No evidence federal election was affected by foreign interference, commissioner says

By: Nick Murray, The Canadian Press Posted: 1:01 PM CDT Wednesday, Jun. 25, 2025 Last Modified: 6:24 PM CDT Wednesday, Jun. 25, 2025

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OTTAWA - Canada's elections commissioner said Wednesday she has no evidence to suggest the federal election result in April was affected by foreign interference, disinformation or voter intimidation — even though the volume of complaints about the campaign shot way up.

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OTTAWA – Canada’s elections commissioner said Wednesday she has no evidence to suggest the federal election result in April was affected by foreign interference, disinformation or voter intimidation — even though the volume of complaints about the campaign shot way up.

In a preliminary report, Commissioner Caroline Simard said her office received more than 16,000 complaints about the spring campaign that ended on April 28 — seven times the number of complaints received in the 2019 and 2021 elections.

And while Simard’s office said some of those numbers are due to “amplification” — multiple complaints about the same issue — the number of complaints about foreign interference, artificial intelligence, disinformation and voter intimidation was lower than her office had expected.

Commissioner of Canada Elections Caroline Simard is pictured on Parliament Hill Thursday, March 2, 2023 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

“So far, based on our initial observations and the information we have, there is no evidence to suggest that the election outcome was affected in any way,” Simard said in a news release.

She was not available for an interview Wednesday.

In a statement issued to The Canadian Press, her office said “things like elections advertising, false statements, allegations related to voting (photos of marked ballots), would all have been areas where we observed some degree of amplification.”

Simard’s office had closed about 2,330 files as of the end of April, with another 16,115 still to go.

Simard’s office said several complaints it received suggested mistaken beliefs about what is actually illegal in elections, or a misunderstanding of which section of the Canada Elections Act was broken.