A top secret Canadian military intelligence brief warned the Liberal government that digital IDs and central bank digital currencies are effective tools of authoritarian control. Juno News investigative reporter Melanie Bennet says it reads less like a warning about China and Russia and more like a description of what Canada is quietly building itself.

Bennet joined Ezra Levant on Friday's episode of The Ezra Levant Show to walk viewers through the document.

The brief, marked top secret and declassified not at Juno News's request but as a byproduct of an unrelated information-sharing requirement, was obtained after more than a year of access to information requests. It is one of 12 documents requested, meaning more may follow.

The Prime Minister's Office is believed to have received it, while the author's identity was not disclosed. The full document is available for download at Juno News.

The document warns of what it calls an "authoritarian toolkit," made from a combination of digital technologies including CBDCs, digital ID, and smart city infrastructure in the style used by China to monitor and control its population.

"As I read through it, my first impression was: this sounds like many things that Canada is implementing," Bennet said. "This is many things that Canada is actually doing."

The line that struck her most was this: a monitored citizenry will limit their own speech, knowing that authorities can monitor communications. Knowing there are escalating consequences for expressing dissent, people will modify their own behaviour. The document calls this self-censorship and describes it as the most effective form of censorship.

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"How many Canadians do we report on in the independent media who are coming to us anonymously?" she said. "They're a teacher. They're a doctor. They're a psychologist. They're afraid of speaking publicly. They are engaging in self-censorship because they know these institutions are going to come after them."

Ezra focused on the central bank digital currency warning in particular. A CBDC, he explained, is the government equivalent of cryptocurrency — but inverted in its purpose. Where Bitcoin was designed by libertarians to create a means of exchange that governments could not trace, freeze, or inflate, a CBDC gives a central authority full control over every transaction.

"Imagine if a central bank digital currency had been in place during the trucker convoy," he said. "The idea of donating to the truckers would have been impossible. The truckers themselves would have had their wallets turned off. Suddenly they couldn't buy gas. Couldn't buy food."

Bennet noted that the Bank of Canada has moved away from a full CBDC toward something it is calling a retail stable coin: a government-regulated digital currency backed by the Canadian dollar and administered through private businesses rather than centrally by government. The distinction matters less than it might appear.

"Whilst we're not going headstrong into CBDCs," she explained, "they are moving towards this stable coin." Meanwhile, the Bank of England published a research paper in July examining the "social benefits" of collecting data for CBDCs — suggesting the broader interest has not gone away.

Bennet also flagged the document's candid admission about the limits of Western credibility on this issue. The brief acknowledges that Canada and its allies cannot effectively criticize authoritarian digital control tools while implementing similar systems themselves. China and Russia, it notes, will simply point back and say: you are doing it too.

"It makes it very difficult," she said, "for Western countries to then defend this idea of liberty."