McCarthyism, Eh?

 

'Loss of Ukraine' blame game starts in Canada, with journalist in the crosshairs of Kyiv and Canadian politician who vowed a huge victory over Russia

On Thursday, the Canadian House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security heard from a right-wing diplomat-turned-politician and two “disinformation experts” that Ottawa needs to get “more serious” about exposing alleged Russian information operations in Canada. The politician, Chris Alexander, a former Conservative MP and minister in Stephen Harper’s government, stole the show by claiming that the KGB recruited award-winning Ottawa Citizen journalist David Pugliese at the end of the Cold War.

So far, Alexander’s “bombshell,” ostensibly based on a small collection of Ukrainian KGB documents, hasn’t made the splash that he hoped for. As Simon Miles, an assistant professor at Duke University, explained to Canada’s Global News, “Nothing in these documents clearly says that this individual was even approached, or certainly says that approach was successful. All they do is say this is something worth exploring.” Chris Alexander, however, presented the documents as proof that the KGB recruited Pugliese decades ago, with the implication that he’s been a Moscow-backed traitor to Canada ever since.

Alexander has apparently been trying to take down Pugliese for over a year, but this parliamentary witness, with immunity to say whatever he wanted in that setting, also had bigger fish to fry. He not only suggested that Pugliese is a high-level Russian agent, responsible for helping to prevent Canada from making the military commitments necessary for Ukraine to win the war, but that this veteran journalist is just the tip of an iceberg of “Russian information assets,” who apparently form the vanguard of Moscow’s fifth column in Canada. With these “revelations,” Alexander called for a rapid Canadian government mobilization to win the information war, and “end the impunity with which Russia has operated in Canada.” As he said, “Russian active measures” are an important reason why “we’ve still not committed fully to defeating this aggressor or to Ukraine’s victory.”

This hatchet job seems to have been at least partially motivated by revenge for Pugliese’s articles about Mriya Report, a pro-Ukraine charity founded by a Canadian military officer. In a recent podcast interview, David Pugliese shared that in the last year or two, several journalists from the Globe & Mail, in addition to himself, were all accused of being “paid Russian agents” by a board member of this charity.  (more...)

McCarthyism, Eh?