Outside Influence 6

Chinese, Russian & US Interference Continues

Since our last report and over the Easter weekend, at least four more major cases of foreign interference in Canada’s election campaign have come to light.

What the Bots Are Saying

On Twitter/X, algorithms and inauthentic activity continue to favour Liberals over Conservatives by a wide margin. Our latest sample of posts featuring Carney’s handle showed almost zero negative sentiment, while posts mentioning Poilievre were 50 percent negative. For the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC), negative posts constituted about 20 percent of traffic; for the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), 50 to 70 percent were negative. ‘Freedom convoy’ has also been trending on Canadian X/Twitter for part of today, with almost all relevant content seeking to discredit Poilievre for his support for the February 2022 truckers’ blockade.

The first new case was reported yesterday by the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol Panel of the Privy Council Office, based on analysis provided by the multi-agency Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force. It concerns ‘coordinated inauthentic activity’ targeting Conservative candidate for Don Valley North Joe Tay, a noted pro-democracy activist from Hong Kong.

(Images associated with a state-backed media campaign against Joe Tay, CPC candidate for Don Valley North, as identified by SITE.)

This activity was observed on Facebook, WeChat, TikTok, RedNote, and Douyin. As yesterday’s PCO update noted: “The content of this operation features a mock ‘wanted poster’, as well as disparaging headlines and comments, about Joe Tay, Conservative party candidate for Don Valley North. Mr. Tay is known for his opposition to PRC laws and practices in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and is one of six individuals targeted with monetary bounties by Hong Kong Police in December 2024.”

This is another state-backed campaign of attempted transnational repression and foreign election interference delivered via social media. This story has been covered over the past 24 hours by the Globe and Mail (‘Conservative candidate targeted by election interference from China, watchdog says’) as well as by the Canadian Press, Global News (‘Conservative candidate target of election “repression operation,” task force says’) and The National Post (‘China linked to fake “wanted” poster, repression efforts against Conservative candidate: Posts began appearing on various China-based social media platforms promoting the bounty against Tay’). Sam Cooper of The Bureau has also weighed in with this piece.

US Dimension

The second new case is a one hour and twelve minute interview released by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on April 16, 2025 with Maxime Bernier, a former Conservative cabinet minister who has been leader of the anti-immigration People’s Party of Canada (PPC) since 2018. It now has 4.4 million views on Twitter/X and 486,000 views on YouTube. In the interview, Poilievre is dismissed as a “fraud”; Carney is labelled “globalist-in-chief.” (#Wexit and ‘51^st state’ are downplayed.) Carlson terms Canada “dystopian and threatening” and predicts an “oncoming Canadian revolution.” The release was timed to coincide with Canada’s leaders’ debates. Its apparent aim was to discredit Poilievre and strengthen Bernier, whose fringe party had sunk to very low levels in the polls.

The net impact is likely to be positive for Carney, whose supporters are anyway unlikely to be influenced by a self-described conservative US political commentator. Carlson has been an ardent supporter of Trump and his MAGA agenda. He is also an obvious agent of Russian influence – one of the most prominent in any allied jurisdiction – who interviewed Putin’s double in February 2024, breaking an allied media boycott on Kremlin interviews that had held him since 2022.

(Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin’s double in Moscow, February 2024. Reuters)

Foreign-Backed Proxies

In addition to China-backed foreign interference playing out in Don Valley North, Sam Cooper has reported on two other cases of Chinese state-backed interference. The first concerns the Chinese Canadian Conservative Association’s complaints about both parties and advice to voters of Chinese origin in Canada to “think rationally and vote carefully” – which has been widely interpreted as an endorsement of Beijing’s pro-LPC position. In a separate report, Cooper highlights a Chinese-language website that accused the CPC of proposing ‘anti-China’ policies. In the meantime, the Twitter/X account of LPC candidate for Markham-Unionville Peter Yuen continues to feature a picture of the Clearwater Bay Golf and Country Club in Hong Kong which, given his predecessor’s threatening language towards Mr. Tay and the continuing state-sponsored campaign against him, is in poor taste, to say the least.