Senator Stan Kutcher, pictured in 2023, says many Canadians don’t realize that Russia is a hostile state and its use of disinformation is highly complex.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Russia is deploying disinformation and propaganda campaigns on Canadians to advance its geopolitical and military interests, and Ottawa is not doing enough to combat the problem, warned a Senate report released on Thursday.
The Senate committee on national security studied the impact of Russia’s disinformation on Canada and found that Moscow is deliberately disseminating false information in attempts to push pro-Russian narratives to Western audiences, particularly to justify its war in Ukraine. The committee said Russia’s efforts are an attempt to undermine the NATO alliance and to destabilize Western democracies.
Witnesses, made up of government officials, academics and representatives from civil-society organizations, told the committee that this disinformation campaign has been weakening the Western response to Russian aggression and they linked it to declining support for Ukraine. They also said that Canadian politicians have previously been subject to false narratives coming from Moscow, pointing to cases during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Senator Stan Kutcher, a member of the committee and the English spokesperson for the report, said many Canadians don’t realize that Russia is a hostile state and its use of disinformation is highly complex. The Kremlin utilizes numerous tactics to disseminate mass quantities of disinformation to unsuspecting Western audiences and erodes public trust in information, he said in an interview on Thursday.
“The purpose of many of these campaigns is to overwhelm us with information and to push at the fractures that are normal within any democratic society, but with the intent to cause distrust of democratic institutions,” he said.
The report points to Russia’s use of artificial intelligence and Western influencers to roll out overwhelming amounts of disinformation and exploit social or political divisions.
“This is part of this very complex strategy that Russia is pushing, to get democracies, to weaken them from within, so that they won’t be able to stand up to the threat that Russia poses to the rest of the world,” Mr. Kutcher said.
To strengthen Canada’s response, the report notes that the government needs to promote media literacy and critical thinking skills, including through increased collaboration between governments, communities, civil-society organizations and academic institutions.
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“That means bringing together the groups that are already doing it, and so that they are working in a co-ordinated way – identifying where we have gaps and filling those gaps – and part of that is actually educating the Canadian population about the challenges that are being faced from that,” he said.
Mr. Kutcher said countries such as Finland and Ukraine have centralized civil-society organizations to combat Russia’s disinformation. The report uses Finland’s educational approach as an example of how to build media literacy skills.
The senator said that civil-society organizations have demonstrated they have the capacity to address incoming disinformation, and that Canada should adopt and fund measures similar to those used in Finland and Ukraine.
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Mr. Kutcher added that collaboration should extend beyond our borders, and that Canada should work with allies in the G7 and NATO to develop “a more collaborative response.”
He said the government does not currently have a strategic plan to combat these threats. To strengthen Canada’s ability to identify and respond to these threats, Mr. Kutcher said that Ottawa should include a plan within its National Security Policy.
Mr. Kutcher called this Canada’s “modern Gouzenko moment.” In 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, defected and exposed a massive Soviet spy ring in Canada.
“What we really need to do, primarily, is to wake up that this is happening,” the senator added.