Justice Marie-Josée Hogue presenting her report on January 28, 2025.
Justice Marie-Josée Hogue presenting her report on January 28, 2025. Credit: CPAC Credit: CPAC

Justice Marie-Josée Hogue issued her report on foreign interference in Canada’s last two federal elections on January 28, and her conclusions are reassuring.

There are no traitors sitting in Parliament, she says. And she finds no evidence that meddling from China, Russia, Iran, India or any other country had a significant impact on the last two elections. 

Notwithstanding those sanguine, overarching conclusions, Justice Hogue does warn there is still much we must all do to head off threats to Canada’s democracy.

The greatest of those threats, she tells us, is the scourge of false and misleading information: 

“Misinformation and disinformation have the ability to distort our discourse, change our views, and shape our society. Information manipulation (whether foreign or not) poses the single biggest risk to our democracy.”

She adds, ominously: “It is an existential threat.”

And so, it seems that Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and other social media platforms – most of them owned by U.S. corporations – pose more of a threat to Canada than do foreign agents trying to influence local nominating meetings.

Trump and big tech will work together

But before governments try to exercise any control over Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and a number of other platforms, or Elon Musk’s empire, which includes X, or, for that matter, Google, which owns YouTube, the social media oligarchs have a warning for them.

U.S. tech’s oligarchs boast that they’ve got a new and powerful ally: Donald Trump.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was not always a Trump fan. Facebook banned Trump because of his penchant for lies and conspiracy theories during the Biden administration.

But now, like his colleagues throughout the U.S. tech world, Zuckerberg is doing everything he can to ingratiate himself to Trump. In return, Zuckerberg wants Trump’s support in his battles with the European Union (EU).

The EU and some of its member states have imposed steep fines on Meta for violating their anti-trust and privacy laws.

Zuckerberg calls those penalties a “kind of tariff” and hopes Trump will exercise his own penchant for tariffs to bring the Europeans to heel.

That quarrel is all about money. 

Of more relevance to our democratic future is Zuckerberg’s – and most of his fellow tech billionaires’ – idea of free speech. In an interview with a popular U.S. podcaster Zuckerberg was blunt:

“We are going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”

That decision aligns with Zuckerberg’s decision to get rid of Facebook’s fact-checkers shortly after Trump was elected. He also scrapped Meta’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. (DEI is one of the second Trump administration’s favourite targets.)

A selective definition of free speech

The Right in the U.S. characterizes conspiracy theories, such as the assertion that the 2020 election was stolen, and a wide range of bogus pseudoscience claims – among them attacks on vaccines and the promotion of unproven cures – as the mere exercise of free speech.

And they want governments and other actors, including scientists and academic researchers, to keep their hands off their free speech.

In the midst of the firehose of executive orders Trump issued upon taking power, there is a little-noticed one forbidding any branch or agency of the U.S. federal government from engaging in, facilitating, or funding “conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” 

Without irony, Trump simultaneously issued other orders banning significant areas of free speech, among them the teaching of Black history, ethnic studies and women’s studies, and sharing information on climate science and public health threats.

Domestically in the U.S., the Orwellian free speech order is a shot across the bow at publicly-funded anti-misinformation and disinformation efforts – the sort of efforts Justice Hogue says we must accelerate here in Canada.

Trump’s order promises legislation that would impose fines and other sanctions on federal civil servants who engage in what it characterizes as censorship, especially as it relates to online platforms such as Facebook.

But the order also extends beyond the borders of the U.S. It includes sanctions against foreign individuals and governments that engage in what the Trump regime considers to be abridgments of Americans’ and American corporations’ free-speech rights. 

As Trump’s open and unabashed campaign against Canada’s sovereignty and the freedom of Canadians to choose their own way of life gains momentum, his new pro-free-speech allies, the social media giants, will be ready and eager to help.

In one of his recent screeds about Canada becoming the 51st state Trump engaged in his usual falsehoods and fanciful inventions. 

The U.S. president actually said that if we became part of his country, we Canadians would have better healthcare.

That lie is so obvious it hardly merits a response, but it is a preview of the misinformation tactics the new regime in the U.S. will use. Halting fact-checking and elevating outright falsehoods to the status of constitutionally-protected free speech will make the task of defending Canadians’ freedom even harder.

And so, it seems Justice Hogue was given the wrong brief, namely to conduct an inquiry into interference in Canadian affairs from such far-way foreign actors as China.

The biggest threat to Canada, by far, comes, in truth, not from far across the seas, but from just across our southern border.

The many varieties of U.S. imperialism

The United States has always been an imperialist, expansionist entity. 

In its early days, the ideology of Manifest Destiny served as a justification for the violent and bloody removal and destruction of thousands of Indigenous communities. One of Trump’s heroes, Andrew Jackson, was a leading proponent of this pitiless exercise in naked power.

The purpose of the famous doctrine which bears the name of the fifth president, James Monroe, was notionally to keep acquisitive European powers out of the U.S.’ neighbourhood, the western hemisphere. 

In fact, the Monroe Doctrine has served as a pretext for U.S. interference over centuries in Latin American affairs.

In the late 19th century, another Trump role model, president William McKinley, proudly proclaimed the U.S. to be an empire. He backed that up with notable conquests in Cuba and the Philippines.

The 20th century brought an era of lip-service to multilateralism and de-colonization. But the U.S. continued in its imperial ways all the same. 

Between the two world wars U.S. marines occupied Haiti and Nicaragua. 

After World War II, the U.S. engineered the overthrow of the democratically elected governments of Iran, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Argentina, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, and Grenada. 

All of this happened in the context of the Cold War. U.S. engineered coup d’états and insurrections were, in theory at least, aimed at thwarting Soviet influence, especially in developing countries.

The Marshall Plan, which saw the U.S. provide billions of dollars in economic assistance to western Europe right after World War II and the creation of the NATO military alliance had the same purpose.

This anti-Soviet crusade ran asunder in the long Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, 

But until Trump came along the idea of bullying long-standing friends and allies was off the table. That has all changed.

Trump announced his intention to expand the territory of the U.S. in his inaugural address on January 20, and he is moving quickly to make that happen.

The Panama Canal and Greenland are his first targets. 

The prime minister of Denmark Mette Frederiksen hoped Trump’s designs on Greenland (which is a semi-autonomous Danish territory) were a pressure tactic, with other ultimate goals than a U.S. takeover.

In a testy phone conversation with Trump before the inauguration she discovered she was mistaken. 

Trump was adamant that the U.S. needed to take full possession of the arctic territory just east of Canada for so-called security reasons – despite the fact the U.S. currently has a military presence in Greenland. 

Needless to say, the wishes of the 57,000 (mostly Indigenous) Greenlanders do not even figure in Trump’s calculations.

Trump and his close ally Elon Musk are sufficiently full of demented visions of grandeur that it is not unreasonable to assume they actually believe they can re-draw the map of North America. Grabbing Greenland and re-naming the Gulf of Mexico are just the start.

Prime Minister Frederiksen now characterizes Trump’s ambitions as a grave threat, and has sought the solidarity and aid of her fellow European Union members. She is also increasing Denmark’s military presence in Greenland.

Canada’s response, at this stage, is still hesitant and unsure of itself. There has been little effort to find allies throughout the world, and even in the U.S. itself.

We are going to have to drastically up our game if we hope to resist a takeover by the land of guns, executions, bans on women’s rights over their own bodies, persecution of trans people, for-profit health care, acute inequality, and faux-free-speech.

The threat is truly existential.

Karl Nerenberg

Karl Nerenberg joined rabble in 2011 to cover Canadian politics. He has worked as a journalist and filmmaker for many decades, including two and a half decades at CBC/Radio-Canada. Among his career highlights...