By Scott Taylor
Last week the Canadian Armed Forces were pummeled with yet another self-inflicted wound to their public trust. The Ottawa Citizen reported the stunning news that certain military leaders viewed the COVID-19 pandemic as a welcome opportunity to employ propaganda techniques against the Canadian public.
To be clear, this initiative was not directed by the Liberal government, and when the country’s top general got wind of the scheme he shut it down post haste.
In fact, not only did then Chief of Defence staff, General Jonathan Vance terminate the operation, he also later brought in retired Maj.-Gen. Daniel Gosselin to investigate just how this plan was hatched in the first place.
It was the findings in Gosselin’s report which provided the genesis for the latest Citizen story.
This fittingly brings us full circle as it was Citizen reporter David Pugliese who first broke the story in the spring of 2020.
As it gets a bit confusing and involves a number of separate yet related issues, I will do my best to recap the sequence of events.
In April 2020, almost as soon as it was being implemented, Pugliese reported that the military’s Canadian Joint Operation’s Command (CJOC) planned to employ propaganda techniques on the Canadian public as part of Operation Laser, the CAF’s response to the pandemic.
It was also reported that a separate initiative, this one involving officers working under the direction of military intelligence, was put in place to cull information from social media accounts in Ontario. This initiative also included military personnel compiling data about Black Lives Matter leaders and their gatherings.
The Citizen stories sparked public outrage and General Vance ordered the CJOC scheme shut down. The data mining initiative was allowed to continue. For his part, Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan promised his fellow parliamentarians that these highly questionable activities by Canada’s military had been cancelled.
The CBC later reported that in fact some of those activities had continued unabated until Vance sent out written orders.
That prompted the review by Gosselin, which although completed in December 2020, is only now being released under the Access to Information Act.
What Gosselin’s findings now reveal is that this was not simply the wayward ideology of a rogue military propaganda specialist. It is clear from his report that Gosselin was convinced this represented the collective mindset of the CJOC senior commanders who viewed the pandemic as a “unique opportunity” to test out their theories.
Around the same time that the Citizen first began reporting these anomalies it was also revealed that the Canadian military 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 2016 data – mining scandal aimed at boosting Donald Trump’s U.S. Presidential campaign.
That training initiative was the brainchild of Brig.-Gen. Jay Janzen, who was at the time the senior officer in the Public Affairs Branch.
The military leadership also formally shut down another one of Janzen’s initiatives, this one a controversial plan which news reports pointed out would have allowed military public affairs officers to use propaganda to change attitudes and behaviors of Canadians as well as collect and analyze information from the public’s social media accounts.
When the news of Canada’s military using military psyops on their own citizens became public, it did not take long to realize how badly that plan backfired.
A story in Vice World News last week reported that “The Canadian Armed Forces attempt to combat misinformation only ended up giving conspiracy theorists another way to spread it.”
Apparently QAnon forums, Covid-conspiracy Telegram groups and something called 4chan are claiming that the CAF’s plan to modify behavior among the population is further damning proof of the government’s great COVID-19 conspiracy.
Despite the fact that Canada’s senior brass shut these initiatives down and ordered investigations into their origins, no one has been sanctioned for these actions.
Even now that it is increasingly clear how this has eroded public trust in the military institution, not one officer has been held to account.
For his part, Janzen has since retired and taken a senior civilian position in communications with NATO.
Just wait until the conspiracy theorists dig their teeth into the fact that Janzen is now in a position to influence the communications strategy for all 30 nation states within the alliance.
That cannot be very reassuring.
