Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to the members of the committee for the invitation to appear today. I would also like to take a moment to thank the interpreters and the technical support team.
I'm an assistant professor at the department of defence studies at the Canadian Forces College, but I appear today in my individual capacity and the views I offer are my own.
Over the past four years, my research has focused on threats in the digital information environment, particularly on how these threats impact several of Canada's ethnocultural diaspora communities. My own thinking around these topics has shifted over time, from how we can counter disinformation to how we can build and sustain trust. This reframes matters because it conceptualizes trust as both an input into democratic governance and an outcome of it.
My remarks today address three dimensions of this challenge.
First, there is the threat landscape. Canada is not immune to the geopolitical and technological pressures affecting liberal democracies more broadly. Internationally, this is unfolding alongside prolonged democratic backsliding, creeping authoritarianism and increasing strain on the rules-based international order, multilateral co-operation and the post-war international security system.
Threats are increasingly hybrid, spanning digital, cyber, social, economic and physical domains, with technologies advancing at a rapid pace. The low barrier to entry means that a wider range of adversarial state and non-state actors operate persistently below the threshold that would trigger a conventional state response. These activities are persistent, cumulative and corrosive.
The second dimension I'd like to emphasize is the impacts of these threats and how they are unevenly distributed.
Ethnocultural diaspora communities live in layered, complex and transnational information environments. They use private and encrypted chat and direct messaging applications at rates exceeding Canadian averages. More than 80% of our survey respondents belong to at least one internationally scoped chat group. For these communities, disinformation is often shaped by home country political dynamics, the ebb and flow of information across platforms and foreign-driven narratives.
Moreover, there is also an added layer of harms for these communities. Members of these communities reported being the targets of xenophobic and discriminatory disinformation circulating within Canada. In our own survey, 44% of respondents reported emotional harms. At the group level, 46% reported experiencing hate because of disinformation on social media, while 51% reported feeling marginalized. These communities often experience fear, intimidation, information overload, self-censorship and even threats to their physical safety and security. All of this can impact civic engagement.
This leads to the question of what we can do and why we should do it.
To enhance and deepen civic resilience in Canada, we need to bring civil society back in and to resource it properly. Civil society organizations operate as trusted intermediaries in the digital spaces in which these communities engage and share information. They are also often the first to understand how information threats manifest on the ground. Microgrants tied to measurable outcomes, longer horizon funding for established organizations and genuine co-design of resilience programming are strategic investments.
Civil society can also function as a force multiplier in this rapidly shifting threat environment. It extends the reach, legitimacy, cultural fluency and local knowledge of a durable and resonant resilience strategy that cannot be easily replicated. For below-threshold threats, civil society organizations can help detect emerging harms, prebunk harmful narratives, build community awareness, strengthen information literacy and reinforce democratic participation.
Civil society also serves as an added benefit as a critical feedback mechanism for government by identifying how institutional arrangements, policies and interventions are being experienced on the ground in ways that can help inform policy-making.
Civic resilience is a relationship that must be continually renewed and nurtured. The government's role is not to manage the relationship from above but to create the conditions for it to flourish from below. That means centering trust, investing in our most vulnerable communities and treating civic engagement as a democratic value to be protected.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.