe, add back the time from the pause?

Are we good? Okay. I'm sorry about that. I will try my best to slow it down. It's not my greatest skill.

In last year's federal election, 7,100 schools and one million students cast a student vote ballot. As I said, on a rainy day, maybe you'll want to recognize that you caused four million voting experiences in kids under the voting age through the work of this committee, so thank you.

You sure picked a doozy with this standing order. I will cut it up a little. I'll start with a quick comment on what I think the state of civic resilience is in Canada right now.

I think we're very resilient—so far. I've looked into civil resilience over the last few years. It's led me to speak to the most amazing people in this country and around the world. There's a very special breed of person with whom I've had the privilege of speaking: past and current members of our armed forces.

I shared a meal with someone last night. His name is Dave. He was a major in the Canadian Army. He quit at the time of the Ukraine invasion, and he went and fought on the front lines. He knows what I've been up to. He said something when we left this really cute little pub on Elgin Street. These are his exact words: “Resilience is the only thing you can't build during a war. Once the war starts, you can figure everything else out. If you don't have the will, you don't have anything.” I know we're not talking about a war today, and that's okay, but you could put a little blank space about that quote. “Resilience is the only thing you can't build during” and then a blank space.

The second part of your standing order is about what to do to build resilience. That's my interpretation. I think what you're really looking at is attachment. That's what you want to do. You want to focus on attachment to each other, to Canada and to our values and ideals as a country.

One point I'll leave you with today is getting to the how. I love the how. I've focused on the how of civic engagement and education for 20 years. It's what I do. Let's look at how you get people to know each other and get attached to Canada. There's an incredible opportunity. It seems to be a very different moment regarding some of the things our armed forces are exploring. It's about the growth of our primary reserve and the potential for a strategic reserve. I don't know whether Mr. Wilkinson.... There was a question related to one of the testimonies earlier on in this committee that talked about scale. It talked about Katimavik, which may have 10,000 kids a year, and other things. That's great. I'm used to hundreds of thousands and millions. We have an opportunity to encourage our armed forces to be entrepreneurial in how they look at the development of this supplementary and strategic reserve.

I'll leave you with that. There are a number of other things I can comment on related to your previous witnesses.

Again, I appreciate the work you do.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

We'll now turn to Mr. Bridgman for five minutes.

[Aengus Bridgman, Assistant Professor, McGill University, and Director, Media Ecosystem Observatory, As an Individual]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, committee, for the invitation. I also am being welcomed back. I was here in November for the foreign interference study. At that time, I talked about resilience and about information integrity, so I'm happy there's now a dedicated study looking specifically at that. I'm also happy to share my thoughts and research and understanding with the committee.

I direct the Media Ecosystem Observatory, Canada's largest entity that monitors the information space and the way information emerges, is digested and comes to shape the attitudes and behaviours of Canadians. For many years now, I and others in the information integrity space have been sounding the alarm. Most recently, this was sounded by Commissioner Hogue during the commission.

I want to talk a bit today about three things that I think folks have a sense of but I think really deserve attention in this study.

First, at this moment in Canada, we are operating in an information environment that is comparatively unregulated relative to many of our peer countries. We are operating in a situation where the platforms are not providing data access or base levels of accountability and visibility into what's going on. I have numerous examples I can speak to, moments where parliamentarians like you have asked platforms to provide even just a basic standard, a basic decent level of standard, of transparency around an information operation and around inauthentic activity, and have been met with silence.

Generally, both social and AI platforms are at a moment where they have been able to capture large parts of the market. They have been able to be very effective and serve the interests of Canadian democracy in some ways but also completely disregard others. While there have been several fits and starts in terms of legislative approaches and governance approaches, I really think we're at a moment where, when we look at other countries, we look at other jurisdictions and we look particularly at our European partners, we are lagging far behind. The time to act is far past. That absolutely needs to happen.

The second thing I want to talk about is the way in which AI will be restructuring the information environment. There is considerable change already occurring. About a month ago, we released a study looking at the way in which AI agents are ingesting and repackaging Canadian journalism. Increasingly, that is the way Canadians will be getting and receiving information about their communities and about what's going on in the world around them. There is some responsible, interesting and innovative behaviour in that space, but they are doing so in a way that is in their interest and not necessarily in the democratic interest. We're certainly keeping a very close eye and monitoring that. In that study in particular, I want to highlight that we identified some very clear exploitative behaviours, particularly vis-à-vis the French-language community in Canada and the underserving and under-referencing of French-language journalism.

The third thing I want to say is that we are in a moment when there will be massive change and a massive acceleration of change. I think we're all tired of change. We're all tired of how fast the information environment has been shifting over the last decade or two. Buckle up, because it's going to keep going. Very likely we're moving from a point where maybe many of your experiences with AI are through a chatbot type of interface. That's certainly the way many Canadians are now using it. We are very quickly moving into an agentic space, where individuals are tasking AI agents with seeking information and providing them with information. They are displaying very high levels of trust.

This is an opportunity. This is an exciting moment. We should think about how that can support our democracy, how that can support civic resilience, and how that can support information integrity, but there are also some dangers. This is also a fraught space. It will be yet another radical restructuring of our society and yet another radical restructuring of our information environment at a time when we are still playing catch-up.

I have two clear recommendations.

First, I think there has been a sense for a while in Canada that the information environment cannot be regulated and cannot be governed, for a variety of reasons. We need to disabuse ourselves of this notion. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit around data transparency, attribution, researcher access and basic levels of accountability. There's also some medium-hanging fruit if we talk about online harms. This is possible. This is urgent. This absolutely needs to happen.

The second is around civic resilience infrastructure, particularly in the information environment but also thinking a little more broadly. The major program in the space of the digital citizen initiative is sunsetting. There are other programs that are sunsetting at the moment, coming out of Heritage and other spaces. This is an opportunity to think about what we want to invest. I was heartened to see there's this $31.5-million investment in improved capability to protect our information environment from foreign adversaries, but the civic resilience side is lagging behind, and that absolutely needs to be a priority over the next year.

The last thing I'll say, if the chair will permit it, is that we have two very important moments. The Quebec election is coming up. The Alberta referendum is likely to occur at the end of the year. These are critical moments for our democracy. Information integrity is absolutely critical to those being successful democratic exercises.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

We'll now turn to Mr. Blask for five minutes, please.

[Chris Blask, Chief Executive Officer, QuietWire]

Thank you, Chair and members of the committee, for the invitation.

My name is Chris Blask. I'm co-founder and CEO of QuietWire, a Canadian AI infrastructure company. My work lives at the intersection of cybersecurity, institutional trust, community memory and practical AI deployment.

I want to start with a simple claim. Civic resilience is not mainly a messaging problem. It is an infrastructure problem. When people stop trusting institutions and trusting what they hear, when they no longer know where local truth lives and where institutions feel distant, and when communities lose the ability to interpret events together, that's when resilience starts to fail. When that happens, no amount of centralized messaging fixes it. You cannot “communication strategy” your way out of a trust deficit.

Resilience starts closer to the ground than that. It starts in communities that still know themselves: communities that can still remember what happened, still recognize who they trust, still connect present events with shared meaning and still act through human relationships. That may sound abstract, but in practice it is very concrete. A resilient community needs trusted people, shared memory, credible local institutions and tools that help people make sense of events without taking agency away from them. This is where I think Canada should focus.

At QuietWire, that is a direction we're building towards: local practical AI systems that help communities, institutions and businesses preserve continuity, strengthen memory and remain legible to themselves over time. That's not as a replacement for people and not as a centralized platform that hoovers up data, but as infrastructure that supports human judgment, stewardship and local trust. That is not the only answer to this problem, but I do believe that it is a useful Canadian answer.

A lot of the public conversation around civic resilience drifts very quickly towards disinformation, moderation, platform policy and centralized response. Those things matter, but they are downstream. If people feel like they're only being spoken to and managed, corrected or nudged, that does not build resilience. It usually does quite the opposite. People become more resilient when they are better connected to one another, when they can see themselves reflected in their institutions, and when they have real ownership over the systems that shape local understanding. That is where AI becomes useful as a tool for continuity, recall, interpretation and service at the local level.

Used properly, AI can help communities preserve knowledge, access memory, support education, strengthen institutional continuity and help a place remain legible to itself over time. Importantly, this does not have to mean only the largest institution with the largest budgets. Canada can support approaches that are accessible to ordinary municipalities, libraries, indigenous communities, schools and small and medium-sized organizations as well, and that matters.

It's a different thing from using AI to manufacture consensus or push narratives from the top down. I think that distinction is one of the most important ones that this committee can make. A healthy approach to civic resilience is not centralized narrative management. It is distributed, human-anchored, community-owned capability. If I were to leave you with three practical recommendations, it would be these.

First, treat civic resilience as infrastructure—not just as a communications concern, but as something that deserves real support, experimentation and long-term institutional backing.

Second, invest in community memory and trust systems. Municipalities, libraries, indigenous communities, schools and local civic bodies are all places that need tools that help preserve knowledge, maintain continuity and support local meaning-making.

Third, support human stewards, not just technology. Every system that actually works still depends on trusted people on the ground. If Canada wants resilience, it should be backing the people who hold local trust: educators, librarians, archivists, municipal leaders, operators and community custodians.

My central point is this. Canada will not become more civically resilient by becoming more centralized, more abstract or more managerial. It will become more resilient by becoming more local, more legible, more trusted and more connected from the community up.

Thank you very much for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much. We'll now go to questions from members.

We'll start with Mr. Van Popta for six minutes, please.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley Township—Fraser Heights, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for coming here today and sharing their wisdom and knowledge with us as we undertake this study on the state of civic resilience in Canada today.

Mr. Gunn, maybe I'll start with you.

You talked about voter engagement and the work that your organization has been doing in encouraging young people to get involved. I think that work has borne some fruit. I understand that in the last election, in 2025, voter participation among younger people went up.

However, overall, our voter turnout is not that great. There was a record turnout of 80% back in 1958, in the John Diefenbaker landslide. That's sort of the benchmark, and it's been sliding since then. It sort of bumps up and down a bit. Provincially, sometimes it's very low, and in by-elections, it's particularly low. Perhaps you could comment on voter turnout and how that ties into a sense of civic resilience.

[Taylor Gunn]

Sure. Just to clarify, I haven't been with Civix for four years, but I was just kind of reflecting on my past time here at the committee. I still admire the work of that organization.

Also, Mr. Van Popta, I just want to congratulate you, because, of all of the committee members, you were in third place in the last federal election for the number of ballots cast in your electoral district by the kids, with just under 5,000.

[A voice]

Get out the vote.

[Taylor Gunn]

That's right. Good for you. Twenty-one schools in your electoral district participated.

When I was much younger, I thought that voter turnout was the best measure of the health of a democracy. I still think it's a clue, but I don't think it's the best measure. I think we have a different, generational interpretation of a sense of civic duty into electoral participation. That doesn't make me happy or comfortable with the decline in voter turnout. You're right that we've seen some hope in the recent federal election and in some of the other past recent federal elections, with youth voter turnout. Thank goodness Elections Canada actually monitors and studies that.

I think I'm not entirely uncomfortable with the change. I think we just need to acknowledge it. I still also don't think we should give up on a sense of civic duty. I also don't think we should believe that clicktivism, whatever that means, is a replacement for electoral participation. I think that it's a fundamental act of citizenship, and we should always treat it as such. We need continued actions, which would be great, with more investments in civic education.

Chris was a fantastic witness. I don't know Chris personally, other than from a couple of LinkedIn messages, but his concept of community and of bottom-up rather than top-down in how you look at some of these issues around civic resilience is something I firmly believe in. I think we need to keep working at it. It's not something to give up on. It's not going to be fixed overnight. We all have a role to play—even you in how you are on committee, how you are in the House and how you are at home—in people's trust in institutions.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley Township—Fraser Heights, BC]

Mr. Bridgman, I'll just bring it over to you.

You talked about where Canada is in regulating platforms, and I think that you're being critical of Canada being a laggard there. However, we do have Bill C-18, which became law in the last Parliament. Again, we're talking about civic resilience and civic engagement, so is Bill C-18 a net benefit or a net detraction from that, in your opinion?

[Aengus Bridgman]

The link that is very explicitly drawn is the quality of Canadian journalism and the output of Canadian journalism in civic resilience. It has been a priority of the government that these two things be linked. Higher quality of production of information locally will ensure or help civic resilience. I think that concept, that idea, is fundamentally sound. What we want is to get high-quality, easily available information to every citizen to help them make informed decisions. That's where we should start from.

Now, on the question of whether or not Bill C-18 has been successful, there have been two major effects. One is $100 million a year from Google to support Canadian journalism. That means there are more journalists writing stories and more availability. Maybe that's good, but there's been this enormous harm that has been done, which is that news is now not widely available on Facebook and Instagram. I think that decision by Meta to remove news was not written in stone. There is the chain here. There's Bill C-18, and then there's the Meta decision.

I think the Meta decision largely relies on a loophole. The loophole here is that they have interpreted very directly that news outlets cannot post and individuals cannot post news links. They have said that because those two things are not happening, they are not a news distributor. They are a news distributor, though. If you ask Canadians today where they get their news—you can ask them, we have published results on this—they will say they get their news from Facebook and Instagram. That's where they go to get their news.

We have an impossible situation here. We are saying that they are not subject to this law. They are not paying into this fund, because they are not news distributors. At the same time, depending on the platform, 40% to 50% of Canadians are saying they get their news on that platform. It's an inherent contradiction and one that I am deeply concerned about. It speaks to all sorts of challenges here, but I think that absolutely needs to continue to be considered.

The other piece here about Bill C-18 that is really an ongoing question is its applicability to AI platforms. In the AI news audit that I mentioned, if you go to any AI chatbot today and ask about a recent Canadian news event, it will provide you—and our study documents this in what I would say is painful detail—with a proximate substitute to the Canadian journalists' content, and it will do so by fetching the journalists' content, packaging it and providing it to you as its own product.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much. I'm sorry, but we're over time.

We'll go to Mrs. Vandenbeld, please, for six minutes.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much. I want to thank all three of the witnesses for some very good ideas.

I want to start with you, Professor Gunn, because of course, through your work with Civix, you do things like connect young people to their elected representatives, helping to demystify the process. I really like the word you used when you talked about attachment. I wanted to follow up on that, because I think this is one of our challenges. I've often said people have stopped listening to each other. They're getting that feedback loop in their social media—the polarization.

I wonder if you can talk about the need to have forums where people of differing views could talk to each other, hear each other and have discussions. I'm thinking of things they have in the U.S., like Search for Common Ground or Millions of Conversations, where they have dinner parties with people of differing views. One thing that I do every Friday is have an open Zoom coffee hour with constituents. Anybody can join. They set the topics, and people hear each other.

Can you tell us a bit about what we can do as a government to support that kind of conversation and attachment?

[Taylor Gunn]

I'll try. It's a tricky one.

We also need to remember that we have some things that disattach us from each other. I'd say screens it's in general. That's been documented for a long time. When I started working in schools in 2002-03, I remember how offensive it was to consider something like a corporate logo on an in-school poster. I remember that, and I took it seriously, because schools are sacred places. Just a few years later, every kid in the school board was getting a Gmail address. I wondered if there was a bit of hypocrisy in saying you couldn't have a corporate logo, but everybody could have a Gmail address.

I'm sorry to say it, but I think we were also delusional about the benefits of technology in schools continuing to bind kids to screens as a form of learning. There are some people I can recommend who would speak about how that hasn't worked for students. We have things that work against us all the time.

If you bring people together in person, you don't find polarization. Part of it is that you lose your social capital if you say some of the things in person that you would say online, and you're also not anonymous. For a long time, everyone was thinking we should meet young people where they are, presuming that they were on Instagram. I don't think that was ever a good idea. We should always have been doing things in person. I know it's more expensive, but I think we might now be waking up to the idea that maybe great things are just more expensive.

There's also a role to play.... This isn't me being mean or inconsiderate, but how you all treat each other publicly does some role modelling for people in terms of how we talk to each other. The worse you speak to each other, the more okay it is for people not to speak kindly to each other. We have a really bad example of that close to us, but not in our country. Educators tell people that kids will role model what they see from the highest voices in the land. It's just something to factor into this type of thing.

None of it, Ms. Vandenbeld, is easy. It's a work in progress. The more we're off these devices, the more socially cohesive we are naturally.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Mr. Blask, you said some interesting things. You said that the concern about disinformation is downstream. Building on this idea of the human connection, reinforcing those connections, memories, institutions, I wonder if you could talk about the same thing.

Could you also speak about the productive and constructive ways of engagement? Through social media, there can also be ways of engagement that can create more polarization and distrust in institutions. Could you talk about that in the context of your work?

[Chris Blask]

I've spent most of the last 35 years focusing on cyber-resilience, cybersecurity and so forth. That's taken me down all the paths globally, in nation states, organizations and all kinds of conflict spaces.

In the last seven years, I've been focusing on supply chain security. I've been chairing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security supply chain information-sharing working groups, talking with a global cohort on how we can get trust across supply chains in the world we're in and not just with current events. It's getting fractally more complicated.

What we see in social media or what we call social media is similar to what we see in other infrastructure. There's a level of immaturity that does not yet hold the reality of the relationships that we express in business and in this context, in civil communities and so forth.

My view and our view is that all these issues need to be solved locally, and we finally have the tech and so forth to do that. We ended up with centralized control with Google and all these big things, not because that's the way the Internet was intended to be built but because that's what worked at the time. I think we're fortunate that a number of technical evolutions are coming together at about the time we really need to take it away from the cloud and put it in the local community.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

I'm going to have to interrupt you there. Thank you so much.

We're going to turn to Madame DeBellefeuille for six minutes.

To our witnesses, if you don't speak French, you can put in your earphones.

Mr. Blask, make sure that you're on the French translation service.

Mrs. DeBellefeuille, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Beauharnois—Salaberry—Soulanges—Huntingdon, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

This is the francophone part of the meeting. I suggest you practise your French.

Mr. Chair, I would like to thank the interpreters, who are here in person.

I can attest to the fact that I'm getting excellent interpretation. I thank them very much. I know it's not always easy when you don't have the text in front of you. I sincerely thank them. I can do that because I see them. I see their smiles and they see my expression. They will be able to interpret my remarks correctly.

Mr. Gunn, I agree with you that the environment our young people find themselves in lacks humanity. In addition, we don't instill critical thinking skills in our children to help them become good citizens. We raise children who believe everything they read. We know very well that their sources of information are limited to social media. However, at present, social media, by the way it is built, always suggests what we want to hear. It doesn't develop critical thinking and nuance in our children.

We see that even in adults today. As a member of Parliament, I get a lot of emails from people who tell me that they have read something, so it must be true. Critical thinking is disappearing, as is societal acceptance of nuance. That leads people to think that anyone who doesn't agree with them is against them.

It's hard today to have a healthy debate and formulate arguments for or against something. I find that social media is a cancer on our society, quite frankly, because it doesn't train humans in a way that develops their critical thinking skills.

I think mock election programs in schools were one tool. However, I think we need to go further in educating our children to help them develop a way to be good citizens while being very aware of the societal issues we face and the environment in which we live.

I agree with you 100%. Cities, provinces and the federal government must make an effort to fully understand that there are risks to limiting our children's ability to look at others with kindness. Being for or against means judging rather than accepting nuance. That, to me, is very concerning.

I agree with you, Mr. Bridgman, that there are things we can do at the federal level and that we're lagging behind when it comes to social media. It's not right, for example, for social media companies to decide to remove our local weeklies from their newsfeeds. Our local weeklies help us stay informed about what is happening locally, in our municipalities and in our communities.

That connection to our community has been severed by the fact that Meta, for example, refuses to share news. We tried to do something. I really admired Ms. Freeland for taking on Meta and telling it that it had to pay a levy so that we could better support and inform our communities. Now, the new government has decided to renege on that commitment to get Meta to pay its share.

What more could be done? I think Europe is much more forward thinking than we are in framing the power that the web giants have.

What can the state do, within its limits?

[Aengus Bridgman]

That's a great question.

There is certainly a problem with Meta in particular. Meta is clearly a player that is doing real damage right now, especially to local news. It's hard for the big chains in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, but it's much harder for small towns.

I come from Manitoba, where a number of small towns have a real problem. In my opinion, there are plenty of things we can do. First, there is already a law that could be enforced. I'm not a lawyer, but I see the situation. The big platforms are already distributing news. They're making a lot of money from promotion here in Canada, but Canada is timid. Right now, people are afraid to take on the big American companies in a number of regions. I understand the broader political context, but I'm wondering if timidity has helped us in the last couple of years.

Has timidity been helpful to us?

Has Canada managed to deal with platforms the way it wants to by being timid?

I think it's really useful to know how to act with the major artificial intelligence platforms. Changes are happening quickly. Now, there are major players, such as Google and Meta, but there are also OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity AI and Cohere.

If we don't apply restrictions, if we don't exercise our governance, all these players are going to do exactly the same things.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

You have five seconds.