A separatist convoy gathers in Edmonton on Monday. Alberta’s proposed referendum on independence is being targeted by foreign actors seeking to sow discord in the province, a study being released this week by the Global Centre for Democratic Resilience says.HENRY MARKEN/AFP/Getty Images
Early this year, Canadian researchers who track online influence campaigns and foreign propaganda happened upon something peculiar. Using artificial intelligence to catalogue the activity of Russian websites and social-media accounts known to be spreading disinformation about the invasion of Ukraine, the researchers noticed a new topic suddenly garnering more attention than it ever had from those groups: Alberta.
Between late December and late April, references to Alberta separatism and various related themes, including talk of the province becoming a U.S. state and Canada failing as a country, rose sharply from known Russian content farms. During those four months, Alberta was the focus of 67 items produced and distributed by Pravda Network, nearly five times more than other Canada-related topics.
The researchers say such content, created to inflame the debate in Alberta and undermine national interests, is designed to be pushed online and find footing with like-minded Canadians, then mix into the local conversation through sharing and reposting, “creating a laundering effect in which local grievances are blended with foreign strategic narratives.”
In a study being released this week by the Global Centre for Democratic Resilience, Brian McQuinn, co-director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Data, and Conflict at the University of Regina, and Marcus Kolga, director of DisinfoWatch, an organization that studies online influence campaigns, say Alberta’s proposed referendum on independence is being targeted by foreign actors seeking to sow discord and undermine Canadian interests.
“We’re kind of sleepwalking into this referendum and we are already being targeted a lot more than people realize,” Dr. McQuinn said in an interview.
The activities in question, according to the report, range from covert influence campaigns run by countries such as Russia, China and others to foment discord inside the province to public remarks and actions by the Trump administration to encourage Alberta separatists, including meeting with their representatives in Washington. A third category involves online content mills producing AI-generated YouTube videos for profit, stoking and clouding the debate with falsehoods and narratives designed to deepen divisions.
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“Foreign adversaries are exploiting the Alberta separatist debate to erode social cohesion, deepen domestic divisions, undermine trust in democratic institutions, and amplify perceptions of political instability that damage investor confidence in Canada,” the authors say in the report, which will be presented at a conference in Toronto Wednesday and was provided to The Globe and Mail in advance.
“Canada’s cognitive sovereignty – the ability of Canadians to make political decisions freely, without foreign coercion or manipulation – is not simply under threat; it is being actively contested by foreign actors seeking to shape Canada’s democratic future.”
The proposed referendum in Alberta, slated for Oct. 19 if the vote moves forward, has worried researchers in this field, since it is considered fertile ground for malign forces to attempt to influence the outcome or undermine Canadian unity. Dr. McQuinn and Mr. Kolga say that is already happening. The unanswered question so far is what effect these efforts are having, or could have in the months ahead, and at what scale they are being conducted, given that so much of it is hidden, they say.
The examples are not limited to this week’s report.
Last fall, researchers working for Insikt Group, the research arm of Massachusetts-based cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, also turned up something peculiar. While investigating a covert Russian network called CopyCop, also known as Storm-1516, which has been accused of spreading online disinformation designed to foment divisions in the West, analysts at Insikt came across an unusually specific website about Alberta.
On the surface, albertaseparatist.com and its associated Instagram and YouTube accounts looked like a grassroots campaign by aggrieved Albertans seeking to mobilize support for the proposed referendum on independence.
However, Insikt alleges the site is one of hundreds operated by Storm-1516, an offshoot of Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg cyberstrategy unit that U.S. authorities identified as interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
According to publicly available records, the website is registered under the name James Williams of Delta, B.C. However, The Globe found the address listed doesn’t exist in Delta, and the corresponding phone number is incorrect.
In a threat analysis the firm issued on Russia in September, Insikt says its analysis of the tactics, techniques and procedures used by the Russian unit indicates the website is linked to CopyCop.
The operation “is almost certainly attempting to capitalize on growing pro-independence sentiment in the Canadian province of Alberta and exacerbate domestic polarization in Canadian politics amid calls for an independence referendum,” the threat analysis said. Insikt did not respond to requests for comment.
Cipher AND AI
The suspected influence campaign tracked this year by Canadian researchers was uncovered using Cipher, an artificial-intelligence system Dr. McQuinn developed with University of Alberta computer scientist Matthew Taylor.
Cipher automates the gathering and cataloguing of online content and identifies developing narratives, allowing faster identification of potential disinformation campaigns.
In 2023, the Canadian researchers used Cipher to study Russia’s attempts to undermine support for Ukraine in Canada. What they found was that even before the Russian military invasion was launched, talk of corruption in Ukraine, discord in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and questions about Ottawa’s support for the country began to proliferate online, and were targeted at Canada.
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The 2023 study determined a collection of about 200,000 Russian-linked accounts on Twitter, now known as X, including a core group of about 90 pro-Kremlin accounts, were tailoring narratives specifically for Canadian audiences and had developed an “outsized influence” among Canadian social-media users. Once the information made it into the Canadian online discussion, it often lost its provenance. Dr. McQuinn said as much as 83 per cent of the “ecosystem” spreading what the researchers determined was foreign propaganda, through sharing and reposting, was comprised of Canadians who couldn’t tell the difference or weren’t concerned where the narratives came from.
“They were shaping the environment in a really significant way,” Dr. McQuinn said.
Drawing on two years’ worth of data, the report said the influence campaigns were also politically indiscriminate, targeting either end of the political spectrum in Canada, seeing both as potentially useful.
The work continued into this year, when the uptick in Alberta content was detected. The researchers said the 67 items related to Alberta separation in a four-month span stood in contrast to 14 mentions of Ontario, of which eight sought to highlight U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to close down a bridge linking the province to Michigan.
The activity spiked in January, around the time that Alberta separatist leaders spoke publicly about meeting with Trump administration officials in Washington, which the authors also see as a form of external influence.
“In the Pravda Network, it just kept popping up,” Mr. Kolga said. “Clearly they were monitoring the information space, and then they started pouring fuel onto that.”
It wasn’t the first time this had been spotted.
“As early as 2019, the Russian state media platform Sputnik took an interest in the fringe Western separatist movement known as Wexit,” the report says. “This was at a time when it had little meaningful public support, likely inflating its perceived legitimacy, emboldening its organizers, and signalling that Moscow was paying attention.”
Alberta separatists deliver signatures in support of an independence referendum to Elections Alberta’s offices in Edmonton on Monday.Todd Korol/Reuters
The campaigns targeting Alberta contain four primary themes, according to the report. First, they push the idea that separatist sentiment in the province is growing; second, they amplify and sometimes distort long-held grievances between Alberta and Ottawa, arguing that the local population is being exploited and the path to prosperity involves breaking away to the United States; third, they put forward the notion that Alberta has strong international support for separation; and fourth, they mix falsehoods and inaccuracies with true news items to lend legitimacy to propaganda-based content.
The researchers have since trained Cipher to zero in specifically on suspected Alberta influence campaigns from Russia, the U.S. and other countries, and have begun tracking disinformation targeted at the referendum. The first data set from that work is expected in a month or two.
There is a risk of affecting the polls, the report says.
Support inside Alberta for independence has topped out at slightly less than 30 per cent in polling in the past year, though those numbers drop when people are asked whether they would still support separation if the costs were significant. The higher number “sits within the range where historical precedent shows dramatic shifts are possible in a short period of time,” the report says.
British support for Brexit was between 40 per cent and 47 per cent six months before the 2016 vote, the authors say, while those backing separation in Quebec in 1995 jumped to 50 per cent from 39 per cent as the vote approached. Support for Scottish independence in 2014 similarly rose to 45 per cent from about 30 per cent in the final months of the campaign, the report says.
Foreign-influence campaigns are harder to pick out than people think, Dr. McQuinn said.
“Really good disinformation starts with something you nod your head to,” he said. “That’s how you get people passing something on without even looking at what’s actually in it.”
In the case of the suspected disinformation detected in January, Mr. Kolga said one of the concerns is that the content is being used to train AI systems known as large language models, so as to inject misinformation into AI searches about Alberta separation and other topics.
“Just by flooding it with information that supports their positions, the hope is to manipulate the responses that these platforms are giving,” Mr. Kolga said.
While the kind of foreign-influence campaigns the Cipher software is designed to detect are often murky and covert, others exist out in the open. Mr. Kolga and Dr. McQuinn consider statements and actions by the Trump administration in recent months, along with the stoking of Alberta separatism by U.S. MAGA influencers on podcasts and other platforms, to be similar in nature.
“US involvement in Alberta separatism is not covert – it is overt,” the report says.
“By overt, we are referring to official engagement, where senior US government figures have met directly with Alberta separatist leaders and made public statements validating their cause, while the US is led by a president who has repeatedly expressed interest in annexing Canada.”
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For countries wanting to destabilize Canadian interests, particularly at a time when Canada is negotiating trade agreements, the separatist debate provides fertile ground, the researchers say.
If the referendum on separation goes forward, the report highlights three risks of disinformation that can be expected to emerge prior to the vote, and in the aftermath.
The proposed referendum is facing a First Nations legal challenge arguing that any effort to separate violates treaty agreements. As the courts decide whether the referendum can proceed, and as Elections Alberta validates signatures gathered on a petition to hold the vote, the report says influence campaigns will likely target the legitimacy of the referendum, stoking discord on both sides.
“Narratives may claim that valid signatures were secretly rejected, that authorities are concealing public support, or that courts have ‘cancelled’ a referendum. Fabricated screenshots, documents, or statements may be used to inflame distrust,” the report warns.
The writers expect the lead-up to the vote would also be targeted with disinformation.
“Narratives may focus on voter eligibility, ballot counting, non-citizen voting, foreign funding, misleading interpretations of referendum rules, and false claims that a referendum would automatically produce independence,” the authors write. “Other narratives may portray separation supporters as persecuted or targeted by state authorities, creating a potential pretext for foreign actors to justify intervention.”
After the vote, the authors expect to see campaigns attempting to delegitimize the outcome “through claims of fraud, hacking, forged documents, foreign recognition, or federal obstruction.”
‘Urgent threat’
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the seizure of 32 internet domains it alleged were Kremlin-directed sites built to covertly spread Russian propaganda and influence U.S. politics, including that year’s presidential election.
“Companies operating at the direction of the Russian government created websites to trick Americans into unwittingly consuming Russian propaganda,” the DOJ said in announcing the seizures.
As part of the investigation, the FBI obtained three internal Russian documents that detailed the playbook for running influence campaigns, which were filed as exhibits in the case.
One alleged Russian planning document, titled The Good Old USA Project, describes how online communities are built in advance, kept in a “sleeping state” as they organically grow their audiences in a target community, and are later mobilized.
“At the right moment, upon gaining momentum, these communities become an important instrument of influencing the public opinion in critically important states,” the document says, distributing “bogus stories disguised as newsworthy events.”
Another document filed as evidence in the case, titled US Social Media Influencers Network, outlines methods for creating online influence.
“Active accounts in each state will be maintained on behalf of a fictitious individual, who actively supports the U.S. Political Party A and represents ‘a community of local activists.’
“In order to eliminate the possibility of detection of the ‘Russian footprint’ in the proposed project, a multi-level protection of the infrastructure will be built. It will contain VPN services, physical servers located in the United States, etc.”
The potential sophistication of such foreign campaigns has the Canadian government concerned.
Last week, the Senate standing committee on national security, defence and veterans affairs produced a report examining the issue, titled Russia’s Disinformation: Understanding the Challenge, Strengthening Canada’s Response.
“The committee is convinced that Russia’s disinformation poses an urgent threat to Canada’s national security, democratic institutions and social cohesion,” the Senate committee report says.
“The Government of Canada has been making efforts to address disinformation. However, the extent of Russia’s disinformation exceeds Canada’s current capacity to address it effectively.”
Though the Senate committee report focuses on Russia, the threat is from multiple state and independent actors, Mr. Kolga and Dr. McQuinn say.
“Foreign adversaries systematically exploit these vulnerabilities, moving at algorithmic speed, while Canada’s institutional response remains slower, fragmented, and often reactive. Monitoring alone is therefore insufficient. Canada needs better sequencing between early detection, risk assessment, public communication, and institutional response,” the authors say in their report.
Dr. McQuinn said he is particularly concerned about Elections Alberta in the face of the referendum.
“They have a tough task,” Dr. McQuinn said. “Their organizational capacity is relatively limited.”
Michelle Gurney, a spokesperson for Elections Alberta, said the agency is concerned, and has made changes in an attempt to address the threat of online disinformation.
The agency has created an Information Integrity Unit, “specifically focused on all forms of deepfakes, misinformation, disinformation, and other nefarious online activities, both foreign and domestic,” Ms. Gurney said.
“We are in the process of standing this team up and procuring an expansion on our use of industry leading digital media analysis, monitoring, and listening software and systems.”
The changes include legislation, recently passed, that gives the agency some power to address suspected disinformation campaigns or deepfakes, which are phony videos that appear real.
Prior to the new legislation, “Elections Alberta did not have any legislative authority to change or ask for the removal of posts of this nature,” Ms. Gurney said in an e-mail.
Public Safety Canada spokesperson Margo Boyle said foreign-interference threats are a priority for the federal government, but did not say specifically what work is being done in advance of the proposed Alberta referendum.
“When credible information suggests that a foreign state or foreign linked entity may be attempting to interfere in political processes in Canada, federal agencies do have the authority to assess, investigate, and act within their respective mandates,” Ms. Boyle said in an e-mail.
The authors of the report say Canadians have a right to debate regional grievances and federalism, which are part of a democratic process.
“The danger is not the existence of that debate. The danger is that foreign governments, state-aligned media, ideological networks, and profit-driven manipulation systems are seeking to distort it,” the report concludes.
“When external actors amplify separatist narratives, normalize annexation, encourage national rupture, or undermine confidence in democratic processes, the issue is no longer only a matter of provincial politics. It becomes a direct threat to Canada’s democratic integrity, national security, and cognitive sovereignty.”