As foreign actors work to influence Canada’s election, how safe is your vote?

When Hong Kong democracy activist Henry Chan decided to run for a Saskatchewan Party nomination in his hometown of Saskatoon, he didn’t expect to come out of the experience wondering if he’d been a target of foreign meddling.

Chan says he was approached at his meet-and-greet event by someone he later discovered on social media may have ties to the Chinese Communist Party. In a private conversation, the person asked him “what he was prepared to do for the Chinese people,” he said. They offered support for his nomination in return.

Chan didn’t take him up on it. He didn’t win the nomination, nor did the Saskatchewan Party even win this seat in the legislature in last year’s provincial vote.

After watching his campaign struggle to get party officials to crack down on what they felt were voting irregularities at the nomination meeting, Chan was left with lingering questions about the integrity and security of the entire process.

“In a lot of these nominations there are no rules at all. It is basically a gong show,” Chan told CBC News. Worried that more than just local politics may have been in play, he contacted public safety authorities.

Attempts at foreign meddling

Once a week during this federal election campaign, reporters in Ottawa are briefed by top security and intelligence officials on an extraordinary topic: Whether the vote they’re covering remains safe from foreign interference.

The officials say they’re detecting efforts to sway Canadians’ political opinions, including an orchestrated push on Chinese-language social media to “pollute” the digital environment with both positive and negative takes on Liberal Leader Mark Carney.

The weekly briefings are a first for a federal election campaign. And this race comes just weeks after Justice Marie-Josée Hogue made 51 recommendations to secure Canada’s elections from interference.

Her investigation into the 2019 and 2021 elections did not conclude foreign interference attempts were enough to sway their outcomes — but she wrote that meddling, misinformation and disinformation would only increase in future contests.

All this has Canadians wondering how safe their vote is this election.

“Attempts to interfere are just that: attempts,” Bridget Walshe from Communications Security Establishment Canada, Canada’s information technology security agency, said at a briefing earlier this month.

The point of these updates isn’t to spark unfounded fears of this vote being manipulated by hostile foreign actors, it’s the opposite. If more voters understand the threats, officials hope they’ll be savvy enough to spot fake news before it shapes their political views.

That awareness may be especially important this election, with Hogue’s recommendations largely not yet in place and changes proposed by the chief electoral officer to strengthen the integrity of Canada’s democracy yet to pass in Parliament.

WATCH | SITE Task Force says WeChat campaign spread messages about Carney: 

SITE says Beijing-linked account targeting Carney on WeChat

Canada’s Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force says Liberal Leader Mark Carney has been the focus of articles spread by Youli-Youmian, the most popular news account on WeChat that is linked to the Chinese Communist Party’s central political and legal affairs commission.

Fake news in swing ridings?

Gloria Fung’s concerned about the slow pace of these fixes. She’s an advocate for democracy in Hong Kong and the convenor of a coalition of human rights groups who’ve lobbied for years to set up a foreign influence transparency registry in Canada. 

Fung worries that Canadian political parties remain naive about how easy it is for consular officials and other proxies to set up networks capable of penetrating their campaigns and manipulating opinions.

“I have already seen signs of … fake news being spread around in some swing ridings, which are the target ridings of the Chinese Communist Party,” she said. “I have warned the Ministry of Public Safety and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about this, but I don’t think they have taken it seriously enough.”

She says her network was the first to spot a co-ordinated disinformation campaign on WeChat during the last election that targeted then MP Kenny Chiu and other Conservative candidates who’d criticized human rights abuses in China. 

Hogue’s inquiry probed this disinformation and agreed it could have influenced some voters — although it’s unclear whether that actually cost Conservatives seats in 2021.

Lack of transparency fuels suspicions

Hogue’s inquiry also flagged party leadership races as easier to penetrate than general elections. Intelligence disclosures warned of meddling attempts in the party races that picked both Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in 2022 and Carney earlier this year.

Two Indian Canadian candidates were disqualified from the Liberal leadership race for unspecified rule violations: Chandra Arya and Ruby Dhalla. In Dhalla’s case, the party alleged her campaign’s activities may have amounted to foreign interference had they occurred during a federal campaign. Dhalla denies any wrongdoing.

Balpreet Singh, a lawyer who represented the Sikh Coalition at the public inquiry, fears the Liberal Party hasn’t learned from the Hogue Commission. He represents Canadians who strongly disagree with these two candidates’ views on Indian politics and never supported their candidacies.

Still, Singh wishes Liberals were more transparent about why they were disqualified. 

“What does that say about racialized candidates in general?” he said. The secrecy “plays towards these … racist tropes that we’re seeing that these aren’t real Canadians.”

“It really would have been better had the reasons been made clear.”

Education, not censorship

After the U.K.’s Brexit vote and the 2016 U.S. election, Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault said Elections Canada realized it needed to start working with security partners to make sure election integrity isn’t jeopardized.

Perrault told CBC News that those events taught him not all Canadians understand concepts like the principle of a secret ballot.

As a pilot project, Elections Canada hired Punjabi, Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking educators to run civics education programs, with new materials in more languages to help voters understand the safeguards in place to protect the integrity of the vote.

Fighting disinformation, however, is not something Perrault believes is appropriate for his role. Rather than bolstering public confidence in the neutrality of his agency, attempts to regulate political speech could arouse suspicions of bias.

“Weighing in on the accuracy of information regarding a candidate, a party or a platform would very, very severely undermine my credibility,” he said.

“I think it’s something that I cannot undertake without putting in peril the legitimacy of my office.”