Lex Gill, senior fellow at The Citizen Lab, delivered impactful comments to the Foreign Interference Commission at the public consultation hearing for the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions this October.
She argues that concerns regarding foreign interference cannot be used to justify rights-infringing powers for Canada’s national security agencies, particularly given that such powers will disproportionately impact migrants and other marginalized groups.
“Foreign states ultimately operate through people, and so it is those people in Canada who are being subjected to suspicion, surveillance, intelligence gathering, immigration consequences, and criminal investigation and sanction. And those people have constitutional rights.”
Drawing on The Citizen Lab’s 2022 report examining digital transnational repression (DTR) in Canada, Gill highlights how DTR “is rapidly becoming the cornerstone of everyday transnational repression and a particular threat to the rights and freedoms of dissidents and activists living in exile.”
Watch the webcast (Lex Gill begins at 32:00).