Canada Is Not Ready for Our Brexit Moment
This past week marks the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote. A decade later, the United Kingdom continues to feel the impact of economic chaos, social division, and political weakness
Canada is entering what I fear is our Brexit summer, with the upcoming Alberta referendum. But officials seem determined to ignore the real lessons of Brexit — how it was interfered with and how similar strategies are already at play here in Canada.
The reason I am so worried is that I was one of the MPs on the parliamentary investigation into the data manipulation that impacted the Brexit vote. I brought some of the key players to Parliament to testify and it was an eye-opener for me in how easy it is for digital mercenaries to upend democratic rules.
A dark constellation is forming in our political sky, and it needs to be called out.
But before I get to that, let’s look at the obvious comparisons and differences between what Prime Minister David Cameron attempted to achieve and what Premier Danielle Smith is up to.
In 2016, Conservative Prime Minister Cameron tried to appease his Tory backbench by agreeing to hold a vote on leaving the EU. They were driving an increasingly militant anti-European sentiment.
The downside of withdrawing from the EU was obvious to everyone. Common sense would prevail. Cameron would use the Brexit vote to put the matter to rest and bring the rebels into line.
In reality, he opened the door for data mercenaries and foreign psyops crews who preyed on the massive economic fault lines that had taken root in the country.
Danielle Smith is much closer to Nigel Farage than David Cameron. She built her political career pandering to extremists in the United Conservative Party. She shelved the pro-Canada petition, which would have ended this crisis, and then changed the rules to allow a separatist referendum.
That separatist referendum has been twice ruled illegal by the courts. She has now promoted a referendum on whether there should be a referendum to circumvent the courts.
In the UK, the Brexit fault lines ran straight through the post-Thatcher realm that had divided the country into clear haves and have-nots. Labour party strongholds in broken industrial and mining towns were especially susceptible.
The once impenetrable Red Wall of the progressive industrial working class had been kicked to the curb by years of Thatcherism and abandoned by Blair’s New Labour.
In Canada, the fault line of Alberta alienation has been stoked and exploited for years by right-wing politicians. Anyone who believes that the likes of Danielle Smith and Pierre Poilievre will now turn around and bring healing to a wound that they helped create is kidding themselves.
If the PM thinks that bringing his MPs to flip burgers at the Calgary Stampede will bring national peace, he needs to think again.
The key is foreign interference.
In 2016, the UK was totally susceptible to interference from foreign actors. Vladimir Putin had made the destruction of the European Union his prime strategic objective.
The Russians saw a huge opportunity in Brexit. Nigel Farage, of the Brexit campaign, was a paid contributor to Russia’s propaganda network, RT (Russia Today).
The key organizers of the Leave The EU campaign regularly briefed the Russian ambassador. It was later discovered that UK Leave activist Nathan Gill was accepting Russian money to promote their interests in the European Union.
In 2025, he was sentenced to 9 years in jail.
In Canada, the evidence of foreign interference is everywhere. CBC is reporting on active US and Russian players trying to sow division in the country. There are thousands of offshore sites creating false sites to spread disinformation. This is right out of the Brexit playbook.
As well, the notorious Internet Research Agency of Russia, which was active in Brexit, is now active in the Alberta campaign.
But what is most concerning is that we have evidence of Alberta separatists meeting with top US officials about the campaign, with discussions about a $500 million fund to help the break-up of our country.
In addition, the online space has been flooded by offshore BOTs and dark actors attempting to create division between Alberta and Canada.
In Brexit, the Leave team made use of the stolen data of millions of Facebook users to drive the Cambridge Analytica campaign.
In Alberta, we see the theft of nearly 3 million people’s personal information, with no credible steps being taken by the authorities to deal with this obvious threat to democracy.
The UK set up the referendum under the strict rules of the Election Commission. The Commission recognized two official leave groups — VoteLeave, led by Boris Johnson, and Leave EU, which is a campaign that drove the racial fears and the politics of division. The rules were that these groups could not coordinate in any way or share funds.
There was serious naivety on the part of British officials as to how the campaigns would be conducted. The Election Commission worked on the principle of gentlemen players — that since traditional parties and constituency candidates respected the rules, so too would the referendum organizers.
But this was wild-card politics, and it was winner-take-all. From the beginning of Brexit, the rules were broken.
In Canada, only a fool would believe that the oversight agencies will be willing to address interference or rule-breaking. In Alberta, the rules have been broken consistently, and the vote hasn’t even started.
Elections Alberta has little credibility. The federal government is sitting on the sidelines. As I wrote on a recent Substack, Canada’s new Foreign Influence Commissioner has not even been set up.
The government is hoping for the best.
Given the lessons of Brexit, this is both naïve and openly negligent.
The Canadian Connection
So let me get to the story of the Canadian connection to Brexit.
On June 23, 2016, Britons were stunned when the Leave vote narrowly moved ahead of the Remain vote. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The polls had predicted an easy win for Remain.
After it had all gone down, Guardian reporter Carole Cadwalladr began looking into allegations that the referendum had been interfered with by a group called Cambridge Analytica, a subsidiary of the British military contractor Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL).
Both companies were tied in some way to an obscure Canadian outfit called AIQ (Aggregate IQ) in Victoria, British Columbia. AIQ had been the recipient of a staggering amount of money funnelled to them from various pro-Brexit campaigns.
This unknown Canadian company were all over the Brexit vote, but it was all hidden behind the smoke and mirrors of a well-planned campaign.
After the vote, the UK Parliament established hearings to investigate interference. Key to the whole thing was the testimony of Canadian Christopher Wylie.
He was the most unlikely mastermind. A brilliant young gay vegan with pink hair.
When he came forth as a whistleblower, it seemed too bizarre: a brainy kid interested in fashion who teamed up with the dark prince of American fascism, a creepy British military contractor, and they were all bankrolled by a toxic tech billionaire.
A British MP on the committee described it as being like a mysterious global syndicate right out of a James Bond movie. And all roads kept leading back to a small group of Canadians working above the optometrist’s shop in Victoria.
The problem was that they were unable to force AIQ to testify as its key players — Zack Massingham and Jeff Silvester were in Canada.
As a Canadian MP, I issued a summons for them to testify before the Canadian parliament. It was the first time joint parliamentary hearings were held across two jurisdictions.
It should have been the moment for clarity and straight answers. Instead, we fell down the rabbit hole of the dark world of a British PsyOps company that had learned how to turn Facebook into the ultimate surveillance and influence weapon.
In the 2010s, Facebook was a friendly and fun tool for connecting with old schoolmates and snooping on the lives of “friends.” It was also super addictive.
Facebook made you want to pour more and more of your life onto the screen. You shared your views and whims through likes.
Likes for a friend’s graduation photos. Likes for brands. Likes for TV shows. Likes for political statements. The likes received were like endlessly reinforcing dopamine hits.
They were also digital fingerprints that you left everywhere you went online. Fingerprints that could never be smudged or erased.
If someone could weaponize that intimate knowledge, anything was possible.
British military contractor SCL figured out how to exploit the site. They ran psy-ops and disinformation campaigns. SCL had a second business stream — working on election campaigns for powerful interests in the global south.
Christopher Wylie went to work for SCL in his early twenties. He described their tactics, including gathering “kompromat” on opposing candidates, using stolen and hacked information, and running disinformation campaigns.
Some of the allegations were very dark. Channel 4 in the UK gathered video footage of top Cambridge executives bragging that they had the power to secretly inject propaganda “into the bloodstream to the internet.”
They described bribing politicians, entrapment with undercover videos and sending “very beautiful Ukrainian girls” to compromise a troublesome candidate.
Wylie was hired by SCL to analyze how to use mass datasets as a predictive tool to influence behaviour. The original datasets included electoral information, mortgage data, county records, and more. But then SCL got their hands on a motherlode of personal data on millions of people.
The information had been scraped from Facebook by Russian-American researcher Alexander Kogan. Facebook had a notoriously lax attitude toward its users’ information. Kogan set up a Facebook app on the premise of doing pop quizzes, but this portal allowed him to loot the personal files of 87 million users. It was an unprecedented data breach.
Steve Bannon was sniffing around SCL’s work and wanted in. He was the self-styled intellectual guru for the extreme right in the United States. Bannon wasn’t wasting his time on a get-out-the-vote tool. His focus was on politics as a culture war, and he wanted to bring SCL psyops operations to North America.
To accomplish this, he wanted to work through the granular evidence in the Facebook data to probe people’s fears, prejudices, and paranoia. These were things that could be exploited. This is how a culture war could be initiated. But before the weapon could be deployed, it required extensive testing.
Bannon brought in tech billionaire Robert Mercer, a major funder for many far-right groups. SCL set up a subsidiary, Cambridge Analytica, and began to test the tool.
At first, the SCL team couldn’t quite believe that the vast amount of data information that they had on people all over the world could actually be that accurate. They would draw names at random and phone the people at home to verify that the information they had on the individual was accurate, from their mortgage status to the movies they liked.
In case after case, they were hitting the bullseye. The team was giddy with amazement at what they had gotten their hands on.
SCL bragged that it had amassed 5,000 data points on every single American.
Then Bannon began testing language on race, gender and phrases such as “build the wall” and “drain the swamp.” It was all about finding the fault lines in the American psyche that could be used to drive radicalization.
Wylie gave evidence to the United States Senate that:
“[Cambridge Analytica worked to]… identify mental and emotional vulnerabilities in certain subsets of the American population and worked to exploit those vulnerabilities by targeting information designed to activate some of the worst characteristics in people, such as neuroticism, paranoia and racial biases. This was targeted at narrow segments of the population.”
Brittany Kaiser, who worked for Cambridge Analytica, stated that once they had identified the fault lines, they were ready to weaponize them to flip votes in key regions.
“We didn’t target every American equally. The bulk of our resources went into targeting those whose minds we could change. We called them persuadables. The persuadables were the ones that mattered in swing states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida. Each of these states were broken down by precinct. So, we could say there are 22,000 persuadable voters in one precinct and if we targeted them we could turn the state from blue to red.”
If they could turn 10 votes in one poll and 25 in the next through bespoke advertising that played on individual fears and insecurities, they could upend elections across the country.
Such influence campaigns weren’t noticed by pollsters because many of the people who were identified didn’t have a history of voting. But if you could get them angry enough or fearful enough to get out and vote, it would swamp unsuspecting opponents.
Under the rules, the company was limited to working for one of the two main campaigns. Publicly, that appeared to be Leave EU, as Cambridge Analytica staff worked for weeks with senior officials from this campaign. Britanny Kaiser took a “leave” from Cambridge Analytica to become Leave.EU’s director of operations.
Meanwhile, the other official campaign (VoteLeave) hired AIQ, an obscure company in Victoria, British Columbia, to handle all advertising.
How did a company from Victoria BC that nobody had ever heard of step to the front of the advertising campaign?
Christopher Wylie brought the Canadian data team into the fold. He says they were set up as an offshore part of the SCL/Cambridge Analytica operation. He described AIQ this way:
“It was …. similar to the strategies employed by tax avoidance schemes, this network of companies around the world helped Cambridge Analytica by-pass the scrutiny of electoral or data privacy regulators.”
AIQ cut their teeth in the mercenary data world of SCL/Cambridge Analytica through their promotion of the so-called murder video.
It was a horrific video of brutal violence that was shared online with the intention of terrifying Nigerian voters into rejecting a moderate Muslim presidential candidate over fears he would install Sharia law.
Wylie testified to the UK parliament:
“The videos that AIQ distributed in Nigeria with the sole intent of intimidating voters included content where people were being dismembered, had their throats cut and were bleeding to death in a ditch, being burned alive. There are incredibly anti-Islamic and threatening messages portraying Muslims as violent.”
Wylie says the nature of the work was so dark that it began to frighten him and other employees at Cambridge Analytica.
“[As a result of] the Nigeria project, I got incredibly panicked phone calls from people, because the relationship with one of the funders turned sour, several people were threatened with their lives, and they had to immediately leave the country.
My predecessor was found dead; one of my other co-workers had a massive head injury and is missing part of his skull. People do get hurt at this firm. Given that they work with Israeli private intelligence firms, who are willing to do whatever it is you want them to do if you pay them, this is why so many people… are genuinely afraid to come forward to talk about the firm, because it is that intimidating.”
Wyle testified that AIQ was a “franchise” operation of Cambridge Analytica. While internal documents listed Mr. Massingham as president of SCL Canada. In Parliament, the company denied all connections.
My attempts to clarify the relationship between the three companies went nowhere:
Q. Witness Brittany Kaiser testified that Aggregate IQ is the “exclusive digital data-engineering partner of Cambridge Analytica?” Is that true?
A. I can’t speak to that.
Q. Cambridge Analytica says, “Aggregate IQ was our exclusive digital and data-engineering partner”. Is AIQ the exclusive data and engineering partner of Cambridge Analytica?
A. No.
Q. Witness Chris Vickery says that AIQ is a data digital development team for SCL Canada and Cambridge Analytica. Is that true?
A. No.
Q. Mr. Wylie says that when he was appointed at Cambridge Analytica, they needed a Canadian office… He said that the group was set up as SCL Canada, but they had a Canadian entity, and that legal name was Aggregate IQ. Is that correct?
A. No.
Q. Mr. Wylie said one of the reasons that they set this up was that it was very useful to keep the company at arm’s length… even if behind the scenes, you’re talking back and forth and using the same underlying technology. Is that correct?
A. I don’t believe that’s correct.
Q. SCL had a phone that went directly to you, Mr. Massingham, as their head of SCL Canada. Is that correct?...
A. I only became aware of this… As I said, we’re separate companies.
By the final week of the campaign, VoteLeave had reached its advertising spending limit. They had raised a lot of money but had spent their legal share.
At this point, they transferred a staggering £625,000 to a 23-year-old fashion student named Darren Grimes, who was a volunteer on the VoteLeave campaign but also part of a two-person youth team called BELEAVE.
The money never actually went to the Grimes; instead, it was funnelled straight to AIQ.
This provided a significant war chest to drive the final days of the campaign. The question everyone was asking was how the £625,000 that was supposed to go to separate, unrelated campaigns was transferred to a mysterious company in Canada with no website and just a few Twitter followers.
Wylie testified to the British parliament that AIQ had been set up as a “proxy money laundering vehicle” for driving the break-up of the UK from the EU.
I put the question to CEO Zack Massingham:
Q. Witnesses accuse of you of being an electoral money laundering machine. That £625,000 that went directly through a marginal student’s group into your operation and then was used in the last six days of the Brexit campaign. Do you think that may have affected the result, because that’s what they’re saying in the United Kingdom?
A. I can’t speak to what effect it might have had. I only know what BeLeave asked us to do, which was to place their ads, and that’s what we did.
Dominic Cummings of the Leave EU campaign later stated that the Brexit ads were viewed 169 million times.
That’s a helluva lot of pressure on a small but key persuadable group of voters.
Any issues of illegality lie with the campaigns in the UK that funnelled money in defiance of the electoral rules. AIQ stated to the media that they had not used Facebook data or any database “improperly by Cambridge Analytica.”
Nonetheless, Facebook suspended AIQ from its platform over concerns that AggregateIQ may have improperly received FB user data.”
During my questioning round with AIQ witnesses Massignham and Silvester, I expressed my frustration with their lack of clarity.
“What I’m thinking here is that everyone else must be involved in an amazing conspiracy against you, Mr. Massingham. They’re accusing you of being a part of Cambridge Analytica, which you said you didn’t know existed...
Mr. Wylie said he helped set you up, which you said isn’t true. SCL Canada lists you as their head of Canada services, which you say is not true. You had a phone that went directly to you…
So I’m not sure why you expect us to believe that all these people are making stuff up about you when you could just explain to us… what your direct role is with SCL and Cambridge Analytica…Why are you taking the fall for these guys?”
AIQ CEO Jeff Silvester answered in just four words: “We’re not taking the fall.”
I urge you to watch the testimony:
The fall was taken by British democracy.
The Brexit campaign scored a surprising come-from-behind win with just over 51% of the votes. Those votes came from the increasingly disenfranchised working-class voters who had once rallied to the cause of Labour.
It set the pattern for the shocking win by Donald Trump just a few months later, when Cambridge Analytica vice-president Steve Bannon took charge of the Trump campaign.
In the UK, there was little consequence for those who set up advertising operations, manipulated voters and offshored work to digital mercenaries in other countries. The vote was held. The UK remained incredibly divided and weakened.
Christopher Wylie expressed his frustration to the UK Committee about how the key Leave campaigners operated:
“When you are caught in the Olympics doping, there is no debate about how much illegal drug you took or, ‘Well, he probably would have come in first anyway.’ It does not matter. If you are caught cheating, you lose your medal, because if we allow cheating in our democratic process, what about next time? What about the time after that? This is a breach of the law. This is cheating.“
This was the sign of the new age: that cheaters win.
Get ready, Canada, all the dark players will be feasting on our country this fall.
What an INCREDIBLE write up! So insightful and yet so dark. From this sane American to all sane Canadians... sending sincere wishes for your country to hold together as somehow, it feels like this could be the start of DJT's wishes to obtain his 51st state. Shame on the US if so. Maybe I'm overthinking it. Thank you, Charlie. ELBOWS UP.
Wannabe Americans are a problem but the Canadian bureaucracy has no sense of urgency as usual