Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 21st, 2026

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

We've had a lot of witnesses appear here and advocate for a non-partisan, Canadian democracy fund to support civic engagement and resilience. What are your thoughts on that? How do you think the Government of Canada can do this in a non-partisan way?

[David Salvo]

I endorse the concept. At this moment in time, Canadian funds should be supporting Canadian initiatives. This is not to exclude the importance of, say, international development or doing pro-democracy work overseas, especially in the vacuum of American largesse abroad. At this moment in time, if there are resources the federal government can use to empower local actors in a non-partisan way, it should do that.

You will obviously need some sort of arm's-length intermediary to execute grants, implement funds and ensure that funds are actually being issued to actors of all political persuasions and for different causes, but I recommend the idea. I wish we had.... We have a lot of philanthropy in the United States, but I think this sort of mechanism should exist in many countries.

Canada would be leading the way for a lot of countries to take similar steps in the future if it did this.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

We're now going to Madame Normandin. Put your earpiece in. If you require it online, select the interpretation channel on Zoom.

Ms. Normandin, you may go ahead for six minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for contributing today. It's very appreciated.

Ms. Lau, I had the pleasure of meeting you at Doublethink Lab's offices. You talked about what causes polarization. Again today, you discussed declining transparency and rising anxiety, which hostile actors use to further polarize society.

I'd like to hear your views on the core drivers of citizen resilience. You said that civil society in Taiwan has really organized to address the issue.

Is it true that the bigger the threat, the more people mobilize? It may seem counterintuitive; it's logical that people would want to protect their own safety in the face of a major threat, but the opposite is happening in Taiwan. The people there are very active.

What is driving Taiwan's population to mobilize, and what examples should we draw on?

[Ai-Men Lau]

Yes, that's a great question.

Here, I think Taiwan might diverge in terms of whether this would be appropriate to the Canadian context.

Ben Graham Jones's report, which I mentioned in my testimony, noted that a lot of the actors in civil society have a shared sense of purpose. Resilience isn't driven by a single organization or a shared strategic plan but a sense of purpose. This was really borne out during the sunflower movement in Taiwan, which protested a trade agreement with the then ruling KMT and China. The success of that grassroots protest movement really embedded a civic society mentality that “we can do it” and “we should galvanize”.

Further events later on, such as FIMI's targeting certain local elections in Taiwan, really galvanized people to build up a civil society and various initiatives in Taiwan.

Now, that sustainability has also really continued, as we see sunflower movement leaders become members of Parliament or heads of the civic society organizations. That sustainability, though, is under threat. This is another lesson for Canada. Taiwanese youth voters are facing the same challenges as Canadian youths. They are getting more concerned about rising economic anxiety, rising housing prices and low wages. They're less concerned about the threat of invasion. We saw that reflected in the last few elections as well. That's another threat to civic resilience.

It also has to think about how domestic factors are impacted, as well as the international context of how FIMI can leverage those factors to threaten civic resilience.

There are lessons here. Taiwanese citizens did not feel as though they were reflected, in 2014, in their democratic institutions. Those movements have then had a further impact on why we see a vibrant and innovative civil society.

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

I'd like to ask you a question about Cofacts.

How much credibility does it have with the population, considering that the fact-checking is peer-based? Here, we have Les décrypteurs and other TV shows that do fact-checking, but it takes a while for wrong information to be corrected.

Could you talk about how quickly the Cofacts process works and how much credibility it carries with people?

[Ai-Men Lau]

There is a great article from Cornell Tech called “Crowdsourced Fact-Checking Fights Misinformation in Taiwan”. It explores this question of how quick, trustworthy and credible Cofacts is. It found that a lot of the volunteers were vectors of information. They were able to disseminate credible information much more quickly than state or media agencies that do fact-checking. It said that they respond faster than journalists, mostly because they repurpose a lot of articles, work and media and disseminate them to the community much faster than a top-down approach could maybe do.

The article found Cofacts to be just as accurate as professional sources. I will say that Cofacts employs a pluralistic and participatory model of fact-checking, which is often seen as a more top-down approach. In a very small sample, it was found that Taiwanese graduate students found articles by journalists to be more persuasive, but Cofacts' posts were much clearer. That's how the model works. I would just say this is a much more decentralized effort.

One of its key unique features is that it has volunteers with diverse backgrounds, who are able to give multiple verifications if they don't agree with the initial verification that's done. You have a community working together. I should also say that users can upvote or downvote the perceived the quality of the verification that is done to build further trust. I recommend looking into the Cofacts model for inspiration.

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

Thank you.

Mr. Chair, I'll keep my last few seconds for the next round.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

We'll go to Mr. Jackson for five minutes, please.

[Grant Jackson, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Chair, I'm going to defer my time to Mr. Van Popta.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

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

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

Thank you.

We'll continue our conversation, Mr. Salvo, talking about what you call digital sovereignty. I like the idea, and we're going to be writing a report at the end of the study, perhaps with recommendations. I would like to see a recommendation around enhancing Canada's digital sovereignty as a way of enhancing our civic resilience.

We need to know more about what this looks like. You talked about the foreign-owned behemoth Meta not playing nicely with us, but there's another foreign-owned behemoth that played quite nicely with us. I wonder how a Canadian-owned social media platform you were suggesting might be better behaved. How would that be?

For a foreign-owned social media platform to become big and effective, let's say it's going to be headquartered in Vancouver instead of 200 kilometres away in Seattle. How's it going to be better? To grow, it's probably going to have to offer an IPO. Does it make a difference to you whether it does it on the TSX or the New York Stock Exchange?

[David Salvo]

First, I should say that I don't think a Canadian information environment should be or can be fenced off from national borders, so I don't think there will be a company that is solely Canadian. The investment of resources and time to generate an environment that would provide a meaningful alternative to what currently exists would take a generation.

My argument is that there's no time to lose. Canada has to work with like-minded, trusted allies and partners. Whether it's a social media platform or whether it's AI systems, Canada has a position now to really drive this debate with, say, Europe and other non-American Five Eyes partners to create another ecosystem.

Yes, some of that will involve private companies, and those private companies may indeed behave in ways that are different from how some of the American companies do. Some of the American companies behave differently from Meta, as you identified. Google reacted differently, ultimately, than Meta did.

However, when you have an information environment simply dominated by American media and platforms that also disincentivize the sharing of Canadian news sources, that is not in service of Canadians' being well-informed about what's happening here.

This is really the crux of my argument, not that Canada must create a Facebook equivalent that's only owned by Canadians and has no foreign users. That's not the vision. The vision is more that right now, decisions are essentially made in Silicon Valley on behalf of Canadian interests. I don't think they're actually working on behalf of Canadian interests.

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

Understood, but they are free companies—

[David Salvo]

They are free companies.

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

—run and operated by free-thinking individuals. I know you would never advocate for more authoritarianism, whether it is from the Kremlin or from Ottawa.

[David Salvo]

I would not, and I think Meta made a decision as a foreign-owned company. It has that right.

I think Canada, as a sovereign nation, has a right to react to that decision and determine what's in the best interest of its democracy and its citizens. Allowing the current environment to continue status quo is not in service of that vision. Canada is in a position to do something about that. I don't advocate that Canada should somehow regulate even more or penalize Meta. Meta made its decision. However, standing pat doesn't solve anything either.

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

I appreciate the insights, but with all due respect, you're not leaving us much to put in a report about digital sovereignty for Canada. I understand it's a challenge to find that.

[David Salvo]

It is a challenge, and I think one good step that started is creating, say, sovereign data centres here so that private data is being stored on Canadian servers, on Canadian territory. That is a good step towards establishing digital sovereignty, but as I mentioned, there has to be long-term investment in recreating or replicating the current information environment as it exists, because the alternative is that we're all comfortable with the current architecture.

If there's a recommendation to ask about, it is this: Can there be incentives for Canadian companies to establish the same sort of infrastructure that currently exists but is owned by foreign entities? Tax breaks and the like are incentives for companies to get off the couch and do something about it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

I'm going to have to cut you off there.

We'll now turn to Madame Brière for five minutes, please.

[Élisabeth Brière, Liberal, Sherbrooke, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome to our three witnesses. Thank you for being with us today.

Mr. Salvo, I will ask my question in French.

In the 2018 report “The ASD Policy Blueprint for Countering Authoritarian Interference in Democracies”, you point to political polarization and the decline of trust as vulnerabilities. Do those two things affect civic engagement? What can we do to make sure that citizens participate constructively in democracy?

[David Salvo]

Yes, polarization and lack of trust hamper meaningful participation in democracy, although I think that in countries like Canada, people still, by and large, show up to the polls and vote, including young people, and that's encouraging.

What's disadvantageous to a healthy democracy is if citizens, especially young people, increasingly feel as though institutions aren't working on their behalf or helping them advance in their lives. This creates a rife environment for foreign actors and non-state actors to simply amplify polarization.

To counter this, there are Canadian civil society groups that work with specific communities across this country to help empower citizens to participate in their democracy in a meaningful way. There are groups focused on youth. There are groups focused on diaspora communities. There are groups focused on migrants, which integrate them and assimilate them into the norms of Canadian civic life. However, they are under-resourced.

This is one of the main vulnerabilities that the Canadian democracy fund backers are trying to address for this reason. I know this as a representative of a civil society organization that operates in Canada. Funding is complicated here. Canadian philanthropy is not at the same level, for example, as American philanthropy or even European philanthropy. There's a real resource gap in doing this work at scale in Canadian communities, and this is something that the government and the committee can help address.

[Élisabeth Brière, Liberal, Sherbrooke, QC]

You brought up youth, and I want to stay on that topic.

Various organizations work to get young people involved in democracy. How, though, can we tailor the message to different audiences, youth, marginalized communities and people in rural areas, for example, without watering down the core message?

[David Salvo]

We have to work through trusted messengers in those communities, as I mentioned earlier. I can't show up in a rural community in Canada and be a credible voice for why media and digital literacy is important, why a young person should show up to the polls and vote, or why they should volunteer on behalf of a political campaign. I'm not the right person to do this, but there are messengers in those communities or leaders of those communities who are. There are organizations, and I know one of the prior witnesses in front of this committee runs a civil society group that works across this country with youth groups. She understands who the right people are in those communities to serve as those voices. I think those pathways exist. It's just a matter of identifying the credible people to serve as trusted messengers.

[Élisabeth Brière, Liberal, Sherbrooke, QC]

I think reaching those audiences is another challenge, because they don't get their information from traditional sources. Do you agree?