Federal election will attract foreign interference

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/03/2025 (253 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With Mark Carney freshly minted as Liberal Party leader, an unofficial election countdown has begun. And not only among opposition groups. Foreign actors will also be eyeing the chance to advance their interests during the contest to form Canada’s next federal government.

Ottawa’s recently concluded public inquiry into foreign interference outed China, Russia, India and Iran as having a history of meddling in Canada’s democratic processes. Their main tactic: sowing disinformation to poison the information spaces that voters rely on.

Such viral falsehoods represent an existential threat to Canadian democracy, wrote the inquiry’s commissioner, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue. “If we do not find ways of addressing it,” her final report reads, “misinformation and disinformation have the ability to distort our discourse, change our views and shape our society.”

Artificial intelligence provides bad actors with a powerful new tool to do so. It enables the industrial-scale creation of high quality, multi-modal content — text, images and video — that can deftly disguise propaganda. A report released earlier this month by Canada’s main cyber intelligence agency predicts China, Russia and Iran will all stage AI-powered disinformation and hacking operations in the hopes of roiling voter perceptions.

Their motivations vary. Moscow wants to undermine Western support for Ukraine’s defence. Tehran would like Israel shamed for its destruction of Gaza. And Beijing wants the lifting of tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle imports, among other things.

India could seek to tamper with candidates and polls as well, given New Delhi’s campaign of transnational repression targeting Sikh nationalists on Canadian soil. The Globe and Mail already reported in late February that recent Liberal leadership candidate Ruby Dhalla was sent a list of questions that raised concerns about the possible foreign interference by India. Dhalla denied the reports but was subsequently disqualified over campaign finance irregularities.

And while there’s a low probability of foreign efforts altering electoral outcomes, that isn’t necessarily the objective.

Rather, the goal is to perpetuate the slow-burn degradation of Canada’s liberal democracy from within.

This feeds into a broader ongoing mission of the loose, yet growing alliance of autocracies globally. Mainly, to covertly aggravate confusion, animosity and dysfunction within open societies and erode public trust in government — therefore softening the international system up for authoritarianism.

In a sign of how upside-down the world has become, that appears, in essence, to be the foreign policy of Washington under Donald Trump.

“We are facing a president whose first step is to tear up all those years of economic co-operation to either intimidate Canada or even turn it into a vassal state of the U.S.,” University of Calgary political scientist Rob Huebert argued in February, as the second Trump administration’s expansionist impulses began to emerge.

Elon Musk’s weaponization of X, formerly Twitter, as a far-right megaphone heightens the danger. The world’s richest man — and Trump’s most important ally — now routinely wields his platform and his nearly 220 million followers to normalize extreme rhetoric and MAGA ideals. Several lawmakers in Britain and Germany received waves of online harassment this year after condemning Musk’s endorsement of ethnonationalist activists and parties in their countries.

It’s almost guaranteed Musk will wade into Canada’s election at some point. Meanwhile, a legion of his faithful keyboard warriors will likely keep pushing the imperial fantasy of Canada becoming America’s 51st state.

Other social media companies across the board have been scaling back their own content safeguards as well. Last August, Meta dropped its CrowdTangle tool, which helped researchers, journalists and others uncover patterns of false and manipulated information on Facebook. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg then announced in January that Facebook would be the latest platform to cut ties with third-party fact-checking groups.

Snapchat and Discord have reduced their trust and safety teams by between 20 and 30 per cent, a researcher at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University told security outlet Defense One ahead of U.S. presidential elections last fall. Elon Musk’s gutting of X’s content moderation staff is well known. As is the aversion of both TikTok and Telegram to vetting posts on their platforms.

In her final report, Justice Hogue criticized Canada’s government agencies for failing to properly communicate foreign interference threats to the public. This must change. Canada should emulate the sophisticated state capacity to combat disinformation that exists in other nations, such as Sweden.

But the ultimate defence against foreign interference remains for voters to take their civic duties seriously. This includes voting for candidates based on the policies they support. And critically engaging sources of information that lead to that decision.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based political risk analyst, and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.