A former Surrey mayor and declared mayoral candidate in the upcoming municipal election says he is calling for an immediate federal investigation into foreign interference in the upcoming elections.
In a news release issued Tuesday, Doug McCallum and his Safe Surrey Coalition Party say there is a network of several Facebook pages that appear to present themselves as local news in three Lower Mainland municipalities but are actually being run and paid for by people outside of Canada.
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“A network of at least six Facebook pages presenting themselves as local news in Surrey, Delta, and Vancouver is operated from India, funded from India, and aimed at Canadian voters one week into the pre-campaign period for the Oct. 17 election,” it said.
“This is not a Canadian operation. The people running it are in India. The money paying for it is in rupees. The payer named on the advertising is an entity at a research facility of the Government of India.”
McCallum says this is foreign interference, and when it happens federally, the Canadian government calls it a national security matter.
“It is happening in Surrey right now, and not one person in authority has said a word.”
The Safe Surrey Coalition says the advertising for the network was paid for by an entity named in Meta’s records as “ACTS at C-DAC Innovation Park, Pune.”
“C-DAC is the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, a research body of the Government of India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology,” the coalition said.
Some of the pages involved include “I Love Vancouver,” “I Love Surrey,” “I Love Delta,” and “Delta Speaks,” the press release says, all with daily posts, custom graphics, and coordinated hashtags.
“That is a sustained production operation run from abroad, not a handful of boosted posts,” it said.
The party says it is concerned that content on the Surrey pages promotes Mayor Brenda Locke, with posts that present her record on policing, gang violence, and extortion, “entirely in her own framing, pushed to Surrey audiences with no disclosure of who paid to put it there.”
CityNews has reached out to Locke’s office and Surrey Connect for comment.
McCallum says he is calling on CSIS, the RCMP, Elections BC, the Province of British Columbia, the Surrey Police Service, and the Surrey Police Board to investigate the network. As well, he is calling on Meta and TikTok to remove the pages.