Front Burner - Fake wolves and real military propaganda in Canada

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

For some time now, Ottawa Citizen journalist David Pugliese has been digging into the so-called ‘weaponization’ of the Canadian military’s public affairs branch. He’s recently obtained documents suggesting that the military had wanted to set up this new organization to influence Canadians using propaganda and other techniques. According to the office of the Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, this plan will not go forward. But it’s just the latest in a story that involves everything from dossiers on journalists to a fake pack of wolves. Today, David Pugliese explains what he’s learned.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. So a few weeks ago, we saw this story. It was about how the Canadian military botched a propaganda exercise.

It involved fake wolves in Nova Scotia. It was extremely strange. Ottawa citizen journalist David Pugliese wrote the story, and for a while now he's been digging into the so-called weaponization of the Canadian military's public affairs branch, their PR wing. Pugliese recently obtained documents suggesting that the military had wanted to set up this whole new organization to influence Canadians using propaganda and other techniques. According to the Office of Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, this plan is not going to go forward. But today, David joins me to talk about what's already been going down behind the scenes and the serious questions it raises about the military targeting its resources at Canadians.

This is Frontburner. Hi David, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. My pleasure. So before we get into the latest documents you've been looking at, I actually want to go back a few weeks and ask you about this totally bizarre and puzzling story that some people might have missed. And it has to do with an official looking letter with the logo of the Wildlife Division of Nova Scotia's Department of Lands and Forestry, warning about wolves, wolves. So can you tell me about this letter and what did it say?

So what had happened was unknown to the government of Nova Scotia. The Canadian forces was conducting information operations training mission. Information operations is a nice word for propaganda. So they have these units that specialize in this. What the unit did was they forged a letter on government of Nova Scotia letterhead and essentially said, people in the region, please be careful. There are these wolves that the government of Nova Scotia has introduced into the region, and if you sight them, you know, stay away from them, be very careful. So what happened, and the military is trying to figure this out right now, is somehow that training aid got distributed to the people in the area. And so people started asking the government of Nova Scotia,

what is going on? People were scared. The government of Nova Scotia looked at this, and they had to actually tweet out to people and put on social media, this is a fake. We don't know who did it, but it's a fake. We didn't reintroduce wolves. There's no wolves running around here. And so is the implication here that by sending a letter to people in Nova Scotia about wolves, the danger of wolves in the area, they're trying to influence the behavior?

What kind of influence might a letter about wolves have? Have you ever, like, what kind of influence might a letter about wolves have? Well, we don't know exactly because the investigation is still underway. And so we don't know what they were looking for. First of all, you know, this wasn't supposed to go out into the public domain. So they could have just been practicing, how do you do one of these fake letters? So, you know, I think we can't jump to conclusions that, you know, that it was directed at the public. It was certainly a propaganda training mission that went off the rails. But it's, you know, it appears anyways they were trying to learn their skills.

They also had these trucks with loudspeakers, and they were pumping wolf noises through these loudspeakers. What? Yeah. But again, we don't know why they were doing that. And so there's, you know, this investigation underway now. David, when you find out the story behind this, you have got to come back on the show and explain this to me. This is such a head-scratcher.

Well, you know what, I'm thinking, well, it's obviously a mistake that got out of control, but I think it shows a bigger issue, and that is these skills are being taught in the Canadian forces, and so you've got to take a look at what type of controls are there that this type of thing can get out into the public domain and as well cause a lot of problems for the government of Nova Scotia at the time of a pandemic. This idea that these kind of skills are being taught in the Canadian forces, I want to talk with you about that more today, because I have to say, I hadn't thought too much about the Canadian military's propaganda capabilities before reading your work on the subject.

I know you've been digging into it for a while, and you recently published a story on a new organization the Canadian forces had hoped to establish. And can you tell me about that? So they wanted to establish a kind of an organization that would be able to influence and to change Canadians' minds on strategic topics, the topics of national interest. And so they would do that, you know, in various ways. They're talking about harnessing their Twitter accounts. They're talking about harnessing, for instance, the Twitter accounts of Canadian military personnel and their own personal accounts. But those accounts would be pushing out government-approved, military-approved messages,

pushing out government-approved, military-approved messages, although the public wouldn't know that. And then as well, I had another story earlier this year where their public affairs officials were taught behavior modification techniques. So this million-dollar contract to train these people was given to a company whose officials are from, they learned their skills at a company called SCL. Most people don't know what SCL is. It's the parent firm of Cambridge Analytica, which was caught up in that Facebook scandal, feeding Donald Trump information about, you know, people's private information. Right. And this private information, it shouldn't have been used. It was basically stolen. Christopher Wiley says that users signed up for a personality test,

then unwittingly gave away access to all their friends' information. So it allowed us to profile upwards of 50 million Americans over the span of a couple months, and understand not only their personality traits, but how they think and how they would likely react to different kinds of information. So this whole initiative is part of this program launched in 2015 called the Weaponization of Public Affairs. So essentially what you're talking about is a public affairs branch that instead of just putting out information about

the military and spinning it, is more aggressive in how they go about their business. So as you mentioned, the defense minister has put a halt to all this after he found out. Right. He says it hasn't been approved. He says it won't be going forward. Yeah. But it strikes me that your reporting seems to indicate that some stuff had already been going on. And can you give me some examples of that? Well, we're starting to see, as I reported, the contract with Emic, which is the company, the million dollar contract, to train individuals who can use behaviour modification and influence techniques.

So those contracts have already been out there, and the training actually finished recently. So that was already done. Another thing that I reported on last year, Canadian Forces was dealing with extremists, and there was a lot of problems with far-right and neo-Nazis and that type of thing. Between 2013 and 2018, there were 16 identified members of extreme hate groups in the military and another 35 engaged in racist or discriminatory behaviour. But last year, the Canadian Forces Public Affairs Branch, they put together a plan to counter what they saw as the negative stories. So they didn't believe that the Canadian military had a problem with

far-right extremists. So what they did was they came up with a public relations plan that would use military-friendly academics, former generals, that type of thing, to put out the message, there is no problem. They also created files on several journalists that they thought would cover the issue. One of those was Murray Brewster. Right. I have to say, I read in your piece talking about this dossier on our colleague Murray. There's this quote from the file on him that reads, he's familiar with the defense system and his reporting, while factual, often emphasizes the mistakes and shortcomings of DND and the CAF,

which is a pretty good compliment for a journalist, I think. Well, exactly. And you know what? It shows the mindset that is going on in some quarters in the Canadian forces. So Brewster's reporting is factual, but they don't like it. So they had this counter plan, and this was set, May, June of last year. Well, what happened in the meantime? You had a series of far-right extremists or alleged far-right extremists making headlines. So, you know, there's Patrick Matthews was arrested in the United States. He's a reservist to, you know, the FBI alleges was plotting a race war. He's been trained as a combat engineer with the Canadian military

and has also received extensive explosives training. He was actively going around the city of Winnipeg and putting up recruitment posters for this violent neo-Nazi paramilitary group called The Base. You had a sailor in Calgary who was talking about wanting to start a race war. Then you had Corey Kieran, who heavily armed, went into, smashed into Rideau Hall. He was armed with, allegedly, with two shotguns, a rifle and a revolver, according to the RCMP.

A letter seized by the RCMP suggests he had anti-government sentiments. He was singled out for good conduct by the Canadian military just months before this incident. You know, he's up on charges. So all this kind of came right after their plan to, their public relations plan. So they had to scuttle it because they would have looked pretty foolish if they had gone out, you know, claiming that there's only a few far right extremists in the Canadian forces. The minister says a deeper soul searching exercise is needed. We're going to be taking greater action on this, on how we as an organization, as from a Department of Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces, handle issues like this. Something that we've been taking extremely seriously for many years now.

Another example you've reported on of the Canadian military dabbling in propaganda training exercises is this plan campaign to head off civil disobedience during the coronavirus pandemic. And what was the plan there? So what it was was an information operations plan for the coronavirus. So their idea was that they would, this plan was aimed at convincing Canadians not to do civil disobedience, not to riot, to trust the government. The problem is they took a similar information operations plan for Afghanistan. So if you actually, when you take a look at the articles, they're talking about,

oh, we're going to meet with village elders. Another one was these speaker trucks, which they used in the Wolf Incident, by the way. So the speaker trucks would broadcast messages. So they had this underway, and it went for about two weeks. And then someone, I think it was General Vance, Chief of the Defence Staff, took a look at it. And there were concerns about the ethics behind this type of scheme. And so he ordered it shut down. So what would be the ethical concerns behind that? Well, the main ethical concern is you're not supposed to, or the military is not supposed to conduct propaganda campaigns against its own population. So there isn't actually a law that states that,

but that has been the understanding for decades. So you don't do that unless we are at war, unless we have been invaded or we are at war, such as in World War II. So that was the ethics surrounding that. Now, there is no law that says the military can't do this. So this is kind of a self-governing issue. I'm going to go. empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. know their own household income. That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing.

In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. David, I have to ask, you know, we've described this weird wolf training exercise that went off the rails, sort of went awry, as you said. These two sort of scuttled or aborted plans to influence the Canadian public. We talked about this behavior modification training using this company tied to Cambridge Analytica. You know, for people listening, they might just find this all very puzzling and confusing and even a little bit odd. But when you look at all of this together, what do you see here? What's happening here? Well, there's a concerning trend in the sense that, and don't forget, all this information has come to me from people inside who are concerned about the legalities and the ethics.

So there are some people inside that are worried about what's going on. And one of the examples that I wrote about that gives you kind of an idea of where this might go. So another pandemic exercise they did, and they actually did this, was in Ontario, they went through the social media accounts of the public. And they were doing this because the military is getting ready to go into the long-term care homes. And so they collected information about the long-term care homes, which is fine. You know, you can say they needed to know what they were dealing with. which is fine, you know, you can say they needed to know what they were dealing with. But they also collected from public social media accounts negative comments about Premier Doug Ford and that the Ontario government had failed its elderly.

Then they turned those comments over to Doug Ford's government. comments over to Doug Ford's government. So that, and I mentioned this in the interview I had with the rear admiral and the senior military folks, and they said, well, we didn't do anything wrong because this is out there already. It's on people's social media accounts. And I said, well, but why turn it over to Doug Ford's government? And they couldn't answer that. And so you're starting to see, and this is the concern among some people, the military entering the Canadian political realm.

Right, because I suppose the obvious question here that I have that people might have here is, why is the military even looking through tweets to see how people are reacting to long-term care homes? I know that they were called in to to long-term care homes. I know that they were called in to help long-term care homes, but why do they care what people think about the government response to long-term care homes? And I couldn't get an answer to that. I mean, they're in the long-term care homes to help the elderly, you know, to help the overworked staff. Lieutenant Colonel James Stalker is the commanding officer of the Territorial Battle Group One. So the medical teams will do what you'd expect medical teams to do,

primarily clinical work and direct patient care for the residents in those facilities. Our general duties personnel augment by doing tasks like disinfecting, like cleaning, like laundry, like food portering. There is no reason that they needed to have information, in my view anyways, that they needed to have information about what individual people in Ontario were saying about Premier Doug Ford. You mentioned that you're hearing from people inside the military. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you're hearing from these people? What are their concerns here about what could happen?

So there's a concern that they understand the need for propaganda on foreign missions. So you want to get Afghans to stop supporting the Taliban. So you do various techniques. What individuals are concerned about is that these techniques are being applied by the military on Canadians, on a domestic audience. And that is the concern. So the military says, well, we won't do that. However, you know, I've found four or five examples this year alone where you could argue that it is being done on Canadians. Given these internal concerns and given the pushback from the defense minister, where do you see all of this going? are, where do you see all of this going? Well, all indications are that at least parts of it are going to be shut down and that public affairs officers won't be allowed to be involved in this

type of propaganda operations. Whether that takes place, I mean, I think we've got to see how that plays out over the coming months, because there are some people in the military that are quite committed to this capability. Okay. All right. David Pugliese, thank you so much for bringing us this really important story. Please keep us posted, and I hope you come back soon. Great. Thank you. So before we say goodbye, an update on a story we've covered a number of times on the show, the ongoing tensions over China's influence in Hong Kong.

On Wednesday, all of Hong Kong's pro-democracy lawmakers resigned en masse. The move comes in response to the expulsion of four of their pro-democracy colleagues from the legislature after a new law imposed by Beijing allowed the removal of, quote, unpatriotic politicians. The expulsion and mass resignation leaves Hong Kong's legislature with only pro-Beijing lawmakers, which critics fear reduces it to a rubber stamping body. That's all for today. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we will talk to you tomorrow.