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Conservative MP Kenny Chiu rises during Question Period in the House of Commons in Ottawa on April 13, 2021. The Conservative Party believes Mr. Chius defeat in the 2021 election was linked to a propaganda campaign against him.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

Two researchers at McGill University say a disinformation campaign against a Conservative Party candidate during the 2021 election race is a disturbing demonstration of how propaganda tactics could be used by hostile foreign actors to interfere with Canadas political system.

And they suggest a countermeasure to discourage future disinformation efforts would be a public registry to track foreign influence that is similar to the very mechanism that former B.C. MP Kenny Chiu was attacked during the election campaign for proposing.

During the 2021 federal election campaign Mr. Chius proposal was condemned on Chinese-language social media, alleging his plan would suppress the Chinese community in Canada. The comments were disseminated on apps and websites widely used by some Canadians of Chinese origin, who make up approximately half of his ridings population.

What is alarming is these tactics could be deployed against any group in an information and psychological warfare campaign, the authors say. In short it has high potential for interference in Canadas electoral process by foreign state actors and thus severely threatens the countrys liberal democracy.

Writing this month in Policy Options, a publication of Canadas Institute for Research on Public Policy, Sze-Fung Lee and Benjamin Fung say Canada needs to better protect itself from disinformation campaigns that could damage this countrys electoral process. Ms. Lee and Mr. Fung are experts on information warfare. Ms. Lee is a research assistant in the School of Information Studies at Montreals McGill University, where Mr. Fung is a professor and Canada Research Chair in data mining for cybersecurity.

Mr. Chiu, a Canadian who was born in Hong Kong, was elected as the member of Parliament for the federal riding of Steveston-Richmond East in B.Cs Lower Mainland in 2019 but was defeated in the 2021 election. Data from the 2016 census indicate the ethnic origin of the ridings population is close to 50 per cent Chinese.

The Conservative Party believes Mr. Chius defeat was linked to the propaganda campaign against him, but foreign affairs critic Michael Chong acknowledges the evidence is so far inconclusive.

This disinformation effort against Mr. Chiu was recently documented by the Atlantic Council think tanks Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), in a November report.

DFRLab analyzed anonymous articles circulating on Chinese language apps and websites such as WeChat and Weibo, both heavily used by some Canadians of Chinese origin, that misrepresented a private members bill Mr. Chiu had tabled in 2021.

The Foreign Influence Registry Act he proposed was an effort inspired by similar Australian legislation to combat foreign interference that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and other bodies have warned is a growing problem in Canada. It called for a registry where people working on behalf of foreign governments or corporations would have to file notice when they are trying to influence public policy, contracts or legislation in Canada. It exempted diplomats.

In late 2018, Australia enacted a Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme to track work being done by foreign governments and foreign state-owned enterprises as well as individuals or political organizations affiliated with countries. The United States Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) has been in effect since 1938 and a similar registry has been under consideration in Britain.

The election campaign attack on Mr. Chiu painted his registry proposal as an effort to target all people of Chinese origin in Canada. Once this act becomes law, all individuals or groups connected with China may be considered as spokespersons of the Chinese government and will be required to register specially, one article on WeChat alleged.

It said after this bill became law, activities related to associations in mainland China, as well as normal Sino-Canadian economic, cultural and technological exchanges, would be suppressed and have a profound negative impact on the Chinese community.

The anonymous attacks also called Mr. Chiu anti-China because he had been an outspoken critic of Beijings crackdown on dissent and protest in Hong Kong and because he had backed a motion condemning the Chinese governments repression in Xinjiang.

Ms. Lee and Mr. Fung said disinformation is widespread throughout social media in diaspora Chinese communities and that a language barrier sometimes prevents Chinese immigrants from verifying what they read by crosschecking it with other Western media.

They said its very difficult to prove who was behind the disinformation but say its logical to infer whoever was responsible for disseminating the fake news had a clear motive in reshaping the narratives in favour of Beijings interests.

The solution, the McGill academics say, is to expose the sources of influence on the public debate in Canada. They say a useful countermeasure would be a mechanism similar to what Mr. Chiu and the Conservative Party advocated, and which was proposed by Alliance Canada Hong Kong, an umbrella group of Canadian human-rights activists. This registry as outlined by the group would be paired with a public commission to enforce compliance with the registry.

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Disinformation campaign against former MP Kenny Chiu a disturbing precedent, researchers say - The Globe and Mail

Enlarge / Scientists have used the data from Gaia to track the location and motion of stars in our galaxy.

Galaxies like the Milky Way are thought to have been built through a series of mergers, drawing in smaller galaxies and clusters of stars and making these foreign stars their own. In some cases, the mergers were recent enough that we can still detect the formerly independent object as a cluster of stars orbiting the Milky Way together. But, as time goes on, interactions with the rest of the stars in the Milky Way will slowly disrupt any structures the cluster incorporates.

So it's a bit of a surprise that researchers found what appear to be the remains of a globular cluster composed of some of the oldest stars around. The finding is consistent with a "growth through merger" model of galaxy construction, but it raises questions about how the cluster stayed intact for as long as it did.

The results started with an analysis of data from the ESA's Gaia mission, which set out to do nothing less than map the Milky Way in three dimensions. Gaia imaged roughly a billion objects dozens of times, enough to estimate both their location and their motion around the Milky Way's core. This map has helped scientists identify structures within our galaxy based on the fact that there are some groups of stars that are not only physically close to each other, but all moving in the same direction.

The process of mining the Gaia data for these sorts of structures is so useful that there's a software algorithm called STREAMFINDER that identifies them. That software led to the discovery of the C-19 stellar stream, a group of stars moving together through the Milky Way's halo.

One way to check whether these groups of stars really started out as part of a single cluster is to check their age; clusters are often composed of stars with similar ages. One of the ways to see if stars formed at the same time is to check the content of heavier elements. There was little in the way of elements heavier than helium formed during the Big Bang, so most heavy elements that are now present were produced by earlier stars. The later in the history of the Universe a star formed, the more of these heavier elements that star is likely to contain.

(Astronomers call any element heavier than helium a metal and refer to a star's heavy-element content as its metallicity. But this will probably confuse most non-astronomers, so we'll avoid it.)

So, the astronomers behind the new work measured the levels of heavy elements in the stars that were thought to belong to the C-19 stream. And, with the exception of one outlier, they were all quite similar, suggesting that the stream really is the disrupted remnant of a cluster. But the results also contained a surprise: a remarkably low amount of heavy elements.

The typical way of registering heavy elements is through the ratio of iron (which is only formed late in the life of massive star) to hydrogen. Hydrogen has always been the most abundant element in the Universe, while iron levels have slowly built over time. So the higher the iron-to-hydrogen ratio, the more recently the star formed.

In the case of the C-19 stream, the ratio was extremely low. So low, that the stars of C-19 would have formed prior to 3 billion years after the Big Bang, or when the Universe was only about a quarter of its current age. And they likely formed quite a bit earlier than that.

Within the Milky Way, a few hundred stars have been identified with similarly low heavy-element levels. But no cluster in which every star has such a low level has ever been seen. In fact, prior to this discovery, clusters in the Milky Way were thought to have a heavy-element floorall of them had levels above those seen in the C-19 stream. This was true despite the fact that, based on the distribution of known clusters, we'd expect about five with heavy-element levels similar to that of the C-19 stream.

The lack of other clusters suggests that most of the earliest clusters like this stream have already been disrupted to the point that they've faded into the background of Milky Way stars. Which raises the question of why the C-19 stream hasn't. That's especially unexpected given that the stream's orbit around the galactic core takes it deep inside the Milky Way, giving it plenty of chances to engage in interactions with other features that should disrupt it.

One possibility that could explain this is that the cluster originally entered the Milky Way as part of a dwarf galaxy that was swallowed. The dwarf galaxy's structure could provide a degree of protection until it became disrupted and its stars spread through the Milky Way. And, if this were true, then the cluster that gave rise to the C-19 stream would have had a large fraction of the stars present in the dwarf galaxy at the time.

Regardless of how it ends up being explained, the presence of the C-19 stream tells us things about the history of the Universe. "The very existence of C-19 proves that globular clusters must have been able to form in the lowest-metallicity environments as the first galactic structures were assembling," the researchers conclude.

Nature, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04162-2 (About DOIs).

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Stars from ancient cluster found in the Milky Way - Ars Technica