Public Safety Committee on April 5th, 2022

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

The Russian missions and diplomatic posts in Canada and their role in spreading disinformation.

[Dr. Ahmed Al-Rawi]

Because of freedom of expression and freedom of speech, I think it's important to at least flag these efforts and to talk about what the Russian embassy is doing in the public domain. I've already written a piece that I hope will be published soon on The Conversation website.

We cannot ban what is going on but at least flag what is happening and debunk, fact-check these claims and at least warn Canadians not to be enticed or drawn to this type of propaganda. It's the only thing we can do, I believe.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you very much.

Dr. Cooley, I'd like to turn to you. In your opening remarks you were talking about the new Russian exiles, journalists, IT workers, academics, and you were asking an open question of how we can enhance and strengthen these networks. The expression that came to mind as you were speaking was that “the best defence is a good offence” and I wonder if we are strengthening these groups to learn more about how Russian society functions, the different power structures that sustain Putin, and possibly launching counteroffensives.

I would just like to invite you to maybe further expand on that subject because I know five minutes is not a lot of time in your opening remarks.

[Dr. Alexander Cooley]

Thanks so much.

The presence of exiled Russian media is not new; it's just being magnified now because of this sort of conflict. We've had very effective Russian investigative reporters doing work on Putin's corruption, holding investigations of Yevgeny Prigozhin and what he's been doing in Africa. Dossier and Proekt, these organizations that are based overseas expose some of the most devastating inner secrets. In fact, a New York Times reporter, when he reported on Prigozhin, had much of the same information that these Russian exile reporters reported months before.

First of all, we can support them financially. Groups like Meduza, like Nexta—let's not leave Belarus out of here—have been so key in mobilizing against Lukashenko. Certainly, TV Rain, which is now shut down in Russia and is operating from outside, is one.

We have to anticipate what's going to be, at some point, the Russian reaction to this, which is to engage in more transnational repression. I will say that transnational repression is the kind of systematic targeting of political opponents, journalism, civil society, business community, of co-nationals overseas. Actually, this use of disinformation against diaspora communities is one aspect of this. It could also be actual attempts at assassination, rendition, coercion, or intimidation of family members.

The Russians are going to have a real problem because they're going to see all of these communities increasingly engaged to break down this disinformation wall and they are likely to target them. We need to be aware of how we can protect them, not only by supporting them, but also by realizing the status that these exiles and diasporas have as communities of interest of the crimes.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Dr. Cooley.

You're always welcome to send the committee a submission if you want to go into further detail on some of the specifics. I would invite you to do that.

I have a final question for Mr. David Perry.

Our committee's mandate is very much on national security and public safety within the borders of Canada. I don't want to get caught up in the military side of things, but when you look at our cybersecurity and the role that CSE plays under National Defence, but also CSIS and the RCMP under Public Safety Canada, do you have recommendations as to whether Canada needs a way to reorganize how those agencies functions?

Is there anything pertinent that this committee can make as a recommendation to the Government of Canada?

[Dr. David Perry]

Thank you.

I think there's a lot of room to expand our collaboration between the government and the private sector. We should have an ability to leverage what is our real national strength in our cybersecurity and high-tech sector to find a better synergy between.... There's too much of a silo approach that we have right now. More collaboration would be helpful.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

You have 10 seconds left.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

I'll send the 10 seconds back to you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you.

I'll move right into the second round of questioning and invite Ms. Dancho to begin a five-minute round.

The floor is yours.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here.

My questions are for Mr. Perry concerning procurement.

We hear a lot about difficulties of getting money out the door in DND. There have been a lot of promises made to buy frigates, planes and various defensive capabilities for Canada in order to defend itself against any sort of threat posed by Russia or other state actors.

How critical is it that we fix procurement and how would you recommend we go about doing so?

[Dr. David Perry]

I think it's fundamental because that's the way that we basically develop our ability to respond, whether or not that's for defence specifically or many of the other aspects of national security. You certainly need good human capital, but, fundamentally, those people need tools, and the procurement system is the way that we give them the tools to do their jobs, whether these are airplanes, ships or computer systems.

There's a whole range of issues with our procurement system, but I think, fundamentally, to the point of my opening remarks, we need to decide how important this is to us. Is procuring this type of equipment and gaining this kind of capability—again, whether it's for defence or other agencies in the national security community—something that matters to us? If so, how much relative to all of the many other priorities of government? That's part one.

Part two is that we need to calibrate better what we're doing with the workforce and the amount of work required to do it against the human capital available to us. You need resources, both financial and human, to get all of this done, and I don't think that match has been calibrated appropriately for about a decade and a half now. Until we fix that, we can't really expect to see much of a different result.

To be fair, successive governments have increased how much we are spending on this kind of procurement, and that's gone up progressively over the last 15 years. We're now spending more money on this than we have at any point, by my math, since basically the Korean War, if you adjust for inflation. The problem, though, is that we took a decade and a half off doing any of this, so the requirements to catch back up to a status quo level are far in excess of what they would have been if we had stuck to a regular spending pattern over time.

Beyond that, there's a whole number of other issues with the procurement system, from conflicting government priorities and some of the institutional structure, but I'll stop there.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Can you elaborate a little bit on making the commitment to improve procurement? We're hearing a lot about this, and I'm just trying to understand for Canadians what exactly that means. Is it a signal that government needs to be send within cabinet or to the public? How would the Prime Minister communicate such procurement and that improving it is a priority?

[Dr. David Perry]

I think there are two broad ways. There are written, formal statements or speeches, but also commitments of time. I think you can point to examples. The indigenous file has been one where the current Prime Minister has indicated that the file matters very much to his government. I don't think it's any accident that we've seen spending on that particular file over the last several years effectively double, which is a remarkable increase in a short amount of time. Talking about the huge increase in the financial commitment to that particular file, that was clearly communicated to all ministers in the 2015 mandate letters and remains in the current version of those mandate letters today.

If we want to see an equivalent type of change in output or outcomes on the procurement file or on defence/national security writ large, you need to see that type of a commitment of government to identify that as a key set of activities and priorities that they're looking to see progress on. Absent that, procurement officials, other officials and other department agencies will take their cue that other things simply matter more and focus there first.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

In the upcoming budget, what are you looking to see on the procurement side? From what you're sharing, it sounds like we need not only investment in the tools to defend Canadian territory and the Canadian people but also human resources in the procurement area. Are you looking in the upcoming budget for a direct indication that this government is investing more in procurement for human resources?

[Dr. David Perry]

Whatever new financial level we potentially move to in terms of defence spending— with presumably a big component of that being oriented around procurement, given some of the needs that have been articulated for continental defence and the modernization of NORAD—if we want to see that money move out the door in, say, a short number of years rather than multiple decades, you need to make a commitment to increase and provide the capacity to ensure that those funds get spent by the end of each fiscal year. Otherwise, they won't.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

A good indicator to do that would be—it sounds like from what you're saying—a very strong indicator from the Prime Minister, whether in mandate letters to all of cabinet or in their general communications, that procurement must be a top priority. Is that correct?

[Dr. David Perry]

Yes, I think it's critical to identify that as a key priority of the government going forward.

[Raquel Dancho, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Ms. Damoff, we'll go over to you for a five-minute line of questioning. The floor is yours.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you so much, Chair.

Thank you to all three of our witnesses.

My first question is for Dr. Al-Rawi. We've talked about disinformation on social media, but we haven't really touched on platforms that aren't quite as common as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. I'm thinking of platforms like Telegram and Gab, where their position is to appeal to extremist or fringe discussions.

Could talk about the impact of that in terms of Russian interference? Also, are there any recommendations you could make to the government on these less well-known platforms?

[Dr. Ahmed Al-Rawi]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

A few years ago, a few [Technical difficulty—Editor] in United States and elsewhere were de-platformed from mainstream social media, like Facebook and Twitter, including former President Trump and many conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and so on. This actually led to what they call a “migration” to new, alternative outlets, including the ones you mentioned, Telegram, Discord, and a few other ones. Some of them unfortunately are even based in Canada. What we have today is platforms that are dominated by conspiracy theories and disinformation.

In our study about the convoy protest, we found that Twitter contained very few conspiracies in relation to the protest and that the dominant discourses or conspiracies were actually elsewhere, specifically on Telegram.

The major problem I am seeing is that the big search engines like Google have indexed Telegram. When I search for a message posted by Alex Jones on Telegram, I can't actually find it. I think that's the major problem. I do not think we can moderate these small platforms because it's like playing whack-a-mole—if you try to silence one of them, four others will emerge, because this is a thriving business for them. They are actually profiting by probably billions of dollars, not millions.

I don't think there is a way to completely stop these smaller social media platforms. What we can do is pressure the big search engines to index these sites less so that searching for a specific comment will be hard.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

That would have to do with the algorithms they use as well.

Thank you. I'm sorry to cut you off. Time is limited at the committee.

Professor Cooley, I have a question for you. You were recently quoted in a Hill Times article talking about how we need to move beyond sanctioning financial facilitators of Russia and target western proxies of Russian funding.

I'm wondering if you can talk about how these Russian proxies and management firms that provide their services to Russian elites are influencing cybersecurity and what recommendations you would make to the government in terms of dealing with that influence.

[Dr. Alexander Cooley]

You're talking about how they're influencing cybersecurity?

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

You wanted them sanctioned. I guess it would actually be in terms of national security.

Is there—