By Scott Taylor
It is now official. Last week the Department of National Defence released the results of four separate internal investigations into the Canadian military’s recent forays on using propaganda and influence activities on fellow Canadians.
The conclusion of one investigation was that military commanders had violated various rules and acted outside of their authority when they employed intelligence teams to collect information on the public. Another report concluded the military public affairs branch was out of line in its decision to move forward with new policies that would allow the use of propaganda techniques against Canadian citizens.
The not so funny part of this story is that pretty much every concerned Canadian knew that it was wrong for the Canadian military to spy on, and attempt to deceive the public, when the Ottawa Citizen first broke the news of these initiatives last year.
It was also clear that some senior military and political leaders understood immediately when the Citizen stories broke, that it was just plain wrong that the Canadian Armed Forces had created teams to harvest data from the social media accounts of private citizens.
Then Chief of Defence Staff, General Jonathan Vance, the man who first coined the phrase “the weaponization of Public Affairs”, quickly realized that his new ‘weapon’ had resulted in a very serious self-inflicted wound in terms of public trust. As such, Vance ordered an immediate halt to these operations.
For his part, Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan promised his fellow parliamentarians that these questionable activities by the military had been terminated shortly after they began.
However, a new report obtained by the CBC revealed that after Vance publicly ordered one of the initiatives halted in April 2020, portions of a military campaign meant to influence the Canadian public during the COVID-19 pandemic continued to operate for another six months.
It was only after Vance issued a written command in November 2020 that these influence activities were finally terminated.
Around the same time, the Citizen reported on other military schemes to begin using influence tactics on Canadians. It revealed that the Canadian Forces had already spent more than $1 million to train public affairs officers on behavior modification techniques similar to those used by the parent firm of Cambridge Analytics, a company which was implicated in a 2016 data-mining scandal aimed at boosting Donald Trumps U.S. presidential campaign.
That initiative was the brain child of Brig-Gen Jay Janzen, who was at the time the senior officer in the Public Affairs Branch.
Vance also formally shut down another Janzen’s initiatives, this one a controversial plan that news reports pointed out would have allowed military public affairs officers to use propaganda to change attitudes and behaviours of Canadians as well as collect and analyze information from the public’s social media accounts.
In reacting to this embarrassing public cancellation of his pet project, Janzen posted a message to his public affairs subordinates advising them “these efforts were on the leading edge, and we were exploring unchartered territory, innovation is something prone, to being misunderstood.” Poor Janzen – “Just a soul whose intentions were good, oh lord please don’t let [him] be misunderstood” – to paraphrase the old Animals hit.
That, however, was not how the military brass viewed it. The most recent review released by acting CDS Lt-Gen Wayne Eyre and Deputy Minister Jody Thomas concluded that the initiative was “incompatible with the Government of Canada Communications Policy (and the) mission and principles of Public Affairs.”
For anyone to think this mandate would be enhanced by widening that mandate to include psychological and information operations against Canadian civilians is simply mondo bonkers.
Instead of building trust with the media and the public, this plan harmed the reputation of not only the public affairs branch, but by extension the reputation of the Canadian Forces as an institution.
Canadians want their military to defend Canadian interests and uphold Canadian values at home and abroad. We do not want them spying on us, deceiving us or trying to modify our behavior.
For the record, no one involved in these plans, either in the public affairs branch or intelligence branch, have ever been sanctioned by the military leadership.
