National Defence Committee on Feb. 14th, 2023

[Marcus Kolga]

You're absolutely right. Any effort to address foreign disinformation specifically needs to be non-partisan. I've long advocated for a whole-of-society approach and an approach especially within the context of Canada's Parliament and the possible formation of an all-party committee that looks at that disinformation.

[Bryan May, Liberal, Cambridge, ON]

Is any country doing a good job in this area?

[Marcus Kolga]

There are lots of countries that are doing a great job in this area. These are frontline countries—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Taiwan is doing an exceptional job in combatting Chinese disinformation. Finland and Sweden as well have adopted early childhood education programs into their curriculum to make sure that all future generations of Swedes and Finns have the cognitive resources necessary to critically assess the information they're consuming.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. May.

Welcome to the committee, Mr. Perron.

You have the floor for six minutes.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for having me on the committee.

Mr. Kolga, thank you for being with us today.

In your last answer, you mentioned that you already knew about Canada being the target of Chinese cyber attacks.

Can you elaborate on that?

[Marcus Kolga]

In terms of the information realm, we know that China has targeted Canada with various different nefarious activities to try to undermine our democracy during the past three elections.

During the last election, my organization, DisinfoWatch, detected Chinese state actors trying to inject narratives through state media into our information space. We also saw various different domestic Chinese language platforms repeating some of those narratives that targeted one specific political party here in Canada.

In terms of foreign disinformation, China has very much targeted Canada over the past two to three years at least.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much.

There are even rumours of funding for some candidates. I do not suppose you have any data on that.

[Marcus Kolga]

No, unfortunately I don't have data on which candidates received funding and which received support from the Chinese government.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Let us go back to Canada's preparedness to defend itself from future cyber attacks.

How would you characterize Canada's ability to defend itself in a hybrid war, that is, a war where an attack could be partly kinetic, but also include a large cyber attack? Is Canada equipped to deal with that? Is it sufficiently developed independently of its allies?

For example, Canada could lose sporadically the defence capability of the United States. Would Canada be helpless in that case?

I know this is a big question.

[Marcus Kolga]

When we're talking about hybrid warfare, cyber and the information realm, Canada might have some challenges in defending itself.

From my understanding, there were capabilities that were being developed by the CAF to defend against psychological warfare and information operations. That effort was terminated in 2020, from my understanding, due to some media reports that suggested that the Canadian Armed Forces were preparing to use psychological warfare and information operations against Canadians. I'm not sure there was much evidence to support that.

Since then, it doesn't appear that the Canadian Armed Forces have continued or started developing those efforts to defend our forces against the sorts of information operations I mentioned earlier, including the Russian one, the GRU Ghostwriter campaign that targeted our forces in Latvia by suggesting that they were spreading COVID in that country. From my understanding, the Canadian Armed Forces do not have the capabilities to defend against those sorts of information attacks right now.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

The question was asked earlier, however, do you have a specific recommendation on this aspect?

What steps should be taken?

I know that in 2020, a doubt was raised and these operations stopped. However, there is a balance to be struck between the privacy of citizens and national protection. It is not easy.

[Marcus Kolga]

Again, that's a very good question.

Having read some of the information about those capabilities when they were being developed, I know the Canadian Armed Forces take information and psychological warfare very seriously. As I mentioned earlier, Vladimir Putin's partner, Alina Kabaeva, has mentioned that information is like a Kalashnikov. I think that our armed forces understand that as well.

There was never any suggestion that information operations would be used against Canadian citizens. They were only going to be used where there were active operations. The fact that our armed forces don't have that capability right now is concerning for someone like me who does monitor and analyze foreign information operations.

[Yves Perron, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Thank you very much.

What do you know about quantum computing, which is reportedly developing quite significantly and could revolutionize hacking capabilities from the outside?

Do you consider us to be lax in this regard?

Is there anything going on in Canada? Are we preparing for these potential attacks?

[Marcus Kolga]

I find that any future technologies are a deep concern, especially when it comes to the information realm. AI is developing very quickly. The speed with which our foreign adversaries can put out information and disinformation is going to be quite alarming. I'm not sure we're prepared to address that growing threat.

The other threat that is growing and will become problematic in the coming years is the creation of deepfakes. These are fake videos, fake images and fake audios that are increasingly created by AI. It will take an image of President Biden, for example, and make it seem as though he is saying something that he's not actually saying. The technology used to create these videos is becoming terrifyingly accurate.

Again, I'm not sure we're prepared to deal with the emergence of these deepfakes.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. Perron.

Next we have Mr. Bachrach for six minutes.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mr. Kolga, for your testimony so far.

You've written about the impact of disinformation on several different events, including the pandemic, the convoy and the war in Ukraine. I'm curious about all of those, perhaps starting with the pandemic.

Could you speak a bit as to whether, in your view, these attempts at disinformation by foreign actors had an impact specifically on the political discourse around the pandemic? Did you see that those efforts had some effect in the way that the political discourse in Canada evolved over the course of the last three years?

[Marcus Kolga]

Thank you for that question—

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

I'm sorry. Hang on for a second.

It's a good question and it's an interesting question, but we're a straying a bit from the study. I'm going to allow it, but could you somehow or other tie it back into our security situation here?

[Marcus Kolga]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Foreign information operations—cyber-operations—in that context were absolutely targeting Canada during the pandemic. We had anticipated this already in 2020, when the pandemic was just starting. Our allies in the EU at the eastern StratCom also anticipated that foreign actors, including Russia, would use disinformation and online platforms, etc., to intensify the effects of the pandemic.

In the summer of 2020, we saw platforms such as RT and other Russian state media platforms legitimizing anti-vaccination movements and anti-lockdown movements in Germany. We further saw them giving a platform to and amplifying similar movements in North America, including right here in Canada. One extremely aggressive anti-lockdown organization that had an account on Twitter had spent the year or two before the Russian invasion of Ukraine tweeting anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown narratives. On February 24, those narratives switched to anti-Ukranian narratives. In fact, they were advancing and amplifying narratives that were promoted by the Russian embassy right here in Canada, and they continued to do so several hundred times between February and March.

We saw a fairly clear and distinct correlation between the two. We definitely saw Russian state actors amplifying those narratives during COVID.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Kolga.

With reference to the chair's previous comments, I'm curious to know if you feel that disinformation is a form of cybersecurity threat. Perhaps you could comment on whether the cybersecurity establishment in Canada recognizes it as such.

[Marcus Kolga]

Well, absolutely. I mean, disinformation is often a form of digital communication. It's used by our adversaries, as I mentioned earlier, to destabilize our democracy, to turn each of us one against another. They do this using various different platforms of social media.

I mentioned as well that email is used to do that, and then, of course, in the cyber realm, we see doxing and phishing attempts to try to lure individuals to provide data and such and we see individuals opening up their computers to cyber-attacks or cyber-hackers to steal data and such. We saw that happen in 2016, of course, when Russian hackers went into the Democratic Party servers, stole information and exposed it. There is a definite blurred line between cyber-activity and disinformation. I think they very much belong in the same realm.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you for that.

Continuing along that same line, you've mentioned disinformation attempts related to the pandemic, related to the convoy and related to the war in Ukraine. You also mentioned that Canadian parliamentarians have been the target of some of this disinformation.

In your view, have Canadian parliamentarians been shown to be vulnerable to these disinformation attacks? Could you provide some examples of how that might be the case?

[Marcus Kolga]

There have been clear instances in which provincial parliamentarians in Ontario fell victim to foreign information operations during the pandemic. There was an Ontario MPP who supported anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown views, which is perfectly normal in Canada, but the Russian government, the Russian state media, recognized this and asked him onto RT. He went onto RT, which helped to provide a global platform for his views. After he gave an interview on RT, he tweeted out to all of his followers that they should not be following mainstream media but should follow RT because Russian state media were the only trustworthy ones out there—

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

We're going to have to—

[Marcus Kolga]

—so yes, there are definitely parliamentarians who've been—