The federal government must regulate the internet in Canada to curb Russian disinformation, as a federal ban on Russian-funded television does not go far enough, said Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly..“We’ve banned Russia Today and Sputnik on the broadcasting side,” Joly testified at the House of Commons foreign affairs committee. “We’ve pushed digital platforms to also ban them but we need to do more.”.Blacklock’s Reporter said the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) banned Russia Today from cable and satellite services o.n March 17. On February 28, Telecom companies had already pulled the English-language news service. Web content from Russia Today still remains online..Two community groups, the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress and Estonian Central Council of Canada, have petitioned the CRTC to go further by blocking all websites and social media accounts of Russian state media..“My mandate as foreign minister is really to counter propaganda online,” Joly.said. She did not elaborate on what measures would be taken..Joly made her remarks in response to a prepared question from Liberal MP Randeep Sarai (Surrey Centre, B.C.), who asked what Canada was doing to fight disinformation and Russian propaganda..“In every war, information is key because it justified why you start a war,” Joly.replied. “What we’ve seen since the beginning of this war, before the war, there was a big propaganda campaign.”.Joly said the Russians lied “to our face,” about whether they were preparing to invade Ukraine. “Afterwards they said that the reason they were sending troops to further invade Ukraine was to de-Nazify the country,” Joly said. “We know that Zelensky himself is Jewish.”.Joly said since then, the Russians have been engaging in more and more propaganda. “Meanwhile, we know that it is happening in Ukraine and in Russia but at the same time it’s happening in our democracies.”.According to Joly, social media companies need to recognize states have jurisdiction over them and that “they’re not technology platforms but they’re content producers.”.“It is our way collectively to make sure that we can really be able to have strong democracies in the futurem because this war is being fought with 21st-century tools, including social media,” she said..Matthew Horwood is the Parliamentary Bureau Chief of the Western Standard
