There is something quite ludicrous about a political party raising the alarm over the spreading of falsehoods during an election campaign

I have an urgent warning for the people of Canada. Even now, certain agents are plotting to influence the result of the next election campaign by means of stealth and deception.

Posing as ordinary Canadians, they plan to use social media to spread falsehoods designed to inflame public opinion, using the latest micro-targeting technologies to tailor their messages to the reader’s particular fears and prejudices.

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These agents are better known as the political parties.

One of the problems with the Liberal government’s recently announced plan to “defend Canadian democracy” from foreign interference, notably in the form of “fake news,” is the basic premise: that the principal threat to the integrity of the Canadian electoral process is posed by outsiders, third parties and foreign agents, rather than the participants.

If there is something ominous about the government involving itself, however indirectly, in deciding what is and is not fake news, there is something quite ludicrous about a political party raising the alarm over the spreading of falsehoods during an election campaign. Indeed, a good short definition of an election campaign would be “a sustained, intense, all-party burst of falsehood, slander and misrepresentation.”

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There isn’t a lot else. A modern campaign consists mostly in what is gently termed “defining” opposing party leaders, in a way calculated to make them unrecognizable to their own mothers. The rest is devoted to deliberately misrepresenting the other parties’ positions, while making false or exaggerated claims about their own.

There remains a gentlemanly expectation that these falsehoods should not be obviously detectable as such — that is, that the lie should itself be artfully concealed, disguised as an elision, half-truth or what a Liberal MP recently called “rhetorical advantage,” rather than rubbed in the public’s faces in the manner pioneered by Donald Trump.

Nevertheless the centerpiece of many a winning campaign has been what was later revealed to have been a lie, or at best a broken promise, depending on whether one believes the party in question knew at the time the promise would never be kept. The Liberals may have added their own entries to this ledger of shame, from balanced budgets to electoral reform, but they are only the latest in a long list.

All of this is only to describe the conventional political campaign, the one carried out openly, in full view of the public. But for as long as there have been such campaigns, there have also been parallel shadow campaigns, designed to spread “oppo research” and other material that, even if true, would be awkward for a party to be seen passing about. In ages past these would have been by means of whisper campaigns, leaks to friendly reporters, letters to the editor from “concerned citizens,” and the like.

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To the extent that 'fake news' matters, it would appear the problem is less the supply than the demand

Then came phone banks, and after them robo-calls, and nowadays there is social media. But the game is essentially the same. While it is true that new technology has made it easier to spread falsehoods in greater volume at lower cost and less detectability than before, one suspects what is really behind the panic over “fake news” is that the parties’ monopoly over it has been broken. Before, few would have had the resources to mount a really serious campaign of anonymous vilification — certainly not when the risks were compared to the rewards. Nowadays anyone can, from a kid in a basement to the government of Russia.

In the Liberal government’s case, there is also the added advantage of providing apparent support for its attempted soft-politicization of the press, via the public funding of “real” news organizations. That the latter policy is by far the greater threat to a free and democratic society is one of the many delightful ironies of the Liberal position.

No one disputes that Russia, China and others have interfered or attempted to interfere in recent elections around the world, notably in the election that gave us Trump (okay, Trump still disputes it). Whether the issue is hacking candidates’ emails or party databases, funding favoured parties or causes, or disrupting the counting of votes itself, the threat is real, and obvious. But the impact of “fake news” — as opposed to real news, illegally obtained — the focus of much of the Liberal policy package, is more debatable.

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Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

What, then, do the Liberals propose? Some of it is unassailable, if only because it is so vague. It would be hard to object to the notion of “improving coordination” between government agencies, or that Canada’s security agencies should be working together “to prevent covert, clandestine or criminal activities by foreign actors from interfering in our electoral processes.”

Likewise, there is probably merit in the proposed Critical Election Incident Public Protocol, whereby a panel of five top civil servants would be empowered to notify the public of a “threat to the integrity” of the election. The idea would be to lift the threat out of the political arena, so as to preserve public confidence in the election process itself — though whether that will prove possible in the event we shall have to wait and see.

But spending $7 million on “awareness sessions, workshops and learning material” to help Canadians “critically assess online news reporting and editorials”? I want to be charitable. Perhaps there is a giddier waste of money than government-sponsored critical-assessment “awareness sessions” in which not one in a thousand Canadians would be caught dead. I only say I do not know of any.

I don’t want to say that “fake news” doesn’t matter. But to the extent that it matters, it would appear the problem is less the supply than the demand: the willingness, indeed the desire of large numbers of people to believe transparent falsehoods. But then, without it what becomes of politics?