Evidence of meeting #30 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was women.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Liberal
Élisabeth Brière Liberal Sherbrooke, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome to our three witnesses.
I'll start with Professor Owen.
In your opening remarks, you mentioned that the institutions to which we entrusted our democratic values are not adapted to the pace of this new information environment. You gave three reasons: social fracturing, AI-native manipulation and the fact that there is an intermediary, which has an effect on integrity.
I would like to hear you talk a little more about all that.
Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, McGill University, As an Individual
A baseline requirement for our democratic institutions to, I increasingly believe, reimagine what their functions are in our democratic society—not to be too bleak about it—requires them to understand the ecosystem in which they operate. They're doing so in a very limited way right now.
There are primarily research, journalistic and civil society organizations across the country trying very hard to understand a complex ecosystem, when they have limited resources and capacities. The resources are limited because Canada does not have the funding structure for this kind of work that exists in other countries, and operations are limited because the data needed to understand this ecosystem is largely controlled and hidden from view by the companies that have it.
We on the outside are relegated to a set of unsanctioned research methods, which are regularly being disrupted by companies that do not want us studying this ecosystem, and we have very limited capacity. This is not the baseline status we want if it's even directionally true that our journalistic, legal, university and government institutions are about to go through a fairly rapid transformation, which I personally believe they are.
Of all the things that need to happen to improve our civic resilience, and there are many.... I know this committee has heard from a wide range of amazing people working in this space and doing incredible things, but I do not know how we operate unless we have a baseline understanding of the environment in which Canadians receive information, while ensuring there's a baseline reliability in it. To me, this is a precondition for everything else, and I don't think we're doing that sufficiently right now.
Liberal
Élisabeth Brière Liberal Sherbrooke, QC
It always evolves very quickly, so it's not always easy to keep up.
Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, McGill University, As an Individual
I missed the first half of that. I'm sorry, but can you repeat the question? I got the translation and half of the French, but not together.
Liberal
Élisabeth Brière Liberal Sherbrooke, QC
I was saying that it always evolves very quickly, so it's not easy to keep up.
Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, McGill University, As an Individual
This is, 100%, the underlying variable that has changed instrumentally. The last decade of transformation, as we've shifted from legacy information providers to a new set of actors in our social ecosystem, has been a decade-plus-long transition, and we still haven't kept up with that.
Now what's happening is the creation of generative AI content, plus a new reliance on AI as an information intermediary and platform itself. Those two phenomena are happening at a radically faster scale than the transition to social media. The problem is amplified.
Liberal
Élisabeth Brière Liberal Sherbrooke, QC
You, Professor Owen and Professor Tworek mentioned that the government should get more involved or put in place better things to foster civic resilience, make investments and set up infrastructure for research and data collection.
Is that correct?
Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, McGill University, As an Individual
It is, without question.
I think two conditions are required.
The companies themselves have to be mandated to share a certain subset of information that they control and have access to. This has been done in some other jurisdictions, with varying degrees of success, and is one of the core requirements in the duty to act responsibly, which is the main provision of the online harms act. The way it's designed.... The language of the previous version of the bill is quite good and could be adapted to some of the AI issues I talked about.
Then you need institutions and the capacity to make sense of those data. This is not easy, and it requires collaboration among researchers around the country and a central data steward that is neither the companies nor the government. We do not currently have this infrastructure. It would need to be built if the online harms act were legislated in some version of its previous form—making this a requirement.
Those two things are the table stakes. Other countries saw this far earlier than we did.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Chris Bittle
I'm going to have to interject. Thank you so much.
We'll now go to Madame Normandin.
You have the floor for six minutes.
Bloc
Christine Normandin Bloc Saint-Jean, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank all the witnesses for being with us.
I'll start with you, Professor Owen.
I understand that, in 2024, you published a study on how Facebook users reacted to the news ban. You noted changes in user behaviour. In particular, screenshots were starting to be used instead of URLs to share information. You noticed, if I'm not mistaken, a decrease in the sharing of disinformation, possibly due to the fact that people back then didn't want to be banned from Facebook and were reluctant to share URL links, even from non-journalistic sources.
Do you have an update on the behaviour of Facebook users since then?
Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, McGill University, As an Individual
We do not have a major update to the study, no, except this: One thing the study showed is that the Meta news.... We're talking about Meta's blocking the ability, not to post, but for Canadians to see the links to URLs directing them to content produced by Canadian journalism organizations on Instagram and Facebook.
I think you're right to say an important finding is that the primary way it was circumvented was by posting screenshots of news, not posting full links. This opens an interesting question—frankly, for the CRTC, probably not for this committee—of whether this puts Facebook back into the scope of the Online News Act.
Also, they started relying more and more on content produced by influencers, not journalists. This was the start of a trend that we've seen accelerate very rapidly. We have a recent study showing that there's more news content created and shared by influencers than there is by journalists in the Canadian ecosystem as a whole now. They've surpassed journalism, in fact, by a magnitude of 2:1. There is two times more news content—broadly defined—being produced by influencers than there is by journalistic organizations.
This was the case in the last federal election too, at a time when you would think content produced by journalistic organizations was at a premium for citizens.
Another major change that's happened since the study is that we've seen a shift toward distribution of news on other platforms. This was not the case in 2024. We saw an overall decline in total news consumption, across the ecosystem, when Meta blocked it. Now, a lot of it has moved to TikTok. There has been a real spike in news content being performed on and distributed through TikTok.
Bloc
Christine Normandin Bloc Saint-Jean, QC
Thank you.
I would now like to ask Professor Tworek and Ms. Brumwell a two-part question.
Professor Tworek, you mentioned in your opening remarks that there has been an increase in online harassment of politicians. You've also seen an increase in resignations. You mentioned the case of Quebec, where about 10% of politicians had resigned. Unless I'm mistaken, the resignations are mainly on the municipal side.
Ms. Brumwell, you mentioned that municipal politics are of greater interest to women, but I see a kind of contradiction, because it seems to me that the friction and harassment is mainly on the municipal side because of proximity to the electorate. Municipal politics play rough.
I'm curious to know what both of you think about that. Why are women more interested in municipal politics, when it seems to me to be the most abrasive place to be in politics?
Interim Executive Director, Equal Voice
I'll jump in. I'm not sure who was supposed to start on the question—my apologies.
One of the main reasons that women want to get involved at the local level, as we know from our research, tends to come from their family and personal life commitments. Travel to provincial or federal capitals can put quite a strain on any politician. They are looking for ways to be involved in their community associations, their school boards and municipalities. They feel as though they have a better connection to change. These are the reasons we understand.
We have heard, anecdotally, that a lot of women do not understand the harassment or push-back that can happen at a municipal level until they get into the position. They're not as aware of it, compared to what they hear about in the news at a federal level, for which coverage is much higher.
This is my understanding of the data we currently have.
Director, Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
I'll add that it's quite difficult to do comparables in terms of numbers, because there are many more people involved at the municipal level, and as we've said several times, the data is spotty. It's one of the reasons we wanted to work on this level as well.
What sometimes also happens is that there are young people aspiring to get into politics, and they will work on campaign teams for provincial or federal elections. They will then see the levels of harassment and decide they don't want to potentially continue on a path they may have already chosen. Sometimes, they will then move towards a municipal level instead, or indeed, they will move into different career paths.
This is another illustration of how the pipeline is broken. Those who are even interested...when they work on campaign teams, they're often the ones tasked with dealing with the harassment in order to shield the candidate. They end up bearing the brunt of it and, therefore, don't want to become involved in the first place.
Liberal
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Ponoka—Didsbury, AB
Thank you, Chair.
Ms. Tworek, I'm wondering if you could go back and re-cover the part of your testimony that dealt with generative AI, chatbots, how all that works and how it is, as you said, a prime breeding ground for foreign interference.
Director, Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
Yes. I'm happy to explain that a bit further.
As Professor Owen also mentioned, chatbots draw on many, many sources of information. One of them is journalistic and news organizations. In fact, companies such as OpenAI have signed deals with news organizations. Sometimes, when information is reproduced for users who ask a question, sources will be provided so that the user knows this came from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or whatever, but often that's not true.
What we've seen, of course, is that foreign actors seeking to interfere have evolved their tactics. One new tactic that was documented by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue is for Russian state media sources that have been banned in the European Union to produce massive volumes of information. It's super easy to do with generative AI. They produce a lot, and they look for spaces in which there isn't a lot of information already. This means that when chatbot providers are trawling through the Internet for information, they're picking up the only stuff there is on certain topics—which is Russian state media—and then reproducing it. It's basically a back door—
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Ponoka—Didsbury, AB
Is this because the Russian state media looks like legitimate media?
Director, Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
Yes.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Ponoka—Didsbury, AB
Okay. This would be the same thing as.... There's Russia Today; we allow, or the CRTC does, lots of things in terms of foreign state media in Canada. Do you have any thoughts or comments on that?
Director, Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
Yes. Basically, the point of this study was saying that we can debate the merits of whether the European Union should have banned those sources, but chatbot interfaces have become a space for those sources to now become available.
Director, Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
We can absolutely debate whether or not...but this is a new vector that we need to understand.
Conservative
Blaine Calkins Conservative Ponoka—Didsbury, AB
Okay.
Ms. Brumwell, you have a lot of statistics and information in regard to some of the things that keep women from engaging in politics or entering politics. The information would be a lot more meaningful to me if we had a comparator or contrast with why some men don't get involved in politics. The perception is that more men get involved in politics at certain levels, at least federally, but I know a lot of men who would like to have done it but face the same or similar barriers, or they have concerns about getting involved in public life as well.
Are those reasons any different for a man than a woman?