In this moment of uncertainty about Canada’s democratic future, we must prioritize the testing and scaling of solutions. The CEO of the Samara Centre offers three practical recommendations.
In a moment where many are fearful about what Canada’s democratic future holds, philanthropic and civil society organizations have been coming together to talk about our democracy. The recently released Canadian Democracy Coalition Atlas, which draws on interviews with 58 participants, is intended to provide a framework that guides potential next steps. The resource paints a portrait of the country’s democracy sector and underscores some of the most pressing and enduring concerns for our sector: fragmentation and under-funding. These are challenges that the Samara Centre has been keenly aware of for decades.
Next year, the Samara Centre for Democracy will mark its 20th anniversary as a non-partisan charity dedicated to strengthening and protecting Canada’s democracy. While our mission has never felt more urgent or been as readily appreciated, it wasn’t always this way. In 2007, when our co-founders, Michael MacMillan and Alison Loat, were starting what would eventually become the Samara Centre, they faced a lot of skepticism. A common reaction was “Democracy? That’s not a problem in Canada.”
A lot can change in two decades. Over the past few years, there has been a public awakening that as a country we have been too complacent about protecting our democratic resilience and we’re now paying the price with our national security and social cohesion. Today, many Canadians feel disempowered as foreign interference, threats to our sovereignty, and disinformation erodes the foundation of our civic life. For our team, the key question that has emerged from this challenging moment is this: how do we leverage this new awareness of the vulnerability of our democracy so that we’re not just settling for the democracy we have, but are instead ambitiously setting the course for the democracy we want?
There has been a public awakening that as a country we have been too complacent about protecting our democratic resilience.
This era demands a renewed and strategic commitment to investing in the vital work of civil society organizations, which serve as the crucial, connective tissue of our democracy. Such organizations in Canada’s democracy sector foster social cohesion, enhance public trust, and invigorate citizen participation. Substantive research from across the globe underscores the critical bolstering role that such organizations play as a buttress against democratic backsliding. In this moment where the democracy sector’s research, programs, and community partnerships are needed more than ever, we must commit to moving ambitiously and going beyond problem definition to prioritize the testing and scaling of solutions.
This framing is what guided my recent testimony before the Procedure and House Affairs Committee in the House of Commons, informing their study about the current state of civic resilience in Canada and what the government can do to strengthen social trust and increase civic engagement. Drawing on decades of Samara Centre research and public engagement insights, I offered three practical recommendations that would meaningfully enhance Canada’s democratic culture.
Civic education as national defence
Grey-zone threats from foreign states are emerging, not as open warfare, but as information manipulation that erodes our sense of a shared reality and our sense of a common Canadian identity. Concerningly, we do not currently have a robust infrastructure to support an informed Canadian citizenry who are inoculated against such threats. As a result, Canadians are largely defenceless and ill-equipped to identify foreign information threats, assess inauthentic behaviour online, and evaluate good information from bad. We must be clear-eyed about how information threats endanger our social cohesion and invest in digital media literacy and civic education as a form of inoculation.
We can learn from fellow middle powers that have funded robust civic education as a national defence measure against Russia’s threats and active disinformation campaigns. While such states are not among the most powerful in the world, they do hold considerable diplomatic, economic, and multilateral influence. In Finland, starting as early as kindergarten, youth are taught subjects with an explicit citizenship lens, and digital media literacy is woven throughout their curricula. In Estonia, adults are also included in a national strategy for cross-curricular, lifelong learning. These countries have prioritized securing populations that are digitally literate, critical thinkers, and the results speak volumes: their citizens are among the most resistant to disinformation in the European Union.
This high standard of civic education can be adapted for Canada’s multicultural context, and this shift cannot come fast enough. Currently, Canada’s civic education offerings are piecemeal across regions, uninspiring and under-resourced. This strongly limits our ability to engage in healthy, evidence-based civic dialogue across differences. As a result, young people are not interested in “traditional” democratic processes, such as voting, because they don’t feel represented in our politics. The pandemic and young people’s increasingly online lives have exacerbated this disengagement, amounting to a generational crisis of informed citizenship that breeds polarization and distrust in democratic institutions.
Canadian students should have access to a curriculum that teaches them to understand and critically evaluate media content and disinformation in a Canadian context. Picture children in elementary school learning digital media literacy across subjects – from social studies to math. This should be a crucial piece in our country’s national defence plan against foreign threats and active disinformation campaigns. Beyond national security, there are many other significant benefits that can come from a robust invigoration of Canadian civic education. When youth are onboarded into the role of active citizen, they report higher rates of well-being and have a positive influence on the democratic participation of those around them – not just their peers, but also the adults in their lives that may feel disconnected or intimidated by political processes. Longer term, enabling the civic engagement of youth secures a generational commitment to lifelong democratic participation.
Democracy sector organizations play a crucial role by producing and disseminating accessible, engaging, made-in-Canada civic education materials for all ages. Importantly, these resources meet needs identified by community partners – teachers, professors, librarians, and other professions of democracy – who trust our sector for substantive and engaging civic learning materials that invigorate how we develop an informed citizenry in Canada. They also empower young people to foster civic engagement in their intergenerational and diasporic households, helping to build a robust culture of political participation. Philanthropic foundations can have an immediate impact by recognizing the value of these relationships and providing resources to scale the development and distribution of civic education materials, ensuring that they are in the hands of educators and community leaders across provinces and territories.
Platform regulation in the public interest
Every day, millions of Canadians’ lives are being shaped by foreign-owned digital platforms that in recent years have restricted access to credible Canadian news online and limited fact-checking and content moderation. The resulting proliferation of disinformation through bots, astroturfing, and algorithmic boosting has left us with a deeply polluted information ecosystem that is distorting our shared reality. This is an urgent and dangerous matter; a functioning democracy requires a trusted information environment.
Recently, the Government of Canada tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, in an effort to address online harms, particularly for young people. The proposed legislation is promising in its potential to institute design requirements on some digital platforms to prioritize safety; however, it is not comprehensive in addressing all major digital platforms. To make a meaningful difference, Canada must have legislation that fully addresses the constellation of harms to our democracy being facilitated through our digital ecosystem. We can align ourselves with fellow middle powers to do so.
The Safe Social Media Act currently addresses only social media and chatbots, but other large digital platforms such as messaging, gaming, ecommerce, streaming, and other generative AI platforms may fall out of scope. We can learn from the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which now serves as a vehicle for countries to move forward with regulating large platforms in the public interest. Platforms that fall under DSA regulation are based on the proportion of EU residents that are users. The Netherlands recently confirmed that Meta must provide chronological, non-algorithmic feeds, and Germany has confirmed that X must provide data access to researchers. Similar legislation in Canada could also empower provinces to hold digital platforms to account in ways that are responsive to their populations.
For too long, the responsibility for addressing the online harms created by large, powerful digital platforms has been placed on the shoulders of individual users. It is imperative that we break out of this dynamic and instead keep our focus squarely on what is in the best interest of Canadians. This can be achieved with passing duty-of-care legislation that holds platforms accountable when they harm our social fabric and our democracy. This entails passing laws, regulations, and frameworks that require companies to implement and maintain design features that minimize harm that users face using their platforms, such as default safeguard settings for minors. In addition to regulating in the public interest, this type of response can also spur competition. Currently, Canadians are struggling to identify a shared space for reliable information online; it’s not a bridge too far to encourage that made-in-Canada platforms fill this gap with digital public infrastructure that strengthens our democratic culture.
Civil society organizations are readily contributing to countering foreign interference and protecting Canadian sovereignty by producing evidence that underpins these proposed policy changes. It is worth noting that as technology-facilitated violence is becoming more pervasive around the world, increasingly large digital platforms are taking legal action against the small non-profit organizations that are compellingly demonstrating the harm perpetuated by these companies. It is important that philanthropic foundations be aware of the lived experience of conducting this work and the associated risk.
Investing in the revitalization of civic life
Finally, an informed and digitally literate citizenry needs access to social infrastructure where they can contribute to and benefit from a vibrant culture of civic engagement. Committing to civic capacity-building is how we will secure social cohesion, enhance public trust, and bolster civic participation. This means having spaces like civic hubs where Canadians can connect with their representatives and receive coordinated public services. It’s about accessible spaces where Canadians can be in community together, where disinformation can be checked through in-person conversation and relationship-building. It’s about programs and resources that enable active citizenship.
While the understanding that democracy is under threat in Canada has grown over the last 20 years, the resources to support the work remain largely unchanged from 2007. Civil society organizations continue to make vital contributions in spite of being chronically underfunded, but this is neither sustainable nor sensible. This circumstance also creates inefficiencies by hindering collaboration and connection among organizations.
To truly address the pressing civic needs of Canadians, we need transformational investment in the civil society organizations that are doing load-bearing work to shore up our democracy. The Government of Canada can prioritize scaling the impact of civil society by creating a Canadian Democracy Endowment. This would serve as a permanent, non-partisan, arm’s-length funding mechanism that would help to sustainably support Canada’s civic resilience by funding the non-partisan, non-academic organizations that are already delivering public-facing democratic resilience and civic engagement initiatives.
A healthy democracy is the necessary foundation for any philanthropic mission; this is an issue that affects 100% of the population.
The Samara Centre is one of the developers of the Canadian Democracy Endowment because we feel it is imperative that the federal government commit to the long-term health of our democracy by making a practical investment in our national resilience. The public wants collaboration and efficient approaches to informed policy development that reinforce security, unity, and prosperity; the endowment is a concrete way to provide that. By properly resourcing the effective, evidence-based solutions that are already underway across the country, we can bring forth a robust, coordinated national response to democratic backsliding. This would not only make an immediate and meaningful difference in powering civil society; it would also unlock matched philanthropic funding and cross-sector partnerships that will strengthen Canada’s democratic capacity in the long term.
A healthy democracy is the necessary foundation for any philanthropic mission; this is an issue that affects 100% of the population. By focusing on the big picture, foundations can play a vital role in this moment of crisis by prioritizing strategic, transformational, unrestricted, multi-year granting that demonstrates a trusted partnership with grantees. This moment offers an unprecedented opportunity to revitalize civic life by investing in the “enduring infrastructure for a democratic society.” Foundations must ask themselves, “How do anti-democratic forces operate?” and commit to matching that vigour.
These recommendations for the Procedure and House Affairs Committee were designed to immediately address the most pressing threats to Canada’s democratic culture while also securing it for generations to come. It reflects where our team at the Samara Centre is coming from: we are proud to have shaped conversations about the health of Canada’s democracy over the past two decades, but our eyes are on the horizon. Let’s meet this moment of uncertainty with energy and ambition by investing in robust civic education, forward-looking duty-of-care legislation, and sound civic infrastructure that will imbue Canadians, young and old, with the confidence that the future of our country is secure and ours to shape.
