Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 21st, 2026

[David Salvo]

That's correct.

A lot of those groups are active online. Although there is some backlash against engaging online, and although we want to hold more town halls—those things are fine—the reality is that people are online, even in far-flung communities in rural environments far from Ottawa. There has to be a meaningful plan to engage these communities online. When you have platforms, for example, that disincentivize boring, authoritative sources in favour of polarizing, inflammatory content, there's an imbalance in the architecture for reaching those citizens. This doesn't mean having more regulation, but it does mean we need to understand why the information is designed so that election management bodies, for example, have a harder time reaching those communities than—

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

I'm going to have to cut you off there, unfortunately. You'll have further opportunities to expand on that.

We now go to Ms. Normandin for three minutes.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Salvo, in your opening remarks, you talked about both online and off-line threats, and the polarization that happens in the real world.

In terms of what people can and can't say online, you said the platforms tended to be less active in grey areas. Off-line, people have more freedom.

Are you seeing a rise in the number of people who take their polarizing narratives online into off-line spaces?

I think the phenomenon has been documented among alt-right and incel groups, and others.

Also, do you think greater regulation of online activity is a double-edged sword that could push more people off-line, where we could lose the ability to identify them? We could lose track of people who end up becoming extremely polarized.

[David Salvo]

That's a very interesting question. I hadn't heard it expressed in quite that way. Let me take a minute....

I think that a lot of the rise in off-line violence coincides with the rise of violent extremists or violent speech online. These trends are interlinked, with the online environment creating these opportunities for greater off-line expressions of violence.

There's a difference between regulating lawful speech and regulating violent speech. The platforms have...it's written in their own terms of service that they do not permit violent speech, yet violet speech on these platforms goes, maybe not unabated, but it certainly slips through the cracks quite significantly. My organization has done research showing how, even now, there's a rise in violent speech on many platforms.

I don't think it's coincidental that you then have greater numbers and incidents of violence targeting communities that are in the crosshairs online. I don't think that pushing people off-line will necessarily lead to our not being able to monitor or understand how these violent phenomena are expressed. However, I think we need to get a handle on the environments in which people are coming together to feed off one another. That's not happening exclusively online, but by and large, it's happening online.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you.

I'll bank your other 15 seconds for the future too.

Mr. Calkins, go ahead for five minutes, please.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Dehaas, if I can recap and get agreement with you about what you had to say, it is that the path forward should not be through government-mandated censorship online. I'm assuming you don't mean just platforms such as Meta, X or any of these other things, but also chat apps and these kinds of things. Do I have that right?

[Josh Dehaas]

Yes, that's right. Any form of censorship online creates more distrust. It creates more resentment. It makes people feel that they're left out. Even though we may disagree with the speech that they are putting forward, they need to be able to say that, whether it's on social media, in a chat or online generally.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

It's the “I disagree with what you have to say, but I'll defend, with my life, your right to say it” kind of mentality. Is that right?

[Josh Dehaas]

That's right. My personal view of freedom of expression is that if everybody has an equal opportunity to say things, even if they're considered distasteful, unpopular or contrary to the mainstream, it allows people to feel included in the democracy. It makes people have more trust in the process, and it's the way that we, first of all, identify problems with extreme views or harmful opinions, and fight back by including those people in the conversation rather than censoring them from the outset.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

You're saying it creates even further distrust if you try to use an authoritarian approach to clamp down on these things.

[Josh Dehaas]

That's right. Every time we see governments trying to put more and more regulations on what people can say online, we see more and more people leave that conversation. They're no longer engaging with the mainstream media or the civic institutions as they might have. They no longer want to go through the regular democratic channels of petitions and things like this. They become isolated, and it does more harm than good.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

As a last little follow-up, there are lots of different ways people can be censored. It can be by authoritarian laws by the state. There's also the cancel culture and shaming. There are other ways people can feel censored. What would you say about folks who engage in the kind of behaviour that indirectly censors people? How should we deal with that?

[Josh Dehaas]

I think free speech culture is important. Free speech is there to protect you against government censorship, but we should also have a free speech culture in which, when you hear ideas you don't like or you find difficult, you try to push back with reasoned argument instead of demanding censorship by someone else, because reasoned argument is how we come to agreements and figure out where the other side is coming from.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

I'll switch over to Mr. Salvo now.

Based on the conversations I've heard so far during the study—and even today from Ai-Men Lau, who has talked about crowdsourcing of fact-checking—we know that on platforms like X, for example, there can be community notes in which information is fact-checked. We have organizations like Snopes and others like the IFCN, with all of these people.

I think the real issue here is that disinformation by foreign state actors or their purposeful spread of misinformation—or even spreading it with ill intent—is a real and present thing. Somebody at a previous meeting asked what would happen if we got rid of the “like” button. However, instead of getting rid of the “like” button, maybe we should have a way for people to click on something and readily fact check it a little more prevalently than is now done on these media. There are lots of ways. AI can be used to do this. There are crowdsourcing organizations.

Is this a better way to build resilience? How would this work? What does your organization think of those kinds of notions?

[David Salvo]

I definitely think there should be methods to enable online users to understand the content they are encountering without that content's being censored. On this, I agree with Josh. Rather than censoring or taking down content, users who encounter AI-generated content or state-sponsored propaganda online should be free to encounter the content, but they should understand what they are encountering.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

Could this be an accreditation process that's mandated by government, or should it be organic?

[David Salvo]

I think you could have both organic processes and companies having labelling policies, for example. They're not uniformly or consistently enforced, but I think there are a lot of vehicles—absent, say, government regulation—that would allow for the labelling, understanding or contextualization of content on these platforms without having content moderation policies in place.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

Well, I think that's—

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

You have five seconds.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Ms. Vandenbeld, go ahead for five minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses.

I'm subbing at this committee for this study, and it's very similar to some of the testimony we're hearing right now in the subcommittee on international human rights. Whereas Canada used to be protected by our geography from a lot of these authoritarian international forces, I think we are in a situation now in which we're not anymore. They can get right into our children's phones, so we can't divorce Canadian democracy and civic resilience from global forces.

I'd like to start with a question for Ms. Lau, because we heard yesterday at our subcommittee that authoritarian national actors are working in a coordinated way and learning from what they're trying in different countries. When there's push-back, they learn from that, but when they get away with something in one country, they will replicate it in other countries. Democratic forces and legislators are not necessarily doing this kind of international learning and coordination—although, Ms. Lau, you shared some examples, including the really good example of Cofacts in Taiwan. I know of Rappler in the Philippines.

How do we better coordinate internationally to make sure that we are learning from one another and learning that what is happening globally is impacting us. We talked about a fund; we talked about different things, but how can we best do this? I'll start with Ms. Lau, and then I'll go to Mr. Salvo.

[Ai-Men Lau]

That's a great question.

What I've seen in the past few years, which is some good news for the committee, is further engagement with particular countries in the Indo-Pacific on the topic of disinformation, misinformation and FIMI.

I really think this committee should also consider how countries that are under significant stress from FIMI, such as Taiwan, and from domestic disinformation, such as the Philippines, are responding to the current threats and how they're moving in lockstep with these threats. Currently, Taiwan is thinking a lot about how to address AI, FIMI and such things.

I've seen more peer-to-peer relations, whether that's through engaging with community civil society actors.... However, what I've seen in my own experience is that it's from government to civil society actors. I'd like to see more civil society actors doing exchanges and having this facilitated more in thinking about how we can counter FIMI to share ideas and best practices.

In my organization, Doublethink Lab, every fall we have a conference called the IO, or Information Operations Roundtable, where we bring together actors from the Indo-Pacific to present on what they see in their countries and how they're trying to counter it.

We heard quite a bit from the Philippines as well in regard to how they're dealing with domestic disinformation there. This is where I learned the strategy of prebunking, which is a bit more novel to me.

Prebunking, for the committee, very quickly, is anticipating what types of disinformation and misinformation will happen in particularly sensitive times like elections. For example, I'm from Alberta. The Alberta referendum is coming up—or potentially coming up—so when you think about that....

What I mean is that I would not have been introduced to this idea if we hadn't brought those organizations in. I would like to suggest to the committee that peer-to-peer relationships are important. Relations from civil society to civil society are important as well.

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

Perhaps one thing Canada can do with this democracy fund is use its convening power to bring these groups together and share knowledge.

I see you nodding, Mr. Salvo. Please go ahead.