NDDN Committee Report

The Conservative Party of Canada Committee Members wish to add clarity to Paragraph 206 of the National Defence Committee Report on Threat Analysis by adding the word “foreign” before the word “disinformation.”  

NDDN — Threat Analysis — 10587823

VERSION 2 — 3 June 2022 — 10:05

Pages 89-90.

206. These developments are among those that are occurring at a time when governments around the world are coping with a range of other challenges. One of the most notable of these is the worst pandemic in more than 100 years: the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the World Health Organization, the pandemic has – thus far – killed more than 6.3 million people worldwide since 2020 and has infected more than 530 million individuals. During the pandemic, new inequalities have arisen, existing inequalities have been exacerbated, and foreign disinformation –about the existence of the COVID-19 virus, vaccine efficacy and effective treatments, among others – has been spreading around the world. Ongoing security-related challenges also exist, including climate change and a rise in both extreme-weather emergencies and natural disasters, weak governance in fragile states, instability in several regions of the world, violent extremism, terrorism and cyber threats.

Please see the relevant testimony below from February 16, 2022:

Mr. Marcus Kolga (Senior Fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute, As an Individual):

Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to speak with you today about the threat posed to our security and our democracy by foreign influence and information operations.

In addition to being a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier and CDA Institutes, I am the director of DisinfoWatch, a platform that is dedicated to monitoring and exposing foreign information warfare that targets Canada and our allies, and to helping Canadians develop the cognitive resources to allow them to recognize and reject disinformation and influence operations.

As has been repeatedly noted by Canada's intelligence community and the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, the threat of foreign information warfare and influence operations—known more broadly as cognitive warfare—is persistent and growing. Canada's a significant target for Chinese, Russian and Iranian actors who seek to manipulate our media, elected officials, civil society, armed forces, ethnic communities and Canadian interests with information operations.

During the 2021 federal election, DisinfoWatch first alerted Canadians to a coordinated Chinese government-aligned influence operation that included disinformation on Chinese state media platforms. The Atlantic Council's DFR lab and researchers from McGill University later published similar findings.

Since early 2020, we've observed Russian state media and its proxies here in Canada trying to polarize our society by promoting narratives that take advantage of public fear, anger and confusion that have grown during the COVID pandemic.

I'd like to stress that the Kremlin does not share any ideology or values with any major Canadian political party. Vladimir Putin's only ideology is corruption and power. As such, our democratic values represent an existential threat to his regime, which is why he targets us. Vladimir Putin can only compete with democratic nations that are divided and whose defence alliances, like NATO, are broken.

To achieve this, Russian state actors operating in the shadows of the extreme political left and right seek to divide our society by eroding our bonds within it. In the United States, we've witnessed state actors exploit civil unrest, environmental issues and other sensitive political issues. In Canada, we recently observed Russian state media exploit COVID protests by promoting extremist voices who seek the overthrow of our democratically elected government.

Mr. Marcus Kolga:

I'll focus specifically on Russia right now.

We know that over the past two years during the pandemic the Russian government has focused its disinformation efforts on exploiting the pandemic and COVID. We were warned already in March of 2020 by the European Union that the Russian government would in fact be doing this. They would try to amplify the effects of COVID and use it to divide us and erode the trust within society, and this is something that we've been tracking all along.

Later that summer, in August 2020, we saw massive anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown protests in Berlin that were covered live by Russian television and certainly promoted by them. The effect of this is that these protests are then legitimized.

Again, these protests may be legitimate. People feel these emotions. They have the fear. There is confusion about COVID. A lot of them are coming out with the best intentions. The fact is that Russia is exploiting those fears and those emotions and is promoting, quite frankly, anti-government narratives within them. This is something that we've seen come out over the past number of weeks in Ottawa. I don't believe that Russia has had a hand in directing what we've seen in Ottawa, but it certainly adds fuel to the extremist elements who are involved there. This is one of the ways they try to undermine our democracy and erode Canadian trust in media, in our elected government and certainly eventually in each other.