A federal investigative unit has identified what could be a Chinese Communist Party intelligence operation aimed at deterring Chinese-born Canadians from voting for the Conservatives in the last federal election.
The Sept. 13, 2021 analysis of Canada’s Rapid Response Mechanism, which tracks foreign interference, says researchers noted that Communist Party media accounts on China’s social media platform Douyin widely shared a narrative that conservatives would almost break off diplomatic relations with Beijing.
The report, obtained by The Canadian Press through the Access to Information Act, was prepared just one week before Canadians went to the polls.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals emerged from the September 20 national vote with a renewed minority term, while the Conservatives, led by Erin O’Toole, formed the official Opposition.
O’Toole, who is no longer a leader, said in a podcast recorded this month that the Conservatives lost eight or nine seats due to foreign interference from China.
Rapid Response Mechanism Canada, based in Global Affairs Canada, produces open data analysis to chart trends, strategies and tactics in foreign interference.
His work supports the G7 RRM, an initiative to strengthen coordination to identify and respond to threats to major industrial democracies.
The analysis of messages about the Conservative Party was part of RRM Canada’s effort to monitor the digital information environment to detect signs of foreign state-sponsored information manipulation in the general election.
Conservative MP Michael Chong, the party’s foreign minister, said in an interview that the analysis was “further evidence that Beijing’s communist leadership interfered in the last general election by spreading misinformation.”
RRM Canada says it manually reviewed Chinese social networking platforms such as WeChat, Douyin, Weibo, Xigua and Bilibili, and conducted open source forensic digital analysis using website files, social listening tools, and classification tools. of cross-platform social networking.
Analysts first noticed the narrative about conservatives in two articles published Sept. 8 by the Global Times, a state-run media tabloid.
RRM Canada believes that the coverage of the Global Times was prompted by a report in the Ottawa-based Hill Times, which examined the positions of Canadian parties on Canada-China relations. The analysis says the Global Times is likely to be the first Chinese publication to cover the contents of the Ottawa publication, with its two articles getting more than 100,000 page views each.
RRM Canada notes that the timing coincided with the first debate of federal leaders and the numbers of ever-closer polls. Similar articles published by major Canadian media in early September, as well as the Conservative Party platform published in August, received no response from state-controlled media in China, according to the analysis.
Several popular WeChat news accounts focused on Canada began interacting with the Global Times narrative on September 9, copying the content and form without accrediting the publication, “hiding the point of origin of the narrative,” they found. analysts.
The accounts also added comments on the Conservatives to the articles, such as “The Chinese are afraid of the platform” and questioned whether “Chinese compatriots should support the Conservatives if they use this rhetoric.”
“Unless proven otherwise, WeChat users would not know that the narrative about the Conservatives and O’Toole comes from the Global Times and would assume that the articles were original reports from WeChat’s Canadian accounts.”
Many WeChat news accounts serving Canadians are registered for people in China, and despite well-established news sources, “some may have unclear links” with Chinese Communist Party media groups, the analysis says. .
The researchers “could not determine whether there was coordination between the CCP’s media that originally promoted the narrative and the popular WeChat news accounts that serve Chinese-speaking Canadians who are now expanding the narrative,” the analysis notes. September 13th.
“RRM Canada also cannot determine whether there was any unauthorized activity that increased user engagement with the narrative, as Chinese social media platforms are not completely transparent.”
However, Communist Party media reports about Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, posted videos repeating a September 8 Global Times headline, according to the analysis. For example, the Douyin account of Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, shared a video saying that the conservative platform mentions China “31 times” and that an “expert” says the party “almost wants to break the diplomatic relations with China “.
The Chinese embassy in Ottawa did not respond to a request for comment on RRM Canada’s analysis.
Among the boards of the conservative platform in the election campaign were promises to confront Beijing on human rights issues, diversify supply chains to move them away from China, adopt a presumption against allowing state entities to Beijing take over Canadian companies and work for Less Global Reliance on China’s Critical Minerals.
Chong says it is clear that representatives were spreading misinformation on behalf of Beijing in the federal elections.
“It’s hard to gauge whether that was the reason for the loss of some Conservative MPs. But I think we can say with certainty that it was a contributing factor.”
If Beijing comes to the same conclusion, China “may be encouraged to do something much bigger in a future federal election, undermining our democratic process,” Chong said.
Under a federal protocol, there would be a public announcement if a group of senior bureaucrats determined that an incident, or an accumulation of incidents, threatened Canada’s ability to hold free and fair elections. There were no such announcements last year.
At a House of Commons committee meeting earlier this month, Bill Blair, the public safety minister during the election campaign, said that although “we’ve all heard various anecdotes and opinions,” he hadn’t received them directly. ” no information from our intelligence services “which provided evidence of foreign interference in the campaign.
Deputy Minister Rob Stewart told the meeting that there were, “as expected”, activities on social media that would constitute misinformation and attempts to influence the votes. “There was no threat to the overall integrity of the election.”
The Canadian election disinformation project, which brought together several academic researchers, found that Chinese officials and state media commented on the election with the apparent aim of convincing Canadians of Chinese descent to vote against the Conservative Party in 2021.
“Misleading and critical information about certain candidates circulated on Chinese-language social media platforms. However, we find no evidence that Chinese interference has had a significant impact on the general election.”
Conservatives “could have done a better job” of countering those messages, Chong said. “Obviously we didn’t, and that’s a lesson learned.”
However, the federal government must actively counter foreign misinformation between election campaigns, Chong said. During the campaigns, the government should make available immediately the analyzes of the Rapid Response Mechanism to inform the public, he added.
Fen Hampson, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University who looks closely at China, agrees that more transparency would be beneficial.
He advocates expanding the analytical process, perhaps by creating a center that includes non-governmental actors, gathers information from a variety of sources, and regularly publishes reports of apparent foreign interference.
“This takes it out of the domestic political arena, which will always be very busy.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on June 23, 2022.