Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 21st, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 29 of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3), the committee is meeting on its study of 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 and remotely using the Zoom application.

Before we continue, I'd ask all in-person participants to consult the guidelines written on the cards on their table. There's a short video. This is for the health and safety of all participants, especially our interpreters.

As a reminder, all comments should be addressed through the chair. For members in the room, if you wish to speak, raise your hand. For members on Zoom, if you wish to speak, use the “raise hand” feature.

I would like to welcome the witnesses for our first panel.

We have by video conference, as an individual, Ai-Men Lau, research assistant.

From the Canadian Constitution Foundation, we have Josh Dehaas, interim litigation director.

From the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, we have David Salvo, managing director, transatlantic policy and programming.

Each witness will have five minutes to deliver their opening remarks.

I will start with Mr. Dehaas, please.

You have five minutes.

[Josh Dehaas, Interim Litigation Director, Canadian Constitution Foundation]

Good morning, Mr. Chair and committee members.

My name is Josh Dehaas. I'm the interim litigation director for the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

The CCF is a legal charity that defends Canadians' rights and freedoms through communications, public education and public interest litigation. Over the past few years, our biggest focus has become freedom of speech, freedom of expression.

Today, I want to talk about how the erosion of freedom of expression in Canada is harming civic resilience and offer five specific ideas on how Parliament can reverse this erosion.

First, I want to offer a very brief lesson on freedom of expression. We all know that we have this charter right, but do we really know what it means and why it matters?

The concept is pretty simple. Freedom of expression is the idea that governments do not get to decide what people can and cannot say—that is, what ideas we may or may not express. While it's acceptable to put limits on harmful forms of expression like nuisance noise or to prevent immediate physical consequences like violence, a truly free country does not censor ideas.

The CCF is doing its best to educate the public about this ancient freedom with our free high school course packs for civics teachers, our Not Reserving Judgment podcast, our freedom of expression book and our free expression course, available at theccf.ca/learn. Many of us fail to understand that freedom of expression is the oil that keeps the democratic engine chugging along.

As the Supreme Court has recognized, it's only when all of us are allowed to express our ideas freely, no matter how unpopular, distasteful or contrary to the mainstream, that we're able to get to the truth of matters and govern ourselves as a democracy.

Free speech is a necessary component of progress, because throughout history the majority viewpoint has so often turned out to be wrong. Galileo was persecuted for saying the earth revolves around the sun. Mahatma Gandhi was jailed for advocating against British colonial rule. Gays and lesbians were fired from government jobs for advocating for gay rights.

The reality is, when governments censor, it holds back progress for all of us.

Freedom of expression is also an essential component of human dignity. When people are told by their democratic institutions to be quiet, they no longer feel they have an equal right to participate in their democracy. This leads to frustration, anger, distrust and political polarization.

Censorship of social media is part of the reason so many people believe there's a secret cabal controlling them through the World Economic Forum. Censorship of information related to COVID-19 is part of what led to the extreme frustration of the “freedom convoy”.

In that spirit, I want to offer five ways for the government to help reverse this erosion and restore freedom of expression.

First, the government should repeal the Online News Act. The Online News Act has caused quality mainstream news stories to disappear from Facebook and Instagram. The result is that organizations like my own can't post op-eds or quality news stories, but dangerous demagogues can spread fact-free commentary and AI-generated slop.

Second, governments should repeal subsection 319(2.1) of the Criminal Code, which threatens imprisonment for the promotion of “antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust”. Parliament should resist calls to ban condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system.

Of course, this type of speech can cause pain, but punishing speech because it causes emotional pain is unconstitutional. As Justice Beverley McLachlin warned in her dissent in the 1990 Keegstra case, hate speech restrictions chill an enormous amount of valuable speech without actually stopping hatred. In fact, these laws may make hatred spread faster, because they trigger conspiratorial thinking and they turn monsters into martyrs.

Third, if the Senate amends Bill C-9 to restore the good-faith religious speech defence, the House of Commons should accept that amendment. Removing this exemption has caused religious people across the country to fear persecution for expression of faith-based beliefs.

Fourth, Parliament should say no to the online harms act once and for all. While we can debate what age limit might be appropriate for children to access social media, all previous versions of this act would have given federal regulators control over the speech adults may see online. Most concerning in this proposal is the proposal to create a digital safety commission to block harmful content. This will lead only to censorship of ideas. Australia's eSafety Commission has very quickly turned into a thought police, and Canada need not go down this divisive and dangerous path.

Finally—

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

I apologize. I'm going to have to cut you off unless you have 10 seconds left.

[Josh Dehaas]

My final point is that parliamentarians should resist attempts to censor expression by regulating the speech that AI is allowed to express.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

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

[David Salvo, Managing Director, Transatlantic Policy and Programming, Institute for Strategic Dialogue]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.

My name is David Salvo. I represent the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a transatlantic civil society organization that focuses on countering extremist, terrorist and authoritarian threats to democracy. I'm based in Washington, D.C., but my work often brings me to Canada. This is not because Canada's democracy is comparatively brittle; there's plenty to keep me busy where I permanently reside.

All democracies require constant vigilance. In the face of an increasingly complex threat environment, it's critical to invest even more in civic resilience in Canada.

An interweaving nexus of foreign state actors, non-state actors and domestic extremists of all ideological manifestations seeks to divide Canadians and undermine their trust in institutions at all levels of government. Moreover, the information ecosystem that creates the conditions for many of these threats to metastasize is itself becoming more complex and conducive to facilitating real-world harms.

ISD's digital analysis shows how crises off-line can translate into Canadian communities' being directly targeted online. A major world event such as the Israel-Hamas war produces spikes of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Violent incidents such as the tragic school shooting in Tumbler Ridge spark a dramatic rise of online hate speech, in this case targeting the LGBTQ community.

My organization's study of anti-South Asian hate online in Canada found that between 2023 and 2024, such activity increased by 1,350%. This followed a four-year period in which police-reported hate crimes against South Asians increased by over 200%.

In general, we've witnessed a rise in domestic extremism in Canada, including white supremacist groups that increasingly mobilize off-line through various social clubs and whose online activity either incites violence or, even when the groups are engaging in lawful speech, serves to drive polarization and isolate marginalized communities, such as those of migrants. This all has implications for democratic resilience.

Amidst this backdrop, there are foreign interference operations that seek to intimidate Canadian citizens, undermine the integrity of Canadian elections and further polarize Canadian society. This committee knows those details quite well, so I won't belabour the point. Increasingly, though, these foreign operations are targeting local governance, critical social services and specific communities divorced from electoral contexts. Strengthening civic resilience will also require building better defences against these foreign interference threats at the local level.

The good news is that a vibrant civil society in Canada is eager to scale up its activity to address this hybridized landscape of online and off-line threats. For it to do so, there must be resources for civic actors and community leaders at the local and municipal levels. I therefore endorse the recommendation made by other witnesses before this committee to establish a non-partisan Canadian democracy fund that would provide greater opportunities to support civic resilience work in Canada. I also believe that by investing in democratic resilience, government will pave the way for Canadian philanthropy to step up its own investment in this work, which is important.

There are also the longer-term challenges in the information space that Canada must address. Regulation of big tech is not a panacea—I want to be clear—and it will inevitably draw the ire of powerful players to Canada's south. Nevertheless, I think there should be a coherent legislative mechanism that demands companies allow algorithmic transparency to understand how these platforms are curating speech rather than facilitating a true marketplace of ideas. To protect expression, Canadians should be able to appeal and seek redress when companies make incorrect content moderation decisions that do not align with Canadian law or their own terms of service.

Together with trusted allies, Canada should also begin to invest in long-term digital sovereignty that gives Canadians meaningful alternatives to foreign-owned systems. This doesn't refer just to AI and data sovereignty, in which Canada has already taken some strides to bolster its domestic capabilities; it also refers to establishing digital infrastructure and an online information ecosystem that advance democratic principles and don't facilitate threats to Canada's national security and democracy.

The fact that Canadians cannot access news articles on Meta Platforms, as my colleague has already outlined, is but one example of a glaring vulnerability. Leaving critical decisions that shape how Canadians separate fact from opinion and truth from misinformation to foreign-owned behemoths has implications for Canada's civic resilience. A Canada that's less prone to the whims of foreign big tech will be a more resilient one.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

Ms. Lau, you have five minutes.

[Ai-Men Lau, Research Assistant, As an Individual]

Good morning, committee members and honourable Chair.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this important issue.

I'd also like to thank the technical staff and the interpreters for their hard work.

My name is Ai-Men Lau. I'm currently an independent research assistant, but for the past three years I was based in Taiwan working at the civil society organization Doublethink Lab, where I researched foreign information and influence operations targeting Taiwan and the international community. While the views I present today are my own, my testimony draws on some research conducted at DoubleThink Lab by my colleagues and me.

Past testimonies on civic resilience at this committee have highlighted a number of factors that have provided fertile ground for polarization, including distance from and distrust of democratic institutions, a lack of transparency and rising economic anxiety. These social cleavages can be and have been exploited by adversaries. I've seen how foreign information manipulation and interference, or FIMI, poses a threat to civic resilience. I was also fortunate to observe how Taiwan's civil society has risen to the challenges of countering FIMI.

I want to stress this: I recognize that Taiwan's model of resilience may not be appropriate for the Canadian context, but I believe there are valuable lessons that Canada can draw from it. In Doublethink Lab's report entitled “Taiwan POWER: A Model for Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference Resilience”, author Ben Graham Jones noted, “Taiwan’s resilience is primarily driven from the bottom-up. Government plays a role as a funding body and in providing overarching directions regarding the significance and nature of the threat, but action is decentralized.”

An example of this decentralized action can be found in Taiwan's Cofacts, a volunteer-driven fact-checking service. The initial verification is done by a volunteer. It is then sent to the user. However, should other volunteers disagree with the initial verification, they can send their own verification to the users, who in turn can make an informed decision. A peer-reviewed study by Andy Zhao found that the crowdsourced fact-checking was as accurate as that of professional sources.

I bring up Cofacts as an example because Mr. Chris Blask from QuietWire, in previous testimony, made a profound point on how community can help people make sense of events without losing agency, which in turn strengthens civic resilience. The Cofacts model is certainly not the sole solution or strategy to countering FIMI, but it is one of many that have emerged from Taiwan's vibrant civil society. However, this vibrancy is in jeopardy, as Taiwan's civil society and resilience are not immune to the challenges of unstable, inconsistent and diminished funding, especially in the past two years. Civil society and resilience cannot be built on a foundation of precarity, whether in Taiwan or at home in Canada. As other witnesses before me have recommended, I'd also recommend that the committee examine ways in which the Canadian government can create a long-term, sustainable funding strategy to support Canada's civil society.

Finally, given my work, I'd be remiss not to mention the impact of a different kind of foreign interference on civic resilience, which is transnational repression. Citizen Lab, and my own research conducted at Doublethink Lab on this subject matter, have highlighted the ramifications of transnational repression for diaspora communities. Such ramifications range from impacts on mental health to widespread self-censorship and fear of political participation.

Furthermore, there is a vacuum of cultural and language-appropriate civic education resources for diaspora communities, which have been exposed to exploitation from adversaries. My recommendation is that the government also consider funding initiatives that not only translate resources but also design outreach and engagement to incorporate community perspectives and practices. In other words, they would meet these communities where they are.

Thank you. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

We'll now go to questions.

Mr. Van Popta, you have six minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being here and for sharing your insights with us on this important study on civic resilience and the state of it in Canada today.

Mr. Dehaas, I'll start with you. Your organization is involved with public interest litigation. You've commented on the litigation around the invocation of the Emergencies Act a couple of years ago. I think the trial court and the Federal Court of Appeal have both ruled that the invocation was done improperly and that it wasn't justified. It's now off to the Supreme Court of Canada, so I don't know how much you can comment on it.

My question is focused on what this has done to a Canadian sense of civic resilience, which is what we're talking about. I'm not talking about the mischief-makers, the people who were honking their horns and really making a nuisance, but about law-abiding citizens, the people who supported the truckers. For example, they may have donated money on the GoFundMe page. I had phone calls from some of them—good Canadian citizens, some of them good friends of mine—who said they were worried that the government was going to freeze their bank accounts. They wondered what they should do.

Perhaps you could comment on this. What does it do to a sense of civic resilience when a people's government turns on them in such an aggressive manner?

[Josh Dehaas]

The invocation of the Emergencies Act did great harm to civic resilience in Canada. It created a huge amount of mistrust in the government.

Regular Canadians were donating to a political cause. They were not necessarily donating to anything that was breaking the law or intending to break the law. They wanted to have their voices heard. Instead of going out and speaking with people who had these particular concerns or trying to address them in policy, the government decided to use an act that is normally reserved for extreme situations such as insurrections or wars, in order to create unprecedented laws that froze people's bank accounts. This has caused an immense amount of harm to civic resilience. People need to be able to donate to political causes without fearing that they will not be able to pay their grocery bills or rent.

Four judges of the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal found that the invocation of the act was unreasonable—the requirements of the act were not met, and using it violated charter rights. Now the government has appealed. We're hoping the Supreme Court of Canada agrees with the other four judges who have already looked at this question.

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

Thank you.

Mr. Salvo, I'm going to turn to you.

I'm very curious about your comments on digital security. I think you used the term “digital sovereignty”. You were critical of Meta, which you accused of being an international “foreign-owned behemoth”.

Are we better off with a Canadian-owned behemoth? Explain to me what digital sovereignty looks like. Was the problem with Meta or was it with Bill C-18?

[David Salvo]

Well, Meta's reaction to Bill C-18 and its decision to block legitimate Canadian news outlets on its platform has created an environment in which Canadians are encountering—as Josh rather articulately characterized it—AI slop and other forms of garbage, frankly, instead of legitimate, authoritative news sources. It's a real vulnerability. Canada's information environment and civic resilience are better served if there is an information ecosystem that doesn't take reactionary decisions, as Meta did in this case.

I don't think Canada necessarily has to create sovereign digital platforms that are solely Canadian, in essence, divorced from any international context or co-operation. Right now, the architecture is overwhelmingly owned by companies based in one country—two, if you want to count China and Chinese platforms. This is a national security risk. It's a risk to civic resilience and democracy.

Whether you're a free speech warrior or coming at this from a content moderation standpoint, there are vulnerabilities in allowing the Metas of the world to make these decisions on behalf of Canadian citizens, who have no insight into how these decisions are made.

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

I want to follow up on that.

You said we're allowing Meta to do things. How would we prevent Meta from doing them? They're a free company run by free-thinking people. They can make the decisions they want to on whether to co-operate with the federal government when negotiating with digital and traditional media people. It's a free choice.

If you had a Canadian company, how would it be any different?

[David Salvo]

My assumption is that a Canadian company might make a different decision in this regard. Its reaction to a bill like Bill C-18, whether it respects the bill or not, wouldn't be to ban news sources on its platform. That's the crux of the issue.

My argument is more that Canada is essentially letting foreigners dictate what Canadians encounter online, and it is a risk.

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

How else would you—

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

You're right at six minutes.

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

I'm just getting to the good part.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Well, you'll have plenty more opportunities. Maybe Mr. Jackson can share his time with you.

On that point, we'll go to Madame Kayabaga for six minutes.

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Thank you, Chair. Through you, I would like to welcome our witnesses.

Thank you for taking the time to engage with us on this very important study we're doing.

You're bang on with the comments you just made. I was the one making a bit of noise while agreeing with you.

You have a unique position. You've studied disinformation ecosystems globally. I wonder how you would assess Canada's current level of vulnerability compared with that of our allies.

[David Salvo]

Canada's in an interesting position because of its heterogeneity. There are tons of diaspora groups here, as our fellow witness online described in her testimony. This is a benefit to Canadian democracy, but it presents a vulnerability in the sense that foreign state actors, in particular, are directly targeting diaspora communities in Canada with an interest in either undermining their trust in Canadian elections and democracy or trying to get them to vote for particular candidates in an election.

I think it's increasingly designed to disrupt or destabilize trust in Canadian institutions at all levels of government. I'm seeing this in the United States and other countries too—removed from the context of elections—when wildfires hit or a hurricane hits and foreign state actors are targeting local communities and even ethnic minorities, trying to get them not to believe that the disaster relief being provided to them can be trusted.

There are all these ways that are conduits for foreign state interference, and there isn't enough investment at the local level in those civic organizations, in community leaders and in the trusted voices in those communities with respect to.... This resilience can't come from Ottawa, nor could it come from Washington in the United States or from another capital. We have to work to amplify and empower the people in those communities whose voices are trusted to get them to build up resilience measures themselves, rather than having these things dictated to them by the federal government.

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Do you know of any countries that have done this? Can you give examples? If they have been successful, what kinds of methods are they using?

[David Salvo]

I'll give the example of Moldova. It's a little less complex than Canada, the United States or a comparative country because there are two primary ethnic groups in Moldova, but the Russian ethnic minority is at the tip of the spear of Russian state interference operations.

Moldova had an election last year that could have gone either way. The choice was a pro-EU candidate or an anti-EU candidate. There was a lot of investment by the national government and local civic actors to spread to the community authoritative sources of information about what happens if you are the recipient of, say, a Russian text message telling you to take cryptocurrency from an unknown Russian-based entity or individual. There was a lot of civic empowerment to do outreach to an ethnic minority—and the ethnic majority—but it was at the local level.

There's a lot that we bigger democracies can learn from a small, emerging democracy like Moldova that has done this house-to-house, community-to-community work to build more civic resilience.

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

Do you think economic impacts and affordability could be used by these actors to target those they involve in disinformation?

[David Salvo]

Economic grievance has been the source of a lot of foreign state interference operations. It's also the source of a lot of genuine domestic grievance in our countries. People feel disempowered and disenfranchised, and they can't advance on their own. The sentiment is organic, but you have a lot of inorganic external interference amplifying those grievances because it's an easy threat vector for them. The mood, the sentiment and the disenchantment with the establishment and institutions are already baked into the fabric of those communities.