“Navigating the World of Foreign Interference Disinformation Harms to Our Democracy and Transnational Repression Effects” — part 1
a primer on the elaborate obfuscation that is the government response to foreign interference
Video Caption: Yesterday in Ottawa (Monday March 31st, 2025), the Montreal Institute for Global Security (MIGS) hosted a press briefing on foreign interference and transnational repression and how it manifests online. Members of the panel speaking with reporters included Kyle Matthews (executive director of MIGS), Wesley Wark (senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation), Marie Lamensch (global affairs officer at MIGS), Mehmet Tohti (executive director of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project), and Katherine Leung (policy advisor at Hong Kong Watch).
I’m going to write about the MIGS briefing that took place yesterday morning, see the video above, and I’ll address the government’s Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force technical briefing on the upcoming federal election that also took place yesterday in a piece to follow this one. I’ve provided the MIG report written by Dr. Wark below for your reading pleasure. Please read it, it’s 17 pages and I think that’s not asking too much. It’s your responsibility to do your due diligence and inform yourself to the best of your capacity.
First of all, let’s just get this out of the way — what the heck is SITE TF? SITE TF stands for Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force. In the words of Dr. Wesley Wark, this [is] a coordinating and intelligence sharing inter-agency body to ensure that there was a coordinated ‘eyes on’ intelligence reporting about election threats. That means interagency information monitoring and sharing, as opposed to direct operations aimed at responding in real time to foreign interference (FI) and transnational repression. This explains why the panel spokesperson said that the Paul Chiang Bounty Hunter Scandal did not fall within their purview. Some engagement farming accounts on X claim that the panel said in their briefing that the Paul Chiang Bounty Hunter Scandal wasn’t transnational repression. That’s untrue, it’s a misinterpretation of a nuanced response from a passive government entity.
As you can see from the graphic below, the government of Canada has established an elaborate and confusing web of entities to address the issue of foreign interference and national security and intelligence threats. Transparency has never been this government’s priority and that remains the modus operandi to this day, our second week into then 45th general election in Canada.
Bottom line for ordinary Canadians: all the information and intelligence monitoring and interagency sharing does nothing in a system designed to obfuscate. It does nothing when the government chooses against direct engagement and outreach with diaspora communities and the general public to address FI. Lack of transparency remains a major weakness for Canada’s national security and the protection of diaspora communities and the public at large. Coupled with a demonstrated tolerance of resistance violence as a means of achieving social justice, together with an overall institutional contempt for enforcing the law and punishing violent crime and terror, Canada remains a sitting duck for hostile foreign entities.
So, back to the MIGS briefing, which I found far more meaningful and informative and helpful, as an OSINT tracker, as a researcher, and as a writer trying to demystify the foreign interference and national security information landscape for normal people. It’s not a secret to anyone who has a brainwave and a heartbeat who remotely pays attention to news media or spends any length of time on social media — Canada has a serious FI problem.
The national security and intelligence community has sounded the warning bells for years, as evidenced by a myriad of reports and briefings on the topic. Nonetheless the Trudeau government acted surprised at the media reports that came out in 2021/22 regarding election interference. OSINT researchers have consistently reported on transnational repression of diaspora communities by People’s Republic of China officials and “friends”. Often they do this work at great risk to their personal and physical safety and security, and that of their family.
By now, an established, valid and reliable growing body of work exists in the open to document and follow the threat of the PRC vis a vis foreign interference and election tampering.
and are a couple of names you should know by now. If you didn’t know them, then you do now, go read their stuff. Buy yourselves a subscription to these publications and support the independent and reliable investigative reportage of this stuff. For those who do Xwitter, you should follow Andy Lee, who operates an OSINT account on that platform.Liberal government-subsidised media will not tell you what the Liberal government itself has gone to great lengths to hide from you and the rest of the country. The state broadcaster will definitely not provide you with the critical information you need to know — what state broadcaster operating under an authoritarian regime which concentrates power and hides behind elaborate obfuscatory comms strategies does? In fact, during the SITE-TF briefing the panel as much as said that the onus lies with individual Canadians and affected communities to inform themselves and engineer remedies to protect their communities.
So, let’s go through Dr. Wark’s playbook and make it all make sense.
What’s so important about this stuff? Well, Canadians have diminished confidence in the institutions of government and society that support and protect us all. The integrity of our democracy depends on these institutions garnering the trust and confidence of us all. At present it’s safe to say, that trust is lacking and it harms our capacity to choose, and it makes the job of transnational repression easier for hostile foreign powers that have a strong foothold in the country at all levels — community, regional, municipal, provincial, federal.
First let’s make it clear we know what we are talking about. What’s Foreign Interference (FI)? Dr. Wark provides the following definition, contained in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Act of 1984, which contains three key elements.
To constitute foreign interference, an activity must:
Take place within Canada or relate to Canada
Be detrimental to the interests of Canada
Be clandestine, or deceptive or involve a threat to any person.
Secrecy. Deception. Threat.
That’s the key takeaway—deception. Government definitions of FI point to the actor behind the threats and deception — a proxy for a foreign state, acting to advance the strategic interests of that foreign state.
Let’s talk about deception now. Think of the acronym MISDISMAL. Misinformation refers to false information not intended to cause harm. Disinformation refers to false information that intends to manipulate or obfuscate or mislead. Malinformation refers to information that originates from truth and gets exaggerated in ways that can cause harm. Not all false information emanates from a desire to cause harm. Fake news travels fast and embeds itself in fairly short order. Then there’s the information that contains a bit of truth and lots of hyperbole, the engagement farming and rage baiting. Then there’s outright false information designed and disseminated to manufacture consent and generally mislead.
Spreading false information does not meet the threshold for FI.
The key to FI lies in the secret link to a foreign actor. The link to foreign interference is when state actors or their proxies get involved in sponsoring disinformation and, remembering our definition, do so either clandestinely or deceptively. That is, they try to hide the fact that their hand is behind such information operations. Fake news is fake news. However disinformation poses a more serious threat because of the malicious intent at the heart of it.
Now let’s talk about this thing called Transnational Repression (TNR) — what the heck it’s that? The targeting of Joe Tay by the Hong Kong Police and PRC at the heart of the Paul Chiang Bounty Hunter Scandal is an example of transnational repression.
Transnational repression is a widely used term. But as the final report of the Foreign Interference Commission relates, there is currently no legal definition to draw on. The common understanding among Canadian government agencies is that transnational repression involves foreign state activity to monitor, intimidate and harass diaspora communities to achieve foreign state objectives. A less bloodless definition is provided by the NGO, Freedom House:
“It is governments reaching across borders to silence dissent among diasporas and exiles, including through assassinations, illegal deportations, abductions, digital threats, Interpol abuse, and family intimidation.”
A special branch of transnational repression involves online campaigns—this is called “Digital Transnational Repression.” —Wesley Wark, MIGS Playbook
Many Canadians have seen digital transnational repression in action — the propaganda campaign waged by Hamas state proxies for example. Remember the disinformation about Al-Shifa Hospital and Al-Ahli Arab Hospital widely spread by mainstream media—including the CBC—and even Canadian politicians, during the Israeli retaliation on Hamas terrorist operations targets following the October 7, 2023 massacre? Remember the Gaza-based journalists reporting on Gaza that turned out to be Hamas proxies? This is transnational repression (TNR) targeting the Jewish diaspora. OSINT reports have surfaced regarding digital transnational repression of dissidents by PRC proxies — Andy Lee and other anonymous researchers and trackers use Xwitter to report their findings.
In the MIGs report, Wark touches on the Independent Special Rapporteur David Johnston and his rejection of a judicial process in favor of a public inquiry that would focus on hearing from Canadians. The fallout from then ISR controversy lead to the FIPI, Foreign Interference Public Inquiry, lead by Quebec Superior Court judge, Marie-Jose Hogue.
The key elements of the terms of reference involved its short time-frame, with a final report initially mandated for December 2024; the open-ended scope of the foreign interference actors it could examine (China, Russia and any other foreign states or non-state actors); the need to look back and examine past foreign interference campaigns against the 2019 and 2021 federal elections; and the requirement to look ahead and make recommendations to better protect “federal democratic” supports and protections in place for members of a diaspora who may be especially vulnerable and may be the first victims of foreign interference in Canada's democratic processes."
This clause seemingly gave a green light to the Public Inquiry to link foreign interference in Canada's elections to the broader themes of transnational repression. Its efforts in that regard failed to satisfy critics, especially from diaspora groups …
Disinformation as a major threat to diaspora communities did not feature centrally in the terms of service for the inquiry. The inquiry seemed mandated to focus on the government structures and processes and the disruptions thereto, as opposed to the mechanisms of TNR attack and the targets of those attacks. Did this matter? Did this limited scope of the inquiry also limit its effectiveness in addressing the issue facing Canadians? Dr Wark asks the question and makes an important point.
How, and how well, did the Inquiry respond to it? … Threats to diaspora communities and disinformation campaigns lock together.
People told the Commission that protests and gatherings were sometimes the scene of such events. Some individuals also indicated having suffered damage to their property which they attributed to foreign state actors and their proxies.
In addition, for many participants, foreign interference takes the form of harassment by foreign states' proxies and supporters in Canada, and often by members of their own community. — Hogue report
Reader, did you catch that?
Protests are often the site of transnational repression targeting diaspora communities and dissidents within them. Where does free expression end and transnational repression (TNR) begin? I’m thinking of the “pro Palestinian protests” that all levels of government cross nationally have allowed to continue virtually unchecked, despite the deliberate and open targeting of the Jewish diaspora and anyone who opposes pro-Hamas activism. Not to mention the repression we do not know about because we do not hear about or see it, because the language shield provides great cover for agents engaging in TNR.
How many of us have to wherewithal or capacity to monitor Farsi and Arabic language media and OSINT to get a sense of the TNR taking place in these diasporas and to monitor the TNR that targets the Jewish diaspora? At present the Jewish diaspora has its own well developed infrastructure of monitoring for TNR, across the globe — the government does little or nothing to address antisemitism and TNR of the Jewish diaspora, aside from the few sweeping symbolic policy gestures.
What measures does Canada have in place to address TNR?
National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator (NCFIC) action plan for the Minister of Public Safety to consider, also a “Cross-Cultural Roundtable”
CSIS hotline to report FI
Diplomatic channels between Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and PRC
Digital Citizen Initiative
Elections Canada voter guides published in 51 languages
Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE, cyber operations) works with global and federal partners to mitigate risk, it has no domestic mandate and so has a limited capacity to deal with TNR, which occurs domestically
Government working in its international capacity, ie G7 meetings
What’s the National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator?
This is a recently created position in the federal government and likely to be little known to Canadians. Its newness and low profile are not helped by the fact that there is minimal public information provided about the Coordinator and there is no dedicated website or web pages for their work. Public Safety Canada provides a one-line description on its website pages devoted to “Foreign Interference and Canada.” —Wark
The latest update on the National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator (NCFIC) appeared in April 2023 and consisted of a noncommittal comms promise to do nothing but engage in what I will call red tape nothing-burger politicking.
What about the CSIS Hotline?
The CSIS “hotline” exists as one of many government hotline. There is no coordination of this patchwork of weak remedial measures — there is no co-ordinated and streamlined mechanism to assist Canadians dealing with TNR. Nothing addresses reporting the FI disinformation serving as a vehicle for TNR. How does one know which hotline to call?
On its website Public Safety Canada advises people to contact the RCMP “to report suspicious incidents which may be of concern to national security.” In order “to report non-urgent potential national security threats or suspicious activities,” people can call CSIS. How do we decide when to call CSIS versus the RCMP? Unknown, unclear. What about cyber threats? For that we have the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. For “non-urgent suspicious cross-border activities”, contact the Canada Border Services Agency. As always there’s 911 for any immediate threat or danger.
As Wark mentions in his playbook, the language of “national security” is far too generic.
In addition to its hotline, CSIS has a small unit called the “Academic Outreach and Stakeholder Engagement (AOSE).” The unit was originally established in 2008 and revised in its scope in 2019. The work of this unit, and more broadly CSIS public engagement efforts, are chronicled briefly in CSIS's most recent annual public report, for 2023, published in May 2024. It notes that CSIS conducted 147 outreach engagements in 2023. While that number sounds impressive, a breakdown of the sectors involved shows that only 7% of these engagements involved “community groups.” There is no category for engagement with diaspora communities. — Wark, MIGS Playbook/Report
Diaspora communities are not an important stakeholders for the Liberal government?
CSIS has an external monthly newsletter called Need to Know. Every month, CSIS shares its declassified briefings to equip Canadian industry with knowledge and insights to better do business at home and abroad. The June 2024 issue contained a mention of Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy (see my March 2024 article on the feminist foreign policy below). The latest issue of Need to Know, dated February 2025 features a discussion of Canada’s integrative military capabilities and directions for the future, the Israel-Hamas conflict, Syria + ISIS, and the pacific corridor, specifically US measures to temper Chinese expansion and China’s energy transition policies.
Financing Trudeau's Woke Feminist Hell
Let’s talk about how the Feminist Government of Canada spends our money, readers.
The Need to Know Newsletter appears quite comms in its feel, it offers nothing concrete or meaningful for normal people seeking information about foreign intelligence issues and FI in general. Reader, the purpose of the newsletter is to produce the newsletter, meaning the unit producing the newsletter is the primary purpose of the newsletter — a thing done to say look, we are doing a thing! As mentioned, it’s an endeavor by the industry for the industry — the peons, peasants, plebs need to concern themselves about important matters. Sarcasm alert. Of relevance to ordinary people might be a podcast episode from Australian National Security about how to spot misinformation. Yes, the same Australia that arrested Chris Elston for peacefully protesting against gender ideology in Brisbane — definitely a country that promotes a policy of Sex Denialism on pain of arrest and professional sanctions can instruct its public on how to spot misinformation! Reader, can we not? Pshaw.
The podcast appears to be a discussion between a digital inclusion researcher, a media literacy policy analyst, and a comms professor. So the context of this discussion of spotting misinformation (which they lump to together with disinformation) involves how you should read the media you’re exposed to on a daily basis and habits you should adopt in the course of your internet travails. Transcript is here, not really relevant to the discussion of TNR though.
Pop quiz! What’s misinformation? Do you remember? Misinformation refers to false information not intended to cause harm. Consider that not everyone who talks about misinformation means the same thing as we do here. Remember Misinformation as distinct from Disinformation, the primary vehicle for TNR. It’s my opinion that misinformation has become the term used by progressive authoritarians who seek to silence dissent by promoting a designated narrative and media literacy often serves as a convenient cover.
Beware what information you consume, think for yourself and survey a variety of information from unrelated sources. Think for yourself, rather than look for others to tell you what to think. Remember being a kid in elementary school and looking around the room before decided it was safe to raise your hand? You’re not a kid anymore, you’re an adult, and that means you taking responsibility for your own thoughts and opinions and choices you make based on the information you consume.
In a July 2021 paper on FI which you can find here, CSIS provided the following three pieces of advice regarding disinformation.
Be critical of what you consume online
Be careful about sharing of information online, that includes reposting
Take note of “unexpected” online interactions
One thing I want to add here is to remind readers of all the digital tools at your disposal. Image Reverse Search, for example. I use Google’s Image Reverse Search to search images. This tells me whether an image might be an AI (if there non attribution or credited photographer, or if the only source of the image is the X post where you found it). It tells me whether an image is indeed what the source claims, or whether it’s something appropriated from the past and repurposed (in the Hamas propaganda campaign, cyber actors frequently used images from the Syrian conflict to discredit Israel and attack the Jewish diaspora.
Generally, when you come across an image posted by an engagement farmer claiming something controversial, I recommend readers save the image and use Image Reverse Search to verify the claim. Remember confirmation bias is not your friend. Verify claims made by engagement farmers and rage baiters and influencers. It’s really as simple as Googling the item. Or of verifying and corroborating with various media.
For example, there are several sources of critical and reliable Israeli media and investigative journalism, Google Translate works fairly well with Hebrew, and a rich tapestry of OSINT exists to help you make informed decisions and combat the ongoing campaign of Disinformation waged by Hamas and related entities. Living in a multicultural society means familiarising oneself with international news media, and knowing the biases of various outlets.
Be your own fact checker. It’s your brain, guard it. You don’t just put any old piece of crap in your mouth, so why would you treat your brain any differently?
Finally, beware AI, sometimes it hallucinates, sometimes it gets details wrong. Grok has proven quite reliable, however, it lies to the human using the AI to validate and verify the information Grok gives you. Yes, Grok can give you a big whack of information in 12 seconds about Brookfield Asset Management or Qatar Investment Authority or The Economist Group. And yes, it lies to you to Google fact checker the stuff your Grok AI research assistant provided you.
What about the RCMP?
[Regarding the RCMP] …all is not well when it comes to [their] ability … to deal with foreign interference and engage in outreach with diaspora communities. The pity is that the Inquiry did not dig deeper into the RCMP's ability to conduct such engagement. The Mounties themselves offer no picture of their outreach strategy. Their website contains a page on "Foreign Actor Interference" which describes various types of FI, including "community intimidation and harassment," but offers no suggestions about how the Mounties and affected communities might work together, or what individuals or diaspora communities impacted by foreign interference might do about it. — MIGS Playbook
The RCMP fails to adequately engage with diaspora and other affected communities in the civilian population. Wark recounts the activity report given to the Hogue inquiry. Of the 48 activities 10 addressed diaspora communities and of those 10, only 3 involved the Chinese diaspora. Wark goes on to mention that no measurement of efficacy of the RCMP engagement activities exists or was reported. Did the RCMP receive feedback from communities it engaged with? Good question. We don’t know. Twenty of the activities involved law enforcement audiences. The outreach list provided to the Hogue inquiry by the CSIS AOSE has been completed redacted.
As Wark mentions, the failure of institutions to engage in community outreach, and the failure of the Hogue inquiry to assess their efficacy in addressing TNR disappoints, falls short of our expectations. Reader, our government and its institutional framework does not serve nor meet the needs of Canadians — this government exists to serve itself, that is its partisan political interest. There is an important role here for coordination and efficacy measurement that could be played by the NCFIC, with appropriate transparency to signal that attention is being paid.
Reader. the government has done little to signal to Canadians that it hears and sees our concerns and the takes the challenges and threats facing Canada seriously.
What about the Communications Security Establishment (CSE)?
First of all, let’s revisit the obvious question — the heck is the CSE?
The Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSE) is Canada’s agency responsible for foreign signals intelligence, cyber operations, and cyber security. The CSE gathers foreign signals intelligence to defend Canada’s national security. They focus primarily on keeping the Government of Canada’s information secure, and in that capacity the CSE works with industry and academia to protect Canadians from cyber threats. — from the CSE Website
The meaning behind the reference in the PIFI final report unclear. It simply states that “some of its cyber operations have repercussions for transnational repression.” Repercussions could be a reference to CSE's authorities to engage in cyber operations against foreign targets to pre-empt cyber-attacks. But if we are looking for ways that CSE can directly assist individuals and communities affected by foreign interference, we turn to the entity created by CSE in 2018 called the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) … The CCCS website does not feature targeted advice for diaspora communities or those facing transnational repression. The website material is only available in English and French. — Wark, MIGS Report/Playbook
CSE publishes both a regular series of public reports on cyber threats to Canada's democratic processes as well as a more general cyber threat assessment, issued as a bi-annual product. The most recent versions of the "Cyber Threat to Canada's Democratic processes" include a 2023 Update which outlines foreign intelligence priorities. It’s a report that talks at Canadians, outlining the priorities of the government and giving the unclassified run down on the intelligence issues facing the CSE. Below you can see the description of PRC cyber threat activity.
A 2025 Update addresses the threats and challenges of generative AI. The report include information on cyberattacks that impact electoral processes around the world and the strategic directed attacks on targeted communities, campaigns such as Spam-o-flage, for example.
“The PRC is identified as posing the top cyber threat to Canada. The threat assessment finds it "very likely" that PRC cyber threat actors support Chinese efforts to target advocates for groups the regime views as security threats, the so-called "Five Poisons.”
This Five Poisons group includes the following.
1. Falun Gong practitioners
2. advocates for the rights of Uyghurs
3. advocates for the rights of Tibetans
4. supporters of Taiwanese independence
5. pro-democracy advocates.” — Wesley Wark, MIGS Report/Playbook
Whew! Reader, whew! Is that enough for today? I think so. That’s half of the Wesley Wark report only, this took us up to page 10 of a 17 page report. So consider this part one of two. I have embedded the video of the MIGS press briefing here so you can take the 25 minutes to watch and listen on your own and draw your own conclusions about what you hear from the panelists.
Did you find this informative or useful? Please share widely and talk intelligently about this stuff because this is the foundations of our democracy and it’s the way we preserve our institutions to protect our freedom. Freedom is not a given reader. It is something we must know, value and and stand up for every day, the more access to the world we have because of the internet’s digital reach, the more access hostile foreign actors have to us, and the greater the chances they have to disrupt through strategic disinformation campaigns, and the more ways they have to intimidat.
TNR is a critical threat to Canadians at the individual and community level, it is the HamasNazis we see with police protection targeting Jewish neigbourhoods, and even schools and synagogues. The progressive DEI culture that’s radicalised the Liberal government has distracted policy makers and legislators from the really predator threatening to devour Canadian democracy — not racism, not white supremacy, not transphobia, but rather the People’s Republic of China.
Part two of this analysis of the MIGS Report/Playbook written by Wesley Wark for Canadians will slide into your inbox sometime tomorrow afternoon or evening.