The former mayor of Surrey, B.C., is calling for a federal investigation into what he describes as foreign interference in British Columbia’s upcoming municipal elections. Doug McCallum and his Safe Surrey Coalition say a network of Facebook pages is attempting to influence municipal voters before the October elections in Surrey, Vancouver and Delta. “This is foreign interference in a Canadian election,” said McCallum, who plans to run for mayor of Surrey again this fall. “Not influence. Not marketing. Interference.” The coalition accused at least six Facebook pages of posing as local B.C. news sites while their operators are actually overseas. “This is not a Canadian operation,” the coalition said. “The people running it are in India. The money paying for it is in rupees.” The group alleges that advertising records from Meta, the owner of Facebook, identify the payer and beneficiary of the pages as a computer research organization linked to the Indian government. “Ottawa calls this a national security matter when it happens federally,” McCallum said. “It is happening in Surrey right now and not one person in authority has said a word.” When Meta blocked Canadian news content on Facebook and Instagram in August 2023, it opened the floodgates to a wave of community pages that frequently repurpose or aggregate reporting from legitimate news organizations, without linking to or crediting the original sources. The coalition alleges the pages are part of a sustained, well-resourced campaign to influence the upcoming elections, citing daily posts, custom graphics, branded videos and co-ordinated messaging across the sites. “You do not spend years building a false Surrey audience by accident,” McCallum said. “It was built to be used. It is being used now.” The group is calling on the federal RCMP to investigate the alleged network, and says the B.C. government must state publicly whether the upcoming municipal elections will be monitored for foreign interference operations. The RCMP and the B.C. government did not immediately respond to requests for comment. This story will be updated when responses are received.
