Opinion | ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests had MélanieJoly and other foreign ministers all worried about the same thing

Most of the world’s eyes were focused on Ukraine last February when the convoy protests were disrupting life in Canada.

But Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly says she was fielding questions from her international counterparts about what the heck was going on in this country.

French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna told Joly the so-called “Freedom Convoy” bore a strong resemblance to protests being seen in her own country. The foreign ministers from Britain and New Zealand said the same thing.

A linking concern for all of them, said Joly, was the role of disinformation in the protests — the way crowds were being mobilized by campaigns to spread mistruths and even outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines — as well as conspiracy theories about governments.

None of them have ruled out the prospect that foreign states, such as Russia, are feeding those campaigns.

“The narratives behind the convoy are spreading, or can be spread around the world, because of this disinformation campaign by foreign states,” Joly said.

So even though she was not on the front lines here in Canada when the convoy protests hit, the domestic protests were rippling across the world stage last February as part of a bigger worry about what Russia was doing to destabilize the world order.

Joly was talking to a Microsoft executive this year who shared some findings with her on the tech giant’s research into sources of disinformation. The research showed that Russia was churning out two different messages about COVID-19 vaccines — telling domestic audiences they were safe, but telling foreign audiences they were dangerous. (With a notable exception of Cuba, where the vaccines-are-safe message also circulated.)

Microsoft vice-chair Brad Smith published some of the findings in a mid-year blog post on how the Ukraine crisis was playing out as a cyberwar.

“These ongoing Russian operations (on Ukraine) build on recent sophisticated efforts to spread false COVID narratives in multiple Western countries,” Smith wrote in June this year.

“These included state-sponsored cyber-influence operations in 2021 that sought to discourage vaccine adoption through English-language internet reports while simultaneously encouraging vaccine usage through Russian-language sites. During the last six months, similar Russian cyber influence operations sought to help inflame public opposition to COVID-19 policies in New Zealand and Canada.”

Joly, in a year-end interview with me in her Ottawa office, said findings like this have made foreign affairs ministers the world over even more determined to tackle disinformation, especially when it comes from governments of countries such as Russia — or China, for that matter.

Throughout the past year, Joly and her office have issued numerous statements calling out Russian disinformation. In October, Joly announced 35 sanctions specifically aimed at Russian spreaders of disinformation, including TV Zvezda, a channel run by Russia’s defence ministry, as well as some prominent media and entertainment celebrities in Russia.

“The Russian regime’s war depends on lies and deception,” Joly’s news release stated in October.

Joly believes the past three gruelling years of the pandemic have made people more vulnerable to disinformation, and that many are feeling more angry and vulnerable, as the convoy protest demonstrated.

“The pandemic has created even more of an issue in the use of social media,” she said. “The fact that people can to a certain extent act (with) total impunity behind avatars… is a real problem.”

It’s going to be one of the issues all governments are going to have to tackle, she said, because disruptions to world order are happening on the literal battlefield in Ukraine, but also in the virtual battlefield all over. “The rules of the game need to be established, because this is not how democracy works, and this is not how social cohesion can be maintained,” she said.

The concern about social media is one Joly has carried over into this job at foreign affairs from her original cabinet post as heritage minister. Her successor in that role, Pablo Rodriguez, is getting ready to tackle online hate in legislation next year and Joly said she is keeping a close eye on how that goes.

The battle could pit the Canadian government against the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, who tweeted in mid-December that an online harms bill here would be “an attempt to muzzle the voice of the people in Canada.”

Musk, who spent some time in December shutting down accounts of selected users and journalists on Twitter, knows a thing or two about muzzling.

Joly believes the next year will be as tough as 2022, largely because the war in Ukraine will continue to play out, causing havoc in the economy and anxiety worldwide. She is confident the war will come to an end, though she’s not making any predictions about timing. She is also hoping Canada will be playing an important role in the peace process, whatever that turns out to be.

What she does know, and says often, is that the world is a more unstable place this year than it was last.

“2023 will be an important year. We will be defined by world events,” she said. “I never thought I would say this as a politician, but you actually need to support the war to get to peace.”

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