The Canadian Armed Forces reprimanded soldiers who warned that an order to spy on citizens during COVID-19 could violate intelligence-gathering rules. The soldiers were right. The military punished them anyway.
Internal records and emails obtained by CBC News show that on March 11, 2020, a team called Joint Operational Effects (JOE) was ordered to create anonymous social media accounts and scour the internet for information about Canadians.
Under the direction of Col. Chris Henderson, the team produced dozens of reports between March 19 and June 5, tracking what the federal Conservative, NDP, and Bloc Québécois parties were saying about the pandemic.
The Canadian military was monitoring opposition political parties using anonymous accounts created specifically for surveillance.
Reclaim Your Digital Freedom.
Get unfiltered coverage of surveillance, censorship, and the technology threatening your civil liberties.
At least two JOE team members pushed back. They emailed their chain of command, warning that creating anonymous accounts without authorization, while working from home on personal computers, could breach intelligence directives.
One soldier wrote to Maj. John Zwicewicz on March 12, 2020: “Given the sensitivity around social media and military use I have concerns about this.”
They added: “My concern is that by creating these accounts without following proper procedure would come close to, or cross the line set out in the policy.” Another asked to go into the office because they felt it “represented a serious risk” to do the work at home.
Zwicewicz claimed a legal adviser had approved the activities and ordered the group to “cease barrack room lawyering” and get back to work. The team was formally reprimanded more than a week after raising concerns. A source told CBC News that within months, some members quit or were medically released.
The people who raised alarms about potentially illegal surveillance of Canadian citizens got punished. The people who ordered the surveillance kept their positions.
The military’s own top lawyer flagged the problem. Then-commodore Geneviève Bernatchez, the judge advocate general, warned that “this issue has a significant legal component, and…could present legal risk to the rights of Canadian citizens, but also legal risks to the institution.” She noted that, unlike overseas deployments, “the full range of domestic law” would apply, and “such operations will often directly or indirectly implicate the rights of Canadian citizens.” The command structure absorbed the warning and carried on.
A compliance assessment by the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, reported by CBC News in April 2026, found three separate military units violated intelligence-gathering rules during Operation Laser between March and July 2020.
One unit used personal laptops to trawl Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Facebook. Another produced over 50 reports on political discourse and was ordered to create accounts to “monitor key regional actors,” but “deliberately disregarded” that order and used personal accounts instead.
Six years later, the legal gap that allowed all of this remains open. The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians urged the government in 2020 to legislate rules governing what the military can collect about Canadians. Ottawa has not acted.
DND spokesperson Andrée-Anne Poulin told CBC News that “additional guidance and oversight measures were put in place to prevent a recurrence and to strengthen adherence to established rules.”
Additional guidance. Oversight measures: The standard institutional language for getting caught.
