Our First Month

Plus, Tracking Electoral Disinformation

Parliament Hill on March 9 (Paul McKinnon/Alamy)

So Canada’s long-awaited election campaign is finally underway. The Diehard Optimist will have plenty to say about the issues at stake, including Trump’s anything-but-idle threats, before the votes are tallied on April 28.

In the meantime, this is to thank you. It’s been one month since we launched our newsletter. Over ten editions (including this one), the Diehard Optimist has covered Ukraine (three times), Trump and Russia (twice), Greenland’s elections, Trudeau’s nine years in office and the several meanings of ‘Canada First’.

The chatter and feedback have been positive. With very little promotion, our subscribers already number in the hundreds. Many of you are paying supporters, earning our extra gratitude. Our introductory piece and look at Trudeau’s lacklustre legacy were free, as is this update. Please reach out to anyone who may wish to join.

For the coming weeks, we have a strong lineup in store. Beyond the obvious issues, we will look at the long decline of Canada’s military; the succession to Russian president Vladimir Putin, which is already well underway; the keys to victory in Ukraine; new threats taking shape in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan; and the impact of hostile long-term influence operations, especially on G7 countries.

In addition, while Canada’s general election is underway, we will be offering an extra series to monitor and provide analysis of outside efforts to shape the outcome.

The scale of such foreign influence campaigns is no longer in doubt. Take the Hybrid Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Helsinki, established in 2017 by nine states (including Canada) to build resilience and counter hybrid threats seeking to disorient, disrupt and weaken our societies. Jakub Kalensky is deputy director of its community of interest for hybrid threats which seeks to safeguard our democracies. He worked as a journalist in Czechia and founded EUvsDisinfo, a flagship EU project that aims to counter hostile influence operations.

Kalensky estimates that 60 percent of disinformation worldwide originates in Russia; in Europe, it’s 80 percent. The EU has been ahead of Canada in countering it.

Information attacks come at us through countless channels – from viral YouTube videos to grey digital news websites, from fake social media accounts to proxy voices taking their cues from Moscow. Beyond Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, India and other states engage in large-scale information warfare.

Social media is by far their most effective channel, with TikTok, Twitter/X and Facebook still flooded with state-directed trolls, bots and addictive agitprop. As we saw in last fall’s US election, this polarizing activity favoured Trump. Influential Democratic data scientist David Shor has shown a direct correlation between exposure to these platforms and rates of support for Trump. TikTok has a similar tendency to push voters towards Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s far-right party.

How much influence does Russia wield on Twitter/X or China on TikTok? There is no accurate measure. But it’s massive. Without Elon Musk’s ruthless torquing of X and the massive impact of foreign-backed hybrid digital campaigns on virtually every major platform, it is doubtful Trump would be back in office.

In effect, a foreign-made online constituency now operates as a stealth party (or parties) in every democracy – during campaigns and between them. In Romania, Russia nearly succeeded in using TikTok to install a radical candidate loyal to them. In Germany’s recent election campaign, Musk and other senior members of the Trump Administration combined forces with Moscow’s bot armies to try to ensure several pro-Russian parties came out on top, but with less success.

This should not be happening. Hostile foreign states should not be king-makers in our democratic elections. Propaganda and disinformation are not freedom of speech, as some naïvely pretend. They threaten the very fabric of our democracies, as Justice Hogue underlined in her recent report on foreign interference in Canada.

The major social media platforms enabled massive foreign campaigns to influence Canada’s last three elections – in 2015, 2019 and 2021. Their impact has not yet been fully assessed. Our defences are still weak to non-existent.

But with existing tools, we can do more. Moscow’s strategies are often painfully obvious: calling them out is often enough. If we do this rigourously, while focusing voters back onto reliable journalism and trusted sources of electoral insight, we can ensure Canadians decide on April 28 — not the Kremlin’s information warriors or China’s United Front Work Department.

As our modest contribution, the Diehard Optimist will report every few days on the shape of foreign influence on Canada’s 2025 federal election campaign. Given Trump’s hostility, such interference may well come from south of the border. So we will cover the following headings: (i) ‘What the Bots are Saying’ – covering foreign-directed (usually Russian) accounts on Twitter/X; (ii) ‘US Narratives’ – tracking our neighbour’s role; and (iii) ‘Proxy Voices’ – highlighting any other inauthentic campaigns.

These will be short reports, on top of our regular essays. If we don’t see major issues, they will be even shorter. The good news is that Canadian voters, having seen malign strategies at work in the US and elsewhere, are already better inoculated against them. But we still need to recover and repair our democracy after a decade of non-stop attacks and degradation. We aim to show Canada is taking this seriously.

Please spread the word to anyone who tracks disinformation, cares about safeguarding our democracy or just wants to understand the hostile online context in which our elections now take place.

Once again, thanks for your support of far: it has been a real pleasure.