Transnational repression on Canadian campuses is an emerging epistemic threat that distorts Canada’s information environment and undermines Canadian sovereignty and NATO security efforts. Transnational repression occurs when foreign governments silence, intimidate, or control individuals in Canada, threatening the freedom of expression of students and faculty. On Canadian campuses, transnational repression functions as a disinformation and epistemic threat because it interferes with the very processes through which knowledge is produced, shaping which perspectives are expressed, recorded, and treated as representative. Instead of injecting fake news into campuses, foreign states can suppress dissenting views that conflict with their interests, narrowing the range of permissible viewpoints and manufacturing a false sense of reality and consensus.
Canada, in particular, is especially vulnerable because of its decentralized governance, highly internationalized campuses, and liberal pluralist system — a system designed to protect diverse cultural, ethnic, and political identities — which creates pockets for foreign actors to exploit and distort its information ecosystem. While transnational repression has existed as a hybrid threat for centuries, what makes it so volatile today is the scale, speed, and technology at which it is carried out. As modern disinformation tactics amplify the influence authoritarian states can have beyond borders, foreign actors can covertly reshape the conditions of information that universities and other institutions of accountability depend on.
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has warned that modern authoritarian takeovers do not necessarily rely on abrupt and violent military force alone, but on gradually dismantling pillars of democracy, such as universities. Eroding truth by attacking these institutions of accountability eventually creates a fake democracy where elections continue, but on a rigged playing field. Hostile states do not necessarily need to spread overt disinformation; they can also simply alter the conditions in a targeted country to work in their favour.
This article uses a two-tier tyranny framework to demonstrate how foreign states create synthetic information ecosystems by suppressing dissent within Canadian institutions, and how those institutions may then inadvertently reinforce this synthetic reality. The two-tier tyranny framework distinguishes between foreign coercion — tier one, the tyranny of the minority — and domestic institutional reinforcement — tier two, the tyranny of the majority. Tier one suppresses dissent and narrows visible viewpoints; tier two then reinforces this distorted environment, producing synthetic consensus. This framework is meant to help recognize early signs or patterns of foreign disinformation, whether it’s obvious in the form of Spamouflage, or in not-so-obvious forms like digital surveillance and self-censorship.
In September 2020, amidst the shift to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, the UBC administration formally requested that instructors place warning labels on course syllabi. The recommended text warned students to avoid course materials covering topics that could be considered illegal or censored by non-Canadian governments. While UBC framed the warnings as a measure to protect their students, critics argued that it fundamentally shifted the burden of safety. Instead of the institution actively securing digital privacy or pushing back against foreign authoritarian reach, they shifted the responsibility of safety onto vulnerable students, telling them to simply “exercise caution” or self-censor by avoiding courses entirely.
Despite good intentions, the practice was harmful as students were constrained from creating and contributing to new knowledge — the very purpose post-secondary institutions ought to serve. Chinese students vulnerable to the influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) regime face targeted threats, family pressure, and digital surveillance amplified by platforms like WeChat, as they are often the only way for students to reach family behind the Great Firewall, allowing the state to reinforce those pressures by tracking communications live and distributing propaganda into students’ primary and personal information sources. By using such tactics of disinformation to force self‑censorship, the PRC effectively deleted critical perspectives from Canadian institutions. This resulting chilling effect creates a false impression of consensus or indifference to current human rights issues affecting individuals in Canada.
Here, the tyranny set by the minority — foreign states such as the PRC — is the invisible, extraterritorial legal and digital coercion that is executed through WeChat surveillance and the threatening of students’ families behind the Great Firewall to suppress individual dissent. The minority regime uses this leverage to erase dissenting perspectives and reshape the information ecosystem that Canadian institutions rely on, leaving the sphere with an artificially narrow range of opinions and conceptions about Canada’s security landscape. The tyranny set by the majority — the UBC administration — is the imposition of regulations limiting student participation and critical voice to mitigate institutional liability, which inadvertently shifted the burden of safety onto the students themselves. In response to the extraterritorial risks created by PRC censorship and surveillance, UBC used its legitimate bureaucratic authority to unintentionally fulfill the objectives of the PRC by actively discouraging student engagement as a way of “exercising caution” in the name of administrative pragmatism.
As a Canadian public university committed to academic freedom and freedom of expression, UBC ordinarily operates on the assumption that students can participate without foreign-state retaliation. UBC also recognized that some students were studying outside Canada and introduced precautionary measures with the intention of protecting them. However, UBC misinterpreted the hesitant participation of many Chinese students, both domestic and international, as evidence of risk rather than a response to coercive pressures. The PRC exploited the gap between UBC’s formal commitment to freedom of expression and the reality that these students were already constrained by preexisting surveillance and family pressure.
The purpose of the two‑tier tyranny framework is to recognize and understand advancing operations of foreign disinformation, how they deteriorate democratic health, and how they threaten national security. The framework is not limited to cases involving the PRC, although the PRC is widely recognized as one of the most sophisticated and pervasive sources of foreign interference globally.
The framework also exposes notable flaws in NATO’s primary counter‑disinformation mechanisms. Current content‑monitoring tools are poorly suited to detecting private, subtractive intimidation on platforms like WeChat. As outlined in NATO’s Approach to Counter Information Threats, the alliance’s interventions remain focused on overt, content‑level responses such as public “debunking or exposure of a campaign,” which can easily overlook the invisible enforcement of self‑censorship, as demonstrated in the UBC case.
While security frameworks are beginning to adapt through emerging Cognitive Warfare doctrines, which acknowledge that adversaries weaponize fear to shape human behaviour and erode institutional trust, domestic policy responses remain narrow, lagging behind the broader understanding of how coercive pressure operates. NATO should encourage member states to expand their definition of resilience and protect institutions of accountability through institutional shields, such as improving the security of reporting between universities and national security agencies, and establish legal and digital support that is government-funded to prevent shifting the burden of defence onto vulnerable individuals. Without clear national guidance, universities often lack the mandate or tools to treat coercive pressure as a security concern, often misinterpreting coercion as a personal safety risk.
Photo: “Room Chair Lot” (2017), by Pixabay via Pexels. Licensed under the Pexels License.
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.
