Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis for his regular weekly segment, Liedtke’s Got a Take!
Jon Liedtke discusses foreign interference in Canadian politics with Gene Valaitis. Liedtke argues foreign meddling is inevitable and criticizes Canada’s bureaucratic, delayed enforcement. He highlights how hostile actors exploit domestic issues, such as Alberta separatism, and calls for real-time tracking and mandatory disclosure of third-party political funding.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: Right now though, on this Friday morning, it is time for another edition of Liedtke’s Got a Take. Good morning, Jon.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Well, let’s talk about the reality of foreign interference in Canada. You know the big referendum vote is happening in Alberta on Monday, and we will be watching that very closely. Now Jon, every time we hear about foreign money or bots in Canadian politics, people panic about Moscow trying to destroy our democracy. You look at it differently though, and I was a little bit curious. How should Canadians actually view what’s going on here?
Jon Liedtke: Well, we know that The Walrus just put out a piece by a former FINTRAC—that’s our financial tracking agency—and she was a CSIS analyst as well, about the Russian money that is behind Alberta separatist movement. But yeah, I mean, look, we need to stop this wide-eyed, fainting couch routine every time that a foreign power is getting involved in our political ecosystem. “Oh goodness, a Russian bot! They’re on Twitter in our pristine democracy, but we’re so polite here.” I mean, I’ll be blunt, Gene. I mean, foreign interference, it’s not a surprise. This is an inevitable reality. Hostile actors don’t meddle because they sit in supervillain lairs cackling about a weaker Canada. They do it for their own objectives. Russia wants to erode Western institutional trust, India and China run their own influence games, and Trump goes to rallies and tells crowds that Canada will end up as a 51st state.
I mean, but we treat foreign interference like it’s a surprise. I mean, we act like leaving a box of Timbits on our front porch, and then when they get eaten by a raccoon, it requires a national day of mourning. But I mean, we can’t get mad at the raccoon, and foreign powers are going to interfere as well. And the scandal isn’t that they try. It’s that our federal government acts like installing a basic screen door is a complex engineering mystery that requires a three-to-ten-year study.
Gene Valaitis: Okay, well I read in a recent DisinfoWatch report that Russian-backed networks are flooding the web with Alberta separatist content. So when hostile state actors latch onto real domestic grievances, how do we separate genuine Canadian political frustration from foreign propaganda?
Jon Liedtke: Well, you know, that’s the beauty of the foreign interference playbook. You don’t need to invent anything out of thin air. Why craft original Canadian fanfiction when you can just find an existing domestic fire, like Western alienation, and pour state-sponsored gas all over it? A McGill study uncovered 20 fake YouTube channels with like 40 million views pumping out AI propaganda to normalize Alberta secession. They had AI avatars, voice actors pretending to be authentic Albertans while they mispronounced local towns. It’s like someone saying, “Ah yes, I love living here in the beautiful town of Niagara Falls.”
I mean, I was looking at Albertaseparatist.com on the Wayback Machine because the website’s down now. I mean, they have energy complaints and an article titled “No Foreign Wars, No Conscription, Only Alberta”. I mean, since when is military conscription a debate in prairie politics? I don’t think there’s anyone in Red Deer sitting at the kitchen table saying, “Well, the crops are in. I just hope Ottawa doesn’t draft me into the Ukraine war”. I mean, this is a Kremlin template that’s been lazily copy-pasted by an overseas operator who doesn’t even know where Alberta is on a map. I mean, on the exact same site, they post, “How would Alberta rank as the 51st state?” The goal, though, isn’t to force secession tomorrow. It’s a demoralization op. They just want Albertans and Eastern Canadians screaming at each other on social media until we all just decide, “Hey, democracy’s a failure”.
Gene Valaitis: You know, we all know that great expression: “Just follow the money”. So in Alberta, strict rules govern campaign donations, but groups can operate unregistered as educational initiatives. They can take in millions without disclosing a single donor’s name. So how massive of a loophole is this really?
Jon Liedtke: I mean, this is not a blind spot, Gene. This is a Grand Canyon-sized loophole. Under provincial rules, official political advertisers face strict donor caps and mandatory audits, but if you do register as an educational initiative, suddenly you’re not a lobby group. You’re an enthusiastic little schoolhouse on the prairie, and you can accept millions in secret dark money and face zero compliance. It’s an obscene loophole, and it can lead to obscene outcomes.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, so former CSIS and FINTRAC analyst who you talked about, Jessica Davis, wrote in The Walrus that federal agencies track suspicious foreign transfers, but legal silos prevent them from tipping off provincial election officials and bodies. So how does a system this broken even exist?
Jon Liedtke: Federal agencies that track suspicious foreign transfers can’t inform provincial election bodies because Ottawa specializes in building multi-million dollar silos specifically designed to ensure nobody can legally speak with anyone else. We know from Jessica Davis’s reporting that FINTRAC monitoring only looks at politicians after they get elected, and our financial intelligence unit is legally barred from handing suspicious wire disclosures directly to election bodies.
So it’s like your local fire department pulling up to a house engulfed in flames, seeing the arson squad standing on the sidewalk with a bucket of water, and the squad going, “Well, sorry, privacy regulations and inter-agency boundaries mean we can’t give you the water, but we will write a classified report about it to be declassified maybe in a few years, and it’ll explain why fire is dangerous”.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, that’s a great analogy, by the way. Hey, listen, even if CSIS or the RCMP flag these threats, I’ve seen in the past that law enforcement often hesitates during an election, or in this case a referendum, out of fear of looking politically motivated. So is our legal system fundamentally paralyzed when it comes to stopping dark money in real time?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, our legal system is fundamentally paralyzed when it comes to stopping dark money in real time. Our national security apparatus operates under institutional terror, terrified of taking action during active campaigns because they don’t want to be accused of putting their fingers on the scale. Meanwhile, the RCMP’s federal policing division is notoriously under-resourced. They’re trying to stop increasingly sophisticated international dark money syndicates without an enforcement budget to match, and the net result is zero real-time enforcement. Intelligence agencies collect the data, electoral agencies audit financial forms 18 months after the election wraps up, though. It’s like, “Great news, everyone! We finished the audit, and it turns out the country was compromised back in 2018. Good effort, team!”
Gene Valaitis: Wow, wow, wow. Well listen, if foreign interference is inevitable and Ottawa’s security enforcement is stuck in a bureaucratic web, what’s the bottom line here? Where does this leave Canadian democracy?
Jon Liedtke: You know, looking at it from the lens of Canadian democracy with foreign interference as an inevitable reality and Ottawa’s security enforcement stuck in that bureaucratic web, the bottom line is that Canada’s current approach to foreign interference seems to be pure rhetorical and security theater. It’s administrative performance art. We pass minor legislative tweaks, we hold multi-million dollar public inquiries, and ministers will of course issue sternly worded press releases, but we consistently refuse to fix the basic statutory infrastructure of it all.
If we actually cared about our democratic integrity, we would implement what Jessica Davis, former FINTRAC and CSIS analyst’s recommendations were, and we’d do them today:
- Tear down the legal walls between our financial tracking agency and our provincial election authorities.
- Create a separate dedicated federal police force trained specifically for financial intelligence.
- Force every third-party political advocacy group operating in the country from coast to coast to coast to disclose every single nickel in real time.
Until we do that, we’re not defending our democracy. We’re sitting back and acting shocked when the Timbits go missing from the front porch, but we’re letting the foreign actors buy off our political discourse for pennies on the dollar.
Gene Valaitis: Fascinating stuff. Hey listen, I lived in Western Canada for about seven years, and there’s an incredible rivalry between Calgary and Red Deer, to the point where the people in Calgary call the people who live in Red Deer “Dead Reerians”!
Jon Liedtke: Really?
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, the “Dead Reers”!
Jon Liedtke: I had not heard that one before. That’s very interesting, Gene. But I guess, you know, there’s alienation not only from East to West, but also from city to city, I suppose.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, you got it. Hey listen, great takes all this week. Have a fantastic weekend, we’ll be talking to you on Monday.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you, Gene. Looking forward to it. Have a great weekend, too.
Gene Valaitis: There we go, Jon Liedtke with “Liedtke’s Got a Take”.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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