No living generation of Canadians has known war close to home. Not even a neighbouring country has known it. The veterans of the Second World War fought elsewhere, and the generations that followed have continued to serve abroad – in Korea, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and beyond. For those not directly affected, and irrespective of generation, conflict has remained distant; witnessed on screens or studied in classrooms, but never felt at home. And for the millions who arrived in Canada from places that did know war, the act of coming here was often, in part, the act of arriving somewhere that did not. Canada is, in a sense, a society organized around the absence of war. Few countries have been so fortunate. Fewer still have had so little reason to examine what that comfort has cost them.
Distance from conflict shapes more than culture. It shapes how Canadians perceive threat, and not every threat announces itself the way a military does. If war has always remained elsewhere, why would disinformation be any different? For many Canadians, the answer is simple: it isn’t. The assumption that foreign influence cannot seriously affect Canada has quietly shaped both public attitudes and the political will to act.
Disinformation is already a reality in Canada. The institutions, the reports, and the warnings exist. What it lacks is a population that feels the urgency. This is the Canadian problem: not capacity, but urgency, a predictable result of a society that has rarely had to take its own security seriously.
Three broad constraints shape democratic responses to disinformation: legality, legitimacy, and speed. Canada faces all of them. What makes Canada distinct is that it has yet to recognize the threat those constraints are meant to address.
Legality gives a government the tools to address the effects of disinformation. In the case of Canada, the question is not whether Canada has laws. It does. The question is whether those laws reflect an understanding, inside the government, of what disinformation actually is, how it spreads, for what purpose, and what would actually counter it. Canada has spent years debating foreign interference and online extremism, but more as political controversies than national security threats. Reports are published, recommendations are written. The knowledge exists, in commissions, in academic centres, in the institutions built to study the threat, but whether it has reached policy is another matter. A sense of complacency remains.
A May 2026 report from researchers at the Canadian Digital Media Network, DisinfoWatch, and the Global Centre for Democratic Resilience documented both Russian state media and American political figures and influencers actively influencing the debate over Alberta’s future. It is the kind of foreign interference operation Canada’s existing legal framework is not built to address. The researchers therefore called for stronger transparency requirements and a coordinated federal response.
As of this writing, however, no such legislation exists. Bill C-9, Canada’s Combatting Hate Act, is an example of a legislative response that, while meaningful, was not designed with foreign information manipulation in mind. It targets hate-motivated intimidation and requires proof of intent to promote hatred. Most disinformation never meets that bar. Bill C-70, the Countering Foreign Interference Act, addresses foreign interference more directly. But it targets espionage, transnational repression, and a transparency registry for foreign agents, not the platform-level disinformation operations the May 2026 report flagged. And C-70 itself took documented election interference and the assassination of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil to produce. In 2023, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian Sikh activist, was shot dead outside a Surrey, B.C. temple and Ottawa later said he was killed by agents of a foreign government. In other words, a citizen had to die before the threat became impossible to ignore.
The government can understand a threat. Being able to act on it is another matter, and that gap is likely where Canada’s lack of urgency hits the hardest. Legitimacy addresses the perception of government action, or inaction: whether the public sees intervention against disinformation as necessary defence, or as overreach. Unlike Europe, where the proximity of Russia has elevated the threat level and, by extension, the legitimacy of its countermeasures, Canada has no equivalent to draw on. The result is action that struggles to find public buy-in, or never comes at all for fear of being perceived as overreach, because the public was never made to feel the threat that the action is meant to address. Even Canada’s one real legitimacy crisis sidestepped the question. The 2022 Freedom Convoy protests, which paralyzed downtown Ottawa and key border crossings, led to the first invocation of the Emergencies Act in the law’s history. The protests were fueled in part by misinformation and disinformation, by the public inquiry‘s own account. But the legitimacy fight that followed, the one that ultimately saw the courts rule the invocation unreasonable, was about protest rights and emergency powers, not about disinformation itself. The legal threshold for invoking emergency powers was tested. The legal threshold for countering disinformation never was. One expert testifying at the inquiry argued that legislation targeting disinformation directly would likely not survive constitutional scrutiny. Canada confronted the consequences of disinformation without ever confronting disinformation as the problem. This shows where Canada’s legitimacy instincts default: toward suspecting overreach, not feeling urgency about the threat that caused it. Any future attempt to legislate disinformation directly will likely meet the same instinct: a public quicker to ask if the government has gone too far rather than asking whether disinformation has gone far enough.
Speed is the constraint that forgives nothing. Disinformation moves in minutes, democracies move more slowly. Some societies have learned to adapt. Canada has had little reason to. The same mechanism that makes Canadian democracy legitimate also makes it slow: Charter scrutiny, consultation, and federal-provincial coordination – none of it built for a threat that moves in minutes. When Canada did move quickly by invoking the Emergencies Act within weeks of the protests, the courts ruled the invocation itself unreasonable.
On the other hand, a nation such as Taiwan has never had the choice between fast and legitimate. It had to find a way to be both. Facing constant disinformation from China, Taiwan built a government response that moves as quickly as the threat itself. Departments operate on what’s called the 2-2-2 principle: a response to false information within 20 minutes, in 200 words or less, with two images, often deliberately humorous, reflecting a strategy known as humour over rumour. Speed was part of the design. Citizen hackers built fact-checking tools directly into popular apps, and government and civil society built overlapping channels, so that neither had to wait on the other when a crisis arrived. None of it runs through Parliament. None of it requires a court’s approval. Speed, in Taiwan’s case, was not a legitimacy problem, because it was never a government problem alone.
Canada has not built speed. Not the institutional kind, slowed by the same mechanisms that make it legitimate, nor the civic kind, which requires a public that feels the threat enough to build it. Canadians, by and large, have had no reason to. Taiwan moved fast because it had to. Canada has had the luxury of moving slowly, or not at all.
Legality, legitimacy, and speed are not three separate failures. They are the same failure, just in different forms. Legality is a tool problem: the laws that exist were not built for disinformation, and the knowledge that could fix it has not reached policy. Legitimacy is the glue: without a public that feels the threat, the government has neither the room to legislate well nor the public’s trust to act when it matters. Speed is about tempo: the same mechanisms that make Canadian democracy legitimate also make it slow, and nothing has forced the question enough to build a faster alternative. Three different constraints, three different failures, all missing the same thing: a public that feels the threat.
The May 2026 report already told us that Russian and American narratives are actively shaping the debate over Alberta’s future. The reports exist, the warnings exist, the noticing does not.
This is the cost of comfort: not a crisis today, but the conditions for one tomorrow.
Image: “The Cost of Comfort,” generated by the author using ChatGPT (GPT-5.5, OpenAI), June 2026.
Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed in articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the NATO Association of Canada.
