Americans are paying more attention to Canada. Should we worry?

New Democrat MP Leah Gazan probably thought she was communicating only with a small and like-minded group of Canadian NDP supporters when she rolled out a lengthy acronym during a news conference in Ottawa earlier this month.

In fact, she had wandered into the wood chipper of U.S. culture war politics.

Her use of the phrase “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” — which many Canadians would probably also struggle to decipher — became fodder for hilarity on Fox News and was mocked across the MAGAsphere. Everyone from Elon Musk to Ted Cruz chimed in with their thoughts on the matter.

It was a sign of how much things have changed that a throwaway line from an opposition backbencher in a minor Ottawa news conference could turn viral in the U.S.

The old truism that Americans know nothing about Canadian politics and care less is no longer as true as it once was — at least, not the second part.

If ever Canadians felt irked at their issues being ignored in the larger country to the south, they now have the opportunity to find out what it’s like when the U.S. takes an interest.

They may come to miss the old days of relative obscurity.

Truckers caught America’s eye

The trucker convoy in early 2022 may mark the beginning of widespread U.S. interest in Canadian domestic politics, catching the interest of President Donald Trump and rapidly becoming a cause célèbre for MAGA.

“Even prior to the trucker convoy, there was some U.S. interest in the way Canadian governments went about lockdowns, went about vaccination,” said Aengus Bridgman, director of McGill University’s Media Ecosystem Observatory. Americans were grappling with similar issues of public health versus private liberty in their own states.

The convoy went viral, inspiring Americans to donate money and drawing commentary from Trump and other MAGA figures in what was, until then, a rare instance of American emotional investment in a Canadian domestic political issue.

Once engaged, that interest never faded, says Bridgman.

“We recently saw it around the ostrich farm as well,” he said. “When there are Canadian moments where something can be weaponized or can be mobilized — and we see it sometimes around Indigenous issues, we see it sometimes around [medical assistance in dying], we see it sometimes around access to drugs — these sorts of moments will get picked up and circulated very quickly.”

Patrick Lennox, a former RCMP intelligence manager and author of the book At Home and Abroad: The Canada-U.S. Relationship and Canada’s Place in the World, says it has become normal for high-level US politicians to weigh in on those Canadian stories.

“[U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard] Lutnick was going on about Canada this week,” Lennox told CBC News. “You’re seeing more and more of it, and I think largely because Canada is such a study in contrast to the United States right now.”

But while Canada makes a good foil for right-wing politicians in the U.S., Lennox says it isn’t seen as foreign or fundamentally different.

“I think they look at us as a blue state in many ways. We get sort of the same treatment as [Gov.] Gavin Newsom does in California. We have become in many ways part of the resistance.”

Woke, weak, effeminate, oppressive Canada

In the MAGAsphere, Canada is often portrayed as a land emasculated by wokeness, conquered by Chinese Communist encroachment and Indian immigration, where free speech is suppressed and Albertans — portrayed as salt-of-the-earth ranchers and roughnecks — are desperate to escape to the embrace of the United States.

Jennifer Welsh, who heads McGill’s Max Bell School of Public Policy, says that portrayal of Canada is not too far from the vision of the U.S. national security strategy, “where U.S. allies, and in this case a close neighbour, are portrayed as having ideas and policy approaches that the far right in the United States, and the MAGA movement in particular, sees as corrosive of Western civilization.”

“We see this with the concern about our apparent turn to a woke agenda, but remember that it’s part of a broader context.”

Welsh says the U.S. government has aggressively pursued this worldview in Europe, noting Vice-President JD Vance’s recent weeklong stay in Hungary where he violated every diplomatic protocol by openly campaigning for Moscow-friendly Viktor Orban.

“In that same trip to Europe, Vance spoke with the leader of the AfD in Germany, breaking a long-standing taboo. And of course, the AfD is questioning Germany’s embrace of what is perceived to be a liberal agenda. The former U.S. secretary of Homeland Security went to Poland during their presidential election, and again urged voters in Poland to choose what she called the right candidate, which was the Trump ally.”

Welsh says the administration has also made clear its preferences in the U.K. where London Mayor Sadiq Khan is a frequent target of MAGA and Trump, who have made no secret of their support for Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage.

“It’s part of a bigger attack on U.S. allies,” Welsh said.

Expect more interference in Alberta

“The global far-right media ecosystem is very much without borders,” said Lennox. “They’re pushing these ideas as a global conglomerate, and they leverage successes in one jurisdiction to amplify opportunities in another jurisdiction.”

They didn’t meet with success in Hungary, where Orban slipped in the polls following Vance’s intervention and went down to defeat. But Vance wasn’t alone in interfering, says Lennox.

“Trump’s tweeting on Truth Social was equally open and brazen and bold, just stridently interfering in the domestic politics of that country. Should we expect that here? Absolutely. We will see that, and we will see it over the course of the summer as this referendum towards Alberta separatism starts to build.”

This is everything that you don’t want in an information environment. It’s very troubling– Aengus Bridgman, McGill University

Could Vance, or other administration figures, even try to campaign in Alberta to sway voters toward separatism? Welsh isn’t ruling it out. “

“The visits of Vance and senior U.S. officials should make us all sit up, I believe, and ask whether that’s possible in this case. We shouldn’t rule it out, given what we’ve seen and the interest that the U.S. seems to be taking in that referendum.”

Alberta looks likely to be ground zero for Americans sticking their oar into Canadian politics in the near future, if the present is any guide.

Bridgman’s investigative unit at McGill has found clear evidence of non-Canadian social media campaigns involving heavy use of AI “slopaganda” that appear to have both organization and money behind them.

“This piece of research really covers an inauthentic YouTube network,” he told CBC News. “When I say inauthentic, what I mean is that these are obviously not people who are from Alberta who are interested in the future of Alberta, but they present as Albertan, they present as coming from Canada and being interested in the future of their communities.”

Still, Bridgman says there are clues.

“There are repeated tells throughout the videos that they’re not that familiar with Canadian politics,” he said. “These individuals are talking about a country and a political context that they know almost nothing about.”

Perhaps the most shocking thing about the campaign is its scale, Bridgman says.

“They’ve amassed 40 million views in the last year, which is comparable in magnitude to the authentic conversation on YouTube by Albertans advocating for separation.”

The YouTube videos push the message that Albertans are being ripped off by Canada. They not only urge separation, but union with the United States.

“They cannot talk about it enough,” said Bridgman. “One of the videos talks about how the U.S. is going to have the 51st through 57th state. It’s not clear exactly what provinces they have in mind.”

Unclear who’s behind ‘slopaganda’

While foreign interference is often assumed to originate with state actors, Bridgman says the world of MAGA channels and influencers is perfectly capable of generating its own campaigns for its own reasons, without government input.

“What we find repeatedly is these sporadic moments of instrumentalization of Canadian politics for a domestic U.S. audience. Really, what’s going on is there is a lot more money in U.S. politics, a lot more viewers … and there is a sort of outrage gang running a very lucrative outrage machine,” he said.

“They have made their career posting things on a daily basis that ostensibly are to provide information to their viewers, but in reality are trying to inflame and highlight culture war issues and give reasons to engage with clickbaity content. And that community is ever-vigilant for this type of content.”

The outrage professionals are driven primarily by financial motives, however, and Bridgman says it’s not clear that’s the case with the YouTube campaign.

“Forty million views is a lot of views, but in monetization terms on YouTube does not represent a huge amount of money, and is unlikely to cover the cost of the operation.”

The campaign includes the use of at least two paid voice actors, as well as AI. McGill investigators tracked one of those voice actors to Pennsylvania, says Bridgman, although the individual refused to answer questions. 

“We can’t verify who’s behind this. We don’t know their objectives. But we have to take this basically as seriously as we can for an information operation. These are inauthentic accounts during a polarizing moment, trying to inflame things, lying to Canadians and Albertans and pretending to be there,” he said.

“This is everything that you don’t want in an information environment. It’s very troubling.”