Canada’s greatest vulnerability is disinformation, and we have no defence for it

(Published in The Globe and Mail March 10, 2025)

For some young man, somewhere in Canada, his Instagram feed is right now serving up a humorous but enticing fantasy.

“What if the United States, Mexico and Canada united to create one country?” an animated video with crude references asks. “Economically, this union would dominate with a GDP of over $28-trillion, making it the richest country on Earth! ... Geographically, this supernation would span 21.66 million square kilometres, overtaking Russia as the largest country!”

For almost a minute, it pitches giving up Canadian sovereignty in order to rule the world. For a young man watching, with his hopes for a stable career, homeownership and a safe world to live in withering away, it might be an alluring idea.

That video comes from an Instagram account suspected of originating in Russia, and posted after Donald Trump started musing about the idea of turning Canada into the 51st American state. Its use of professional-looking graphics, economic data and masculine stereotypes sets it apart from the more subtle approaches to cognitive warfare on social media.

According to NATO estimates, the Russians spend roughly €2-billion a year on creating content to flood social-media feeds in NATO countries. And that’s only the flow it can track. Until recently, Russia had paid little attention to Canada as we had the luxury of being relatively unimportant. That is no longer the case. Canada is in play, along with its Arctic, its resources and its water. What Mr. Trump says, the Russians exploit. It’s not hard to imagine American-sponsored disinformation attacks joining the assault.

Targeting our population with content normalizing the idea of absorbing Canada aims to destabilize our institutions and sap our will to resist. It exploits intergenerational conflict, denigrates our history and culture, and makes America seem like the land of endless opportunity. The aim, after a couple of years of bombarding social media and torquing its algorithms, is to make us believe joining the U.S. isn’t much of a leap.

With a federal election looming, we can expect attempts to boost the posts of certain candidates. With the rise of populist and separatist sentiment in Quebec and Alberta, look for attempts to elevate the destabilizing impact they’ll have on the country. Meantime, MAGA keyboard warriors and their media stars will continue to allege that Canada isn’t a country at all, merely an accident of history that deserves to be corrected.

So how do we fight this escalating war for the hearts and minds of Canadians? There’s the problem. We have built almost no defence. Of all founding NATO countries, Canada is unique in having little ability to track or combat the lies and distortions.

Look to Sweden, NATO’s newest member. It has something called the Psychological Defence Agency, a robust government department that shares and co-ordinates intelligence between companies, regions and agencies to “identify, analyze and provide support” in combatting disinformation that is “aimed at weakening Sweden’s resilience and the willingness of the population to defend itself.” Canada has nothing remotely like that, and no ongoing monitoring of disinformation anywhere.

Then there’s Britain. It has multiple agencies and programs doing that work: the Government Communication Service, the UK Government Resilience Framework, the Information Threats and Influence Directorate, the Home Office and so on. The British Army has devoted a group of between 3,000 and 5,000 reservists and regular army soldiers to its 77th Brigade Information Operations, devoted exclusively to combatting “new forms of warfare in the information environment.”

The Canadian Armed Forces has no such capability. It used to have a robust psychological-warfare effort used to good effect in the Afghan War, but the program was recently abandoned and its expertise scattered to satisfy budget cuts over the past decade. We are the only member of the Five Eyes without a psyops unit to spot, identify and challenge disinformation campaigns.

This has left us completely blind to one of the ways this U.S. administration and its many supporters are seeking to play with our heads in the coming months. Some might argue it was impossible to prepare for the sudden shift in attitude of our neighbour, but the threats to Canada’s infospace have existed from other countries for a decade – not only from Russia, but from China, India, Iran and North Korea. And when Mr. Trump promised predatory tariffs for years, our leaders assumed he didn’t mean for us. We are, once again, victims of a lack of imagination.

It is a colossal failure. The highest calling of any leader and a country’s military is to protect its citizens from harm. We have been left utterly defenceless in this fight for our minds and our sovereignty. Abandoned, each of us, as the propaganda, lies, and distortions are aimed right at us, and sure to intensify.