Canada is helping to set up a rapid-response team of international diplomats to step in when media freedom is urgently trampled, such as in last year’s murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The measure is one of several steps coming out of this week’s big Canada-U.K. conference on press freedom, co-chaired in London by Global Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt.

Other announcements to come on Thursday, the Star has learned, include a global pledge on media freedom and a new panel of international legal experts — headed by rights lawyer Amal Clooney and including former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler — to help support journalism rights around the world. Canada will also be kicking in $1 million immediately to a “global media defence fund” to back the panel’s work.

None of these measures is likely to stop Donald Trump from his “fake news” rants against the U.S. media, though Clooney did send some pointed criticism in the president’s way when she spoke at the opening of the conference on Wednesday. Without mentioning Trump by name, Clooney lamented how the U.S. “has a leader today who vilifies the media.”

Nor will Canada’s $1 million contribution to a fund (which will be overseen by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) stem the flow of red ink that continues to cause job losses and shutdowns in the media industry at home and abroad.

The focus of the Freeland-Hunt conference was far more fixed on particularly egregious threats to the media — murder and imprisonment of journalists, for instance — than the ongoing existential perils that journalism is facing day to day.

That international focus fits with the plans we saw announced on Monday, detailing how the Canadian government intends to approach threats of disinformation and attempts at meddling in the fall election. The new “critical incident protocol,” unveiled on Tuesday by Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould, also relies on panels of civil servants to monitor the system and assumes that the greatest potential threats to democracy and political accountability come from beyond Canada’s borders.

Read the Global Pledge on Media Freedom here View document on Scribd

A designated panel of deputy ministers, including the Clerk of the Privy Council, has already reportedly been doing “tabletop exercises” in rehearsal for potential infiltration of the Canadian democratic process in the fall election, with scenarios based on incidents already seen in other countries.

At the background briefing for the election protocol, I asked the senior civil servants why they were so fixated on foreign threats to the election, when we’ve already seen homegrown efforts to fiddle with democracy — specifically the so-called “robocalls” scandal of the 2011 campaign, when hundreds, if not thousands of voters received messages misdirecting them away from polling stations. This didn’t come from Russia or China — one former Conservative operative, Michael Sona, went to jail for it.

The officials, who carried out this briefing on the condition of anonymity, explained that Canada has robust laws and protections around democracy and elections. The government clearly puts a lot of faith in the media to catch meddling and mischief too. One of the conditions of the new protocol states that the special deputy minister’s panel will step in to correct misinformation only after the members are sure that the media hasn’t already done a thorough debunking for the public.

As an example, they cited the rampant rumour that spread through the Burnaby byelection earlier this year, about how federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh lived in a mansion. The media exposed that mistruth without any help from government overseers, the officials said, and they’re hoping the same will be true if other, similar “fake news” (pardon the term) circulates in the fall election.

In the media-freedom pledge to be unveiled on Thursday at the big conference in London, the signatories (expected to be about a dozen or so) acknowledge that threats to media freedom come from at home and abroad — and that in a world of loose, cultural borders, small threats to the media in one country can become serious rights violations in another.

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“To focus on solving problems at home is not enough. Restrictive regulatory models can spread from one jurisdiction to the next. Techniques of intimidation that originate in one community soon spread to another. Global digital media platforms are increasingly prevalent and bring with them not only promise of free discourse but also the threat of unlawful surveillance and manipulation,” the pledge states.

The measures to be unveiled on Thursday in London, while important, even urgent, will tackle some big threats to media freedom, and we can probably assume that will be focused on countries where journalists are in serious, possibly mortal danger.

But ensuring that journalism continues to perform a public service, and that democracy functions without meddling, is also a domestic exercise, requiring all of us — not just expert panels — to be alert to small steps on the road to delegitimizing the media or eroding faith in the democratic system. To borrow the wording of the pledge, “to focus on solving problems abroad is not enough.”

Susan Delacourt is the Star’s Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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