Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says he is closely monitoring the impending ban on TikTok in the United States, noting he had ordered his caucus to avoid using the app over concerns about Chinese espionage.
In April 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that would ban new TikTok downloads from app stores unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance, divests itself of the short-video streaming platform. While TikTok has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to block the law, with a ruling still pending, the ban is set to take effect on Jan. 19.
“I'll be following the decision in the United States very carefully,” Poilievre said during an unrelated press conference on Jan. 16 in Delta, B.C.
“I’ve already ordered all of our Conservative MPs, senators, and staff to stay away from TikTok altogether, to stop using it because it risks infiltration, espionage, and manipulation by the hostile regime in Beijing,” he added.
Ottawa banned TikTok on all government-issued mobile devices in February 2023, citing security concerns. The ban followed recommendations from Canada’s chief information officer who determined the app posed “an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security.”
Ottawa also launched a review of TikTok Canada in September 2023. Under the Investment Canada Act, all foreign direct investments in the country are subject to a national security review, including the establishment of new businesses or takeovers of existing ones by non-Canadians.
David Vigneault, former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), had perviously warned that TikTok users’ data “is available” to the Chinese regime. Concerns about TikTok’s data security are rooted in Chinese national intelligence laws, which require Chinese citizens and organizations, including private companies, to support the regime’s intelligence collections.
A senior official at TikTok previously confirmed to a parliamentary committee that ByteDance has access to TikTok user data. David Lieber, TikTok’s head of privacy public policy for the Americas, made the comments in testimony before the House of Commons ethics committee on Oct. 18, 2023.
In November 2024, the federal government ordered TikTok to wind up its business in Canada, prompting the company to file documents in Federal Court on Dec. 5, 2024, seeking to overturn the order to cease operations. Though it’s ordering the company to cease operations, Ottawa has said that it will not block Canadians’ access to the app.
TikTok said in its emergency application to block the U.S. law in 2023, that it had roughly 170 million monthly U.S. users who uploaded more than 5.5 billion videos, generating more than 13 trillion views. Half of these views occurred outside the United States. In the same year, U.S. users viewed content from abroad more than 2.7 trillion times.
The app has also seen a growing number of users in Canada, particularly among youth. In a 2023 briefing note, Public Safety Canada cited a report from The Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University, which found that 26 percent of Canadians who have access to the internet had a TikTok account as of September 2022, with higher adoption among younger age groups—76 percent are users aged 18 to 24.
Promoting TikTok to teenagers is part of the Chinese Communist Party’s “unrestricted warfare” strategy, according to a report published last December by the House of Commons Canada-China committee. This strategy involves a “no rules” approach to targeting Western adversaries, which includes a range of efforts: from the distribution of fentanyl to expansionist projects in the South China Sea and the cross-continental Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.
