The Decibel - Foreign actors target Alberta’s separatist referendum

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

New research from the University of Regina and the University of Alberta provides evidence that Russian content farms and right-wing U.S. influencers are targeting Alberta’s upcoming referendum. Some foreign actors are trying to foment discord in Canada, while others overtly try to persuade Canadians to join the separatist cause.  Grant Robertson is an investigative reporter with The Globe. He explains how these campaigns work, what messages these foreign actors are pushing and how ready Alberta – and Canada – are to fight back against them.  Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Alberta's upcoming referendum is being targeted by foreign actors. That's according to two new reports out of the University of Regina and the University of Alberta. They have found that disinformation campaigns are trying to whip up anger around Alberta separation. These campaigns are happening covertly and out in the open, mainly by Russian-based operatives and U.S. right-wing influencers. And with the referendum fast approaching, reminder it's on October 19th, there are questions about how persuasive these outside efforts are and what impact foreign actors could have on the vote that could threaten Canada. Grant Robertson is an investigative reporter for the Globe.

He's read through the new research and is here to explain how these campaigns work, what messages these foreign actors are pushing, and how ready Alberta and Canada. are to fight back against them. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Grant, thanks for joining me today. Hello, thank you for having me. So to start, I want to talk about how this research was done.

I understand it uses a tool called CipherA.I. So can you tell me how this worked and why researchers decided to look at the issue of Alberta separatism? It actually starts about three years ago before we get to the two reports. reports we've seen this week. In 2023, these researchers had set up artificial intelligence to essentially track disinformation campaigns out of Russia that were targeting the Ukraine war. And usually this is done, you know, pre-AI. It was done through human analysis. But what AI has allowed is for scale and speed. And given the volume of information there is on

social media and on the internet, AI can catalog and organize that very quickly. And so they started looking at what were the campaigns around the Ukraine war because they suspected and could see the Russia was trying to cede narratives into other countries about Ukraine, that Ukraine was corrupt, that, you know, the West shouldn't be spending money on, you know, defending the invasion, things like that. And they found a lot of that was directed at Canada, trying to get people against the idea of money being spent in the Ukraine war. What they found at that point was another topic had entered the discussion as well, Alberta separatism. And so they started tracking that late last year and they found within a span of a few months 67 examples of what they deem to be

foreign influence type material. These are articles or memes or things on social media that could be passed around, potentially YouTube videos, faux documentaries, things like that, that are designed to essentially change hearts and minds in a population. And they saw that material targeted at Alberta separatism. And so they thought, what if we took this AI that's tracking disinformation around the Ukraine war and trained it to look specifically for issues related to Alberta and the separatist movement? And that leads us to the two reports this week. The first two data sets we've seen, one from the last two weeks in July and one from the first two weeks in August, essentially say the same thing.

The first data set says they found 149 examples of what they deemed to be clear-cut foreign influence attempts or alleged foreign influence attempts. And this is from about 20,000 items that are suspected. And then the clear-cut ones are this smaller data set. In the second report from the first two weeks of August, there was 147. And what they're finding is much of that activity is coming out of Russia online, about 80%. And that's more covert. And then there's a lot of overt activity coming out of the U.S., making about 20% of it, which is podcasts and online influencers talking about Alberta separating from Canada.

Something you mentioned there is that some of it was very clear cut. Can you explain to me what that means? Like how do they define what clear cut is? Well, Brian McQuinn at the University of Regina, this is his area of expertise. He studies influence campaigns. So what they're looking for in a case like this is not just online discussion about a topic. They're looking at issues that appear designed to change an opinion or foment discord, make people angry, cause divisions within society.

And especially if it's taking a fact. fact in twisting it or just putting false information out there about the reprandom or separatism. So usually with foreign influence campaigns online, the information is passed from person to person to person, but you have to go back to the source of that to see where it came from or where that idea originated. And so the AI is very helpful in that regard. And so they're tracking that. And they have a list of about 15 to 20 narratives that they follow.

Now, these could be everything from trying to undermine the credibility of the upcoming referendum. I'm telling people not to trust the results that, you know, it's corrupt and that the government is lying to you. That's a popular narrative that they see popping up. Other ones are trying to foment discord saying, you know, Alberta's only choice is to leave Canada because this is a failed state. Interesting. Okay. So we have a sense of how they're getting this information and what it's saying here. Let's get a sense of who these foreign actors are. So you mentioned the U.S. and Russia here.

What else do we know about who these foreign actors are? Yes, at this point, they're primarily tracking the U.S. and Russia because they're seeing a lot of material from those two countries. They're not tracking China yet, which is also a known actor in this space in the world because they're training the AI to be able to do it in China, and that takes some time. So they expect to have that in future reports. But for now, the U.S. and Russia, what they're seeing is very overt-type conversation coming to the U.S., popular podcasters.

influencers with massive followings, expressing an unusual interest in Alberta separatism and, and, you know, how great it would be for Alberta to leave Canada. And, you know, that comes at a time when Canada is in very tense trade negotiations with the U.S. And also, you know, the Trump administration has made remarks of a Canada becoming a 51st state, things like that. On the Russian side, what they're seeing is primarily activity from a group called the Provda Network. Now, listeners of a certain age might remember the Soviet era newspaper Pravda. This is not that. Probda Network is an online organization out of Russia, believed to be state sanctioned, state sponsored, which generates online content that's targeted at various countries. So it just generates

massive amounts of material that can be passed around on social media, looks like news articles, might be a headline, but people may not know that it necessarily comes from this thing called Pravda Network, they may show up in your feed from your uncle or your aunt, and it looks like a news item or a fact or a meme being passed around. A lot of this is being traced back to the Provda network that they're seeing, just the scale of material being produced. So the goal of these foreign actors is to influence, right? And I think that listeners will be familiar with the idea of foreign interference. What's the difference between influence and interference? That's actually a very key distinction because there are two very different things. Foreign interference is, you can think of it as

more high-level type, almost criminal activity, whether it's hacking attempts on a country, or whether it's espionage, or whether it's a country targeting people in another country with threats to try to stop them from political opposition or targeting expats that they don't agree with. That's foreign interference. Foreign influence is a different kind of thing. It's essentially information warfare trying to get into the conversation in a country, often covertly, and seed ideas into the population and change people's minds, get them angry about certain subjects. Sometimes it can be targeted at both sides of a debate. It's not necessarily target at one side all the time, just to divide people. Interesting. And it's essentially propaganda in a way.

And so a way to think about it is foreign interference is defined as, you know, covert deceptive things that are posing a threat to a person. That's how CESIS looks at it. Foreign influence can be something much more nebulous. It can sort of... Gray area. Gray area. It can live in the mist. It can I live in the weeds. It's a lot harder to pin down. Fascinating. This might be, I don't know, a simple question. You've kind of touched on it a little bit, but let's really connect this.

Like, what do Russians gain from getting involved in the Alberta separatism debate? Well, that's the material question in all of this, is what is to be gained and what impact can you have? If your goal is to destabilize a country or to try to undermine their political position or simply, to prevent economic development or, you know, break a country apart, you know, you might want to try to influence that. If, for example, on the U.S. side, if they've, you know, had this opinion in the Trump administration of Canada's a 51 state or that Alberta is, you know, a good potential partner for them on energy, you know, any instability could be helpful to somebody trying to put that forward.

it about this movement though, that is so attractive to these foreign actors? Because it's already so divisive. Yeah. You see two camps in Alberta, one that wants to try to push a separatist vote, and then one that wants to stay in Canada. And there's not a lot of middle ground there between those two sides. And so to drive a wedge in there and further foment that, is, I think, an attractive thing if you're attempting a disinformation campaign, as these researchers allege. But also, as Dr. McQuinn points out, elections are always targeted, and we've seen this

with some of the evidence that's come out of the U.S. over the past several elections, about whether or not foreign countries have tried to meddle in those. but even more so referendums are targets for these type of things because they're almost easier to try and seize upon one issue. Grant, are foreign actors just pushing the separatist message in this case, or is there evidence that they are whipping people up on the stay in Canada side as well? Well, typically researchers say in a lot of alleged foreign influence campaigns, you see both sides of the debate targeted. But so far in Alberta, the research indicates or the data that they're tracking indicates that it's mostly the separatist side that's being targeted with the type of material that might stir up anger or discord. And that there's not really material being targeted that they've seen yet in a big way at the stay-in-Canada side. We'll be right back.

So let's actually talk about a concrete example here. Can you share one that illustrates the link to a Russian actor? One of the examples that researchers have seen pop up is the example of a website that was Alberta separatist.com. Now, on the surface, this website and associated social media accounts, whether on Instagram or YouTube, looked like a grassroots campaign from Albertans. But there's a cybersecurity firm in Massachusetts called Insict. And this is a very high-level firm that does cybersecurity for big corporations. And they were investigating cybersecurity issues related to Russia. And they tripped over this website and actually flagged it for Canadian researchers

that it had been traced back to a group called Storm 1516, they allege, which is an offshoot of something called the Internet Research Agency, which is based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and has been known for years by authorities in the U.S. to have targeted U.S. elections with disinformation. So it's not a grassroots campaign at all for Alberta separatists then. Exactly. Okay. And what I found when I looked into it was the website had been registered to a fake address in B.C.

And, you know, all the information behind it was false. And so this was really something made to look Canadian when it wasn't. Now, the website never really got off the ground. It appears nothing was ever done with it, but one might ask the question, well, why was it there? It's interesting. I've followed a lot of the separatist town halls in Alberta in the past few months. You see narratives pop up in the discussion there that are similar to some of the narratives that the researchers at Cipher are following. One of them, for example, is, you know, this notion that Canada is spending too much on the Ukraine war.

In one town hall, there is a discussion about Canadian government spending. Now, that in a working democracy is a discussion that should be had in any country, which is, you know, is the government spending dollars the right way? But the discussion was about something else, and there was this non-secretor remark from one of the speakers about all the money going to the Ukraine war. Now, that's very interesting. It could be coincidental. You know, is this something that the person was keyed to through their social media accounts or online? Or it's entirely plausible that, you know, two people arrived at the same thought independently. So what you're saying is these online Russian farms are hoping that someone, like an Albertan, for example, will pick up this information that they've put out there.

And then they'll spread it to friends and family. And then this message will spread further a field. online. Is that right? Yes. What they call laundering of information is a key aspect of this, essentially covering up the provenance of it. As it gets passed around, if it comes from somebody in your network, maybe somebody is more likely to be open to that information rather than if they know it comes from, you know, a foreign country. And so that laundering aspect is a very key part of what's believed to be the strategy of these disinformation campaigns. Another aspect that's really interesting that researchers believe to be at play here is the notion that

foreign adversaries might be flooding the internet or social media with certain topics or certain viewpoints as a way to teach large language models or AI how to present those topics when people search for them. And that's a real sort of, I guess, cutting edge sort of fear here is that is that you can actually manipulate what people see in the internet by training AI models with certain viewpoints. Okay. So we've been talking about fake news websites or memes or an influencer spouting off on social media.

But what about AI slop? So by that I mean videos that are completely AI generated. Is that a factor in these disinformation campaigns? Yes, that's another aspect that has popped up this year. that's been very interesting is large amounts of content generated for YouTube and for social media that's passed around that is essentially AI generated content with a particular point of view promoting Alberta separatism. But it's coming from countries, you know, outside Canada. And it's just being dumped online to, one, get inside the debate, but also, you know,

there might be an economic incentive if these videos were to get any traction, there might be money to be made on platforms from them. But that one is almost less strategic and more scale, I think the researchers would argue. So the big question here, are these efforts having an effect on public opinion when it comes to this issue? Like, are they convincing people? That is the big question. And, you know, I've asked Dr. McQuinn at the University of Regina about this several times and it's a question that really exasperates him because determining impact on this is very difficult you know you see suspect content all over the internet but is it getting in people's minds does it have any impact fake documentaries put on youtube are people watching them if they watch

them are they internalizing them do they believe them or do they dismiss it as something that they think is silly. Dr. McQuinn has this line where he says, really good disinformation campaigns, start with something that you might slightly agree with or think is true. A grain of truth. A grain of truth. And then you're willing to believe what comes after that. And so that's really the, almost the Trojan horse aspect of this. But one of the things they've had a hard time doing is measuring impact. So what can be done about these foreign influence campaigns? That's a very good question because I think it's been shown over the years that the

internet is very hard to control. So what do you actually do about this problem? This is a problem that's existed for decades going back into the Cold War with propaganda. The internet and social media has just allowed it to achieve scale, essentially. So what do you do about that? Dr. McQuinn and other specialists in this area say the first step is just making people aware that it's out there and that, you know, hopefully people will scrutinize the provenance of information, even if that's hidden from them, or they might question what they're reading. But the first step is just having the discussion that this is going on, but the steps after that are a lot less clear. Have any government officials spoken about this?

threat? It's interesting. They've been very reluctant in Alberta to address this when I first wrote about this in May using the initial anecdotal data that the Cipher AI had picked up that Alberta was being targeted. The Alberta government said in the legislature that they were told by the RCMP that there was no evidence of foreign interference going on around the Alberta separatist debate. Now, the The RCMP has not confirmed that it made that statement to the upper government. We've put that question to them. It's at this point an unknown. However, the word they used in the legislature that day, interference is very different than influence.

But at the time, it was a don't worry, nothing to see here message that seemed to be coming out of Alberta. This week, what we've seen subsequent to this latest data, is the premier of our Alberta acknowledging that, yes, it appears there are foreign influence campaigns being targeted at the Alberta debate. To end your grant, how prepared are Alberta and Canada to deal with all of this disinformation? There are a lot of concerns right now that Alberta at the provincial level and Canada writ large may have a lot of difficulty handling these kinds of things in the lead-up and in the actual referendum. Specifically at the provincial level, there are concerns that since much of the oversight for the referendum falls to Elections Alberta, that that department,

which is a very small department, it's not equipped for this kind of thing, that they might not be able to handle the task that's in front of them. You know, just this week, my colleague in Calgary, Matt Skays, wrote a story talking about how Elections Canada is woefully understaffed for the upcoming referendum. For example, you know, they see. say that they, in addition to hiring people from outside the province, they need to bring in another 60,000 poll supervisors, ballot box clerks, scrutiners, and other workers to sort of oversee the referendum. And part of the reason for that is because because the Premier of Alberta, Daniel Smith, has expressed concerns about the security and efficiency of electronic balloting,

that gives you a sense of the magnitude of the task versus the actual size of the department who's tasked with overseeing it. And we should also mention elections Alberta has created what they call an information integrity unit, which they say is focused on all forms of disinformation, whether it be deep fakes, misinformation, disinformation, and other, you know, nefarious online activities. and what that would give them the power to do is take down things from the internet. However, that can be a very slow process. And one of the problems that elections Alberta, I think, can see coming is that the results of the referendum,

whichever way it goes, would be challenged and the credibility of the referendum being attacked and saying, you can't believe the results of this vote. That's a real challenge. It's on their plate. There's already narratives online that are forming around. that topic. What about the federal government? Have you heard anything on that end? This is the topic that has been discussed a lot lately at the federal level. You know, this spring we saw the Senate Standing Committee on National Security Defense and Veterans Affairs

produce a report on this subject, basically trying to understand the challenge and figure out what Canada's response should be in the years ahead. So this is something they are talking about, influence. With regards to the referendum, Public Safety Canada, Canada has talked mostly about interference and that they are monitoring that and if they see signs of it, they will step in and investigate. And, you know, CIS would play a role in the monitoring of that and probably the investigation with RCMP. But influence is a harder thing to track and it's a harder thing to get your head around. And so what's being done at a federal level on that beyond monitoring and acknowledging the problem is really the question. Grant, thank you so much for coming on this show. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. That was Grant Robertson, an investigative reporter for the globe. That's all for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Tiff Lamb edited and mixed this episode. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Mahal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive. editor. Thanks so much for listening.