Canada is now facing the danger of American misinformation

Rob Huebert is a professor and interim director of the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.

Justice Marie-Josée Hogue’s findings in her final report on foreign interference are still being digested, but there was one clear message – Canada has been targeted by foreign governments. The focus of her report, echoing an earlier warning in a report from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), is that adversarial states (identified in the Hogue report as Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran) have and will continue to use social media to sow misinformation within Canada. The NSICOP report was more concerned about efforts to influence Canadian politicians as well.

There is now a real danger that we will need to add the United States to our list of misinformation adversaries.

As President Donald Trump moves to consolidate his control of the American levers of governance, he is placing individuals into positions of power – such as Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard – whose only credentials for their new offices are their complete loyalty to him and willingness to carry out his orders no matter what. Furthermore, Mr. Trump has also attracted leaders of social media to his team, including most prominently the owner of X, Elon Musk.

While all eyes are on the tariffs, we need to be aware that there will be even more insidious actions taken against Canada by the new administration. One of the most important coming dangers is the possibility of the Americans using levers of foreign interference against Canada.

There had been an understanding that the Five Eyes countries do not spy on each other and take no steps to undermine one another. The Canadian-American security relationship has always been built on trust; we need them and they need us, therefore it made little sense to undermine each other through acts of betrayal.

But the foundation of Canadian-American mutual trust and security is now under attack. Mr. Trump is determined to undermine the foundations of North American security co-operation that have existed since president Franklin D. Roosevelt and prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King signed the Ogdensburg Agreement in 1940 – a pact that Canada and the United States would work to defend one another from that moment on.

Normally, the first act of a newly elected American president regarding Canada is to decide when they can visit, to discuss shared interests and to show to the world the great unity that exists between the two countries. Now we are facing a President whose first step is to tear up all those years of economic co-operation to either intimidate Canada or even turn it into a vassal state of the U.S.

Any effort to cower Canada into submission will undoubtedly include efforts to sow distrust among Canadians through misinformation and to try to influence our political elites – as the NSICOP report suggested our enemies are already trying to do. The main guardrail that has protected the U.S.-Canada security relationship is being removed before our very eyes, which is that the bureaucrats and military officials who understood the need for protecting the relationship are being silenced or removed and replaced with individuals whose only qualification is loyalty to the current President. Furthermore, the key advisers that Mr. Trump has surrounded himself with, including Mr. Musk, have already shown a ruthlessness and cunning when it comes to using misinformation campaigns to gain what Mr. Trump wants, largely via his X platform.

The Hogue Report and what has been reported by the NSICOP suggest that we should already expect efforts by our adversaries to sow distrust from the public toward our political leaders, which will have the added side effect of weakening our leaders’ abilities to respond to American efforts to destabilize Canada.

We can also expect these efforts to try to divide Canadian society. Complicating all of this will be the realization that the five adversarial states identified by the Hogue report will also see the opportunity to bandwagon on any American efforts to sow further distrust between Canada and the United States.

One of the saddest ironies to be made apparent by Mr. Trump’s moves against Canada, is that those who stand to gain the most from such actions are those states trying to weaken both Canada and the United States. A divided North America is ultimately a weakened North America, and this is very much in the interest of our adversaries.