Thank you, Mr. Chair.
For 10 years Russia has been invading Europe's largest state. A full-scale onslaught began in 2022, as you all know, challenging the alliances, institutions and principles Canada fought two world wars to uphold. Moscow's genocidal war of aggression recalls the horrors of Hitler and Stalin, yet we've still not committed fully to defeating this aggressor or to Ukraine's victory.
Why is that? Part of the answer is Russian disinformation, Russian active measures and Russian interference. According to Jakub Kalensky, deputy director of the community of interest on hybrid threats at Europe's centre of excellence in Helsinki, Russia produces over 60% of the disinformation worldwide and 80% in Europe. Its main vectors of distribution are still social media platforms, as Meta recently confirmed to you, but grey zone media, influencers and other proxies, as well as state propaganda outlets like Russia Today, are also major threat actors. They torque debates and magnify niche conflicts into societal breakdowns. On Twitter/X, the owner himself regurgitates Kremlin talking points and rolls out the red carpet for Russian and other state-sponsored bots.
No, Meta, TikTok, YouTube and other platforms are definitely not doing enough. We still have no idea how much Russian-backed, Chinese-backed and Iran-backed spending influences our politics or our elections. Meanwhile, unregulated promotion of political extremism and polarization has tipped newsrooms across Canada into free fall, causing a dangerous loss of self-awareness in local communities and national debates.
Far from being marginal players, Russian information assets and active measures are often kingmakers in our elections. In other words, to prevent Ukraine's victory, Russia is investing heavily in propaganda and political and cognitive warfare to ensure that we never make the military commitments needed to win.
Let me give you two Canadian examples, one past and one present.
Over 2018 and 2019, the anti-immigration People's Party of Canada, the yellow vest movement, trucker protests and Wexit all began. Then COVID hit. By early 2022, truckers were blockading Ottawa and several border crossings. You know the history. To be clear, these protests did attract ordinary people with genuine grievances over vaccine mandates, but many of the ringleaders and extremists who joined them had been radicalized online by Moscow-backed active measures. Their funding came from shadowy corners of the MAGA demimonde, even as far away as Bulgaria, and had all the hallmarks of Russian influence.
The blockade's timing coincided with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Attempts to replicate these convoys, some successful, took place in every NATO country, as well as Australia and New Zealand. Russian state propaganda promoted this story relentlessly. Russia Today did 250 reports on Canada's protests alone.
What was Moscow's motive? It was to distract a country with a huge Ukrainian diaspora as the Kremlin launched its war of aggression. Did it work? In a word, yes. We continue to underestimate Moscow's strategic ambition. Beyond reconquering Ukraine, they want to disrupt and destabilize democracies, roll back American and allied influence, and break the EU and NATO. They sow discord and erode trust with anti-immigrant, xenophobic, anti-LGBTQ, anti-west and anti-women campaigns, as well as hate speech, separatism and disinformation about elections or health issues, as the trucker blockade, the yellow vest movement, the PPC, Wexit, the anti-vax movement, pro-Hamas protests and many extreme elements that play into elections in Canada and allied democracies have shown us.
I am now on the second issue, which relates to a current matter. Seven documents tabled before you originate in the pre-1991 archives of the Ukrainian KGB. They are in the hands of Canadian national security officials, because they are evidence of a serious effort to undermine Canada's national security and collective self-defence. They have also been authenticated by several of the world's leading experts on KGB documents.
In a nutshell, these records document a KGB operation to talent-spot, recruit, develop and run as an agent a Canadian citizen who has been a prominent journalist in this country for over three decades. His code name in these KGB files was “Stuart”. His recruiter, handler and paymaster over the period discussed here, from 1982 to 1990, was another agent, code-named “Ivan”. Some of the world's leading experts on KGB documents have attested to their authenticity. If “Stuart” continued as an agent after 1990, as there is now every reason to believe he did, we have no access to those files, because they are in Moscow.
These documents illustrate the challenge our democracies face. For decades Moscow has been recruiting and paying policy-makers, influencers, politicians, journalists and others to act as their proxies, to undermine trust in our institutions and to dissipate our political will. Even at the height of so-called glasnost, when so many believed Moscow's imperialism and global subversion campaigns had ended, such recruitment was still happening.
The agent described in these documents was an illegal, working for Directorate S of the KGB's First Main Directorate, which today has the same name and purpose in Russia's External Intelligence Service, or SVR, as Mikhail Mikushin and the Vavilovs previously did in Canada, as well as the 10 illegal agents arrested and expelled from the U.S. in 2010.
This journalist has been prolific, publishing as many as 200 articles per year in Canada and the U.S. since 1990. His recent subjects are instructive. There are countless stories about Ukraine's Nazi links or Nazis in Canada, defamatory pieces about the family of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, provocative takes on procurement and other issues at the Department of National Defence and in the Canadian Forces. In short, these are themes that Moscow would be delighted to promote. They also aim to weaken Canadian support for Ukraine.
Previous efforts to expose this journalist's long-running covert ties to Moscow have resulted in attempts to intimidate current and former Canadian parliamentarians, including my former colleague James Bezan as well as Canadian Army officers.
Canadians need and deserve quality, independent journalism now more than ever. We need to bolster our national security and defence and to back Ukraine's victory fully. Moscow's information war, its active measures and continuing espionage are a serious hindrance to all of this.
In 1945, the Gouzenko revelations resulted in a royal commission that turned Canada into one of the Cold War's most reliable allies. I call upon you, the foreign interference commission, our governments, intelligence, and security and law enforcement agencies at all levels to work together to end the impunity with which Russia has operated in Canada. We need to acknowledge, assess and attribute active measures, disinformation, influence operations and other malign activities that originate in Moscow and act to disrupt and prevent such activities and hold the perpetrators to account.
Thank you very much.
