Privy Council Office asked Facebook to remove false report about PM
Concerns story might influence 2019 election
• A false report of a sex scandal involving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and a former student was removed from Facebook, at the request of his department, out of concern that it would threaten the integrity of the 2019 election.
Allen Sutherland, an assistant secretary to the cabinet at the Privy Council Office (PCO), testified at the Public Inquiry on Foreign Interference on Friday that Facebook brought the report about Trudeau to his attention in the days before the election.
The Buffalo Chronicle, an American website, claimed without evidence that Trudeau was looking to suppress claims that he had an inappropriate relationship with a young student at Vancouver’s West Point Grey
Academy, where Trudeau taught between 1998 and 2001.
“The content might have gained significant attention were it amplified, and therefore risked threatening the integrity of the election,” read Sutherland’s witness testimony.
He was instructed by the former clerk of the Privy Council, Ian Shugart, to ask the social media giant to remove the report, which he did, and Facebook complied with the request.
Sutherland also said that the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol, then comprised of Shugart, Trudeau’s former national security adviser and three deputy ministers, discussed whether to make a public announcement about the report but ultimately decided not to.
The rationale for the decision was that an intervention might “amplify, rather than reduce the impact of misinformation and disinformation.”
The members of the 2019 Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force, which monitored the integrity of the elections, said the false report was on their radar but that they were not aware of PCO’S efforts behind the scenes to suppress the article.
One of the members of the SITE Task Force, Gallit Dobner, also the Director of the Centre for International Digital Policy which housed the Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM), said the article first appeared on the RRM’S radar a few days before the 2019 election.
“We saw media reports ... indicating that eight out of 10 of the most popular articles posted on the Buffalo Chronicle included salacious content, rumours or presumed disinformation targeting political leaders in Canada, particularly the prime minister,” she said.
Dobner said the website used “very poor journalistic practices” — such as the absence of bylines and only anonymous sources — but said it was not a case of foreign interference since there was no evidence a foreign state was behind the stories.
Conservative MP Michael Chong’s legal counsel, Gib van Ert, asked Sutherland to explain why such drastic measures were taken to protect Trudeau’s reputation in 2019 while Conservatives were grappling with a misinformation issue on Chinese social media Wechat in 2021.
“Is that to say that ... there was less concern about misinformation targeted at the Chinese diaspora than the English-speaking public?” asked van Ert.
Sutherland said that the Buffalo Chronicle article was “highly inflammatory” and could become a “national event,” whereas the misinformation on Wechat could have an impact on ridings with large Chinese populations, but was less likely to become national.
“I do not want to leave you with the impression that it was treated with any less seriousness,” he added.
Former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu testified earlier in the week that he was “drowning” under misinformation that suggested he was “anti-china” or a white supremacist supporter during the 2021 election because of his bill to create a foreign agent registry.
Erin O’toole also told the inquiry that the misinformation on Wechat cost the Conservative party up to nine seats and precipitated the party’s decision to replace him as leader.
As for the claims in the Buffalo Chronicle, they have never been proven, despite having been chased down by multiple Canadian political reporters — including an investigative team from Postmedia. But the rumours remain persistent in conservative circles.
Last year, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre referenced the insidious rumour in the House of Commons, saying that he had “trouble remembering why” Trudeau left his job.
Trudeau left the academy in summer 2001 to take a teaching position in the public system and later taught at Sir Winston Churchill Secondary. He was the chair of Katimavik, a national volunteer service program, between 2002 and 2006.