Thank you so much for having me here today. I will do my best to keep to time.

Off the top, really briefly, I want to recognize that my being here as a journalist is a little awkward. I'm used to covering these hearings, not testifying before them. I agreed to explicitly because I think this ought to be a non-partisan matter. The fact that I agree so fully with Mr. Alexander, someone whom I have sparred with in the past, should be a testament to the fact that this should be an issue around defending our country from adversaries so that we can more robustly debate our domestic politics among one another, for better or for worse.

I have been covering Russia's illiberal and colonial activities around the world for more than a decade now. I have spoken at great lengths to American, European, Ukrainian and NATO leaders about this challenge, including visiting the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga. I've built relationships with Ukrainian leaders as well as Russian dissidents trying to dismantle Vladimir Putin's empire. For my work, I've been sanctioned by the Russian regime. I've been targeted in the past by Russian information operations and by the Kremlin's “useful idiots” over here.

I will be pleased to answer all your questions on any of these topics.

Today I mostly want to talk to you about one specific story from the past. It's about my connection with a man named Kirill Kalinin who was, at least according to his business card, the press secretary for the Russian embassy in Ottawa.

Over about two years, Kalinin and I corresponded, usually through the official Twitter account of the Russian embassy in Ottawa. I regularly reached out to seek comment and perspective from Kalinin and the embassy more broadly. I found myself chatting with him quite frequently. It was through these messages that Kalinin began to pitch me stories and suggested research that I ought to pursue.

Kalinin, for example, touted the existence of “a very interesting archive at the embassy” that was full of information about Nazi war criminals hiding among us here in Canada. This is similar to what Mr. Alexander was just describing to you.

It could prove, Kalinin claimed, “a big connection to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress”. This would be a trend through a lot of our conversations going forward.

Other times, Kalinin would try to sell the narrative that political parties in Ottawa—all of them—were being duped into a reflexive anti-Russian bias or discrimination.

Kalinin and I kept up our correspondence for many years. We even got beers together a couple of times in Ottawa. I, of course, always disclosed this relationship in anything I published.

On one occasion, he asked me if I was interested in a story. He asked me if I knew that Chrystia Freeland had a Nazi grandfather. What I can tell you—I'm not going to recap the whole story, since I believe we're all familiar with it—is that when he first pitched this to me, there were no publicly available sources, research, news articles or anything of the like that were making this allegation in the public record. In a follow-up message, he pointed me to a box of records at the Alberta archives all about Michael Chomiak, who was Chrystia Freeland's maternal grandfather.

I declined to pursue the story, but I can tell you that in the months that followed, this story started popping up in a variety of supposedly independent blogs, touting the line that Freeland had inherited this supposed Nazi ideology from her grandfather.

Very clearly, I was not the only one being pitched this story. Robert Fife of The Globe and Mail asked Freeland about the Russian smear campaign. After that, it became national and international news.

This story should have invited us to have a conversation about Russia's malign skullduggery happening in the capital. It's a conversation that Mr. Fife had tried to start. Unfortunately, we started scoring on our own team. Commentators began insisting that the only disinformation here was the allegation that Russia was responsible for the story. Others refused to accept Russia's fingerprints. At one point, TeleSur, Venezuela's propaganda outlet, published a curious story claiming that it was the Communist Party of Canada that had dug up these records.

Anyway, I'll cut a bit of a long story short and say that Kalinin was eventually removed from the country in 2018—a call that I think was right.

However, I think the entire saga asks us to become more serious about this issue and to become more serious about how we expose and accredit and attribute foreign malign information operations here in Canada. They often are not as well-organized, purposeful, effective and nefarious as we give them credit for. A lot of the time, they are slapdash, amateur and even, in the case of Kalinin, friendly. Foreign interference is often less cut and dried and less transactional than we think. A lot of the time, it is interpersonal relationships, and this sort of thing is very hard to criminalize or legislate against.

Sometimes sunlight, as I'm sure we're going to hear in a minute, is the best disinfectant. I think the indictment filed in the U.S. about Tenet Media and its connections with Russia Today exposes how effective it can be to just put on the record the intelligence we have.

I'll try to wrap up right now and say that if I can make one recommendation—and I hope I can talk more about this in the Q and A—it's that we need to get more serious about attribution, about publishing the intelligence and the evidence we have of these information operations, and about giving people the information necessary to defend themselves against these information operations and to disrupt them at the very source.

Thanks so much.