Juno News - May 18, 2022


Foreign election interference “clearly undermined our democracy” – Royal Military College professor

Topics
foreign election interference
Mentioned
Kenny Chu Luprecht
Scott Aitchison says Canada must recognize Taiwan as a country Jason Kenney is resigning. What does it mean for Canadian conservatism？

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

139.88

Word count

477

Sentence count

20


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the impact of foreign disinformation on the Canadian election, and the lack of action being taken by Elections Canada to combat it. We also talk about what we can do to prevent similar attempts in the future.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Dr. Luprecht, are you aware of what happened to my colleague Kenny Chu in the last election,
00:00:05.140 primarily because he introduced a bill to propose making this foreign influence registry?
00:00:11.460 I'm aware of some of the online activity that was directed at your colleague,
00:00:16.980 and I also believe that that activity had a material influence on the outcome in that particular writing.
00:00:25.740 So there was a McGill study, I'm sure you might be aware of it, that said the overall election,
00:00:32.140 they said it didn't have a material impact, but at certain writing levels,
00:00:36.120 they can't discount that it had a material impact on the election.
00:00:38.980 Would you say that he was one of the ridings, primarily because he brought forward this bill
00:00:43.620 that was targeted by foreign disinformation campaigns to defeat an incumbent candidate in a Canadian election?
00:00:52.180 Yeah, I think it clearly undermined our democracy, and it was quite nefarious
00:00:57.560 because the activity, as you well know, was conducted in language, in neither English nor French,
00:01:02.840 it was primarily conducted in a third language, a language in which our security, intelligence,
00:01:08.180 and law enforcement agencies have rather limited capabilities,
00:01:13.240 nor did we have a plan of how we would actively identify such influence activity and be able to counter it.
00:01:20.920 And so, yes, it was, I think it is a canary in the coal mine of what any member of Parliament faces
00:01:26.880 when they actively engage in activity that displeases some of our adversaries.
00:01:31.820 That's great. You know, I can understand, you know, I'm reading the 2021 Elections Canada report,
00:01:36.580 and, you know, they sort of talk about misinformation and disinformation,
00:01:39.800 but it seems like they're really downplaying the impact of disinformation and information,
00:01:44.500 saying, you know, that Canadians can trust the election,
00:01:46.740 and I think overall, the vast majority, we can trust the election,
00:01:50.500 but we know how sometimes elections in Canada can literally be decided by a single riding
00:01:55.220 or a single handful of ridings.
00:01:57.600 Do you think that Elections Canada needs to take this more seriously,
00:02:01.460 and even, not only in their reports after the fact, but even during an election,
00:02:05.860 to alert Canadians that there is a disinformation campaign being conducted during the election?
00:02:10.960 It's not an online problem. This is a longstanding problem in Canada,
00:02:16.140 where riding associations are captured by certain entities that are either close to certain countries,
00:02:22.460 to certain ethnic groups, to certain religious groups.
00:02:24.820 So what I would say is that the online attempts at clear interference in our democratic processes
00:02:32.620 is simply a continuation of a longstanding problem that is related to riding its constituency association levels
00:02:41.740 and not sufficient attention, but also not efficient constraints.
00:02:47.320 Do you think Elections Canada should have done more?
00:02:50.200 I'm sorry, we're out of time.
00:02:51.020 Absolutely.
00:02:51.700 Thank you.
00:02:52.040 Thank you very much.
00:02:53.380 I would now like...
00:02:54.620 Thank you.