Some civil liberties organizations in Canada are concerned about the Foreign Interference Commission’s recommendation to establish a new government agency to monitor “foreign disinformation” online.
The Canadian Constitution Foundation and Open Media have raised concerns over Commissioner Mary-Josee Hogue’s final report on foreign interference.
They say that Hogue’s 11th recommendation to establish a “government entity” to monitor social media for disinformation and misinformation could be used as a “back door” to target Canadians with government censorship and privacy violations.
The recommendation, one of 51 recommendations to bolster Canada’s defence against foreign interference in its elections, suggests that the “entity” has the authority to “give and receive intelligence and information.”
It also says the government should consider giving the new government agency the authority to “interact” with social media platforms, though it does not define what the term “interact” would entail.
The recommendation is prefaced by saying that the entity should be structured “to comply with applicable law,” should work with national security and intelligence agencies and “international partners, civil society groups and private organizations,” and be privy to intelligence on foreign interference.
“I stress that I am not recommending that the government monitor all social media activity or private or semi-private communications of Canadians,” Hogue states in the preamble to the call to action. “Canadians can have the right to freely associate and express themselves online, and the right to privacy extends to online spaces.”
However, Open Media and the CCF have doubts about how the Canadian government could choose to interpret the suggestions.
Matt Hatfield, the executive director of the online civil liberties group Open Media told True North that the recommendations are just vague enough that they could be used to justify “both bad and good ideas.”
“How the next government picks up these recommendations and acts on them is going to be very important,” said Hatfield. “Fundamentally, politics in Canada should be debated and decided by Canadians.”
Both groups acknowledged that foreign entities are attempting to influence politics and conversations in Canada to be favourable to their interests and that it is certainly a problem worth addressing with full transparency to the Canadian public.
“That said, you can easily imagine the authority to issue orders to social media being distorted or abused to squelch the legitimate expression of people in Canada,” Hatfield said. “Some allegations were made of foreign influence during the convoy, for example, that were not born out by the facts at the time or after.”
He said it is “critical” that any power to compel data from social media platforms be “very carefully” described so it can’t easily be abused to surveil or silence Canadians.
Christine van Geyn, the litigation director of the CCF, laid out her concerns on the most recent episode of the CCF’s civil liberties podcast, “Not Reserving Judgement,” on Wednesday.
“There is an issue with defining what disinformation or misinformation is, and this is actually an issue that’s been created by the government,” she said. “No one trusts these terms anymore, and it’s because of the way the government conducted it has conducted itself in large part during the pandemic.”
She noted that the government had claimed many subjects were disinformation, only for those topics to be later revealed by the government or journalists to be founded in truth or a matter of opinion.
She had concerns about the “civil society groups” mentioned in the recommendation being only those chosen by the state, the vague meaning behind the term “interact” when describing what the entity should be able to do and the potential for “mission creep.”
“Giving authority to a new agency to monitor online behaviour and develop intelligence information, I think, is a gateway to collecting information about citizens posting things online that the government doesn’t like or disagrees with,” Van Geyn said.
She said there are still people who claim the freedom convoy was a foreign-funded disinformation campaign, naming Liberal leadership candidate Mark Carney as one such offender.
Van Geyn noted an Op-Ed the central banker wrote in the Globe and Mail where he said anyone donating to the Freedom Convoy “should be in no doubt: You are funding sedition” and that foreign funders of “the insurrection” interfered “from the start.”
“This just wasn’t true. You know, 88% of the donations on GoFundMe were from Canadians, both Give-Send-Go and GoFundMe said there were zero donations from Russia or China,” Van Geyn said.
She said even the CBC repeated the narrative that the Kremlin was behind the protest, and she worries that the state will wield the new government entity to crack down on similarly unfounded concerns.
“I think that there are real issues with foreign interference and spreading disinformation, but I have very, very little faith that a new agency to make these determinations will do so in a way that doesn’t chill the speech of Canadians and end up surveilling our own domestic protest movements.”
