How prepared is Canada for foreign election interference?

While much of the dialogue around foreign interference in the country over the past two years has focused on foreign governments such as China, Russia, and India, there are fresh concerns about the kinds of interference that might be coming from south of the border, particularly from actors like Elon Musk.

The tech billionaire and head of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency has openly meddled in European politics, backing parties like the far-right Alternative for Germany party. He addressed their campaign rally in January, live-streamed his chat with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), and repeatedly used it to spread misinformation and amplify the AfD during Germany’s election campaign.

Musk has also been vocal in his support for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and has the tools to skew the algorithms on X to present a view that shows more support for Poilievre than might actually exist within the electorate. Concerned about potential interference, in January NDP MP Charlie Angus called on Elections Canada to launch an investigation into Musk’s conduct.

In his letter to the chief electoral officer, Angus wrote that X "serves as a pathway for Russian misinformation and the rise of hate and threats in Canada. Given X's huge power, any overt efforts by Mr. Musk to support a particular party or leader could easily impact our electoral integrity."

It all begs the question: Are Canadian laws around foreign interference fit for purpose when it comes to this sort of activity?

“The thing we should focus on in the current context is following the money,” says Eve Gaumond, a lawyer and PhD student at Université de Montreal who studies the intersection of law and technology.

“We don’t have a perfect landscape, and we don’t have anything that fits the current situation perfectly, but we have some small pieces that we could tweak or try to use to make an impact.”

In a recent opinion piece she penned for CBA National in response to calls to rip up Musk’s Canadian passport, Gaumond deemed that to be wholly undemocratic and instead proposed solutions of what could be done.

While she says the Canada Elections Act can work in the current context, it would be hard to prove that Musk invested money to promote some content over others. The Media Ecosystem Observatory, a partnership with McGill and the University of Toronto that’s been monitoring information ecosystems and applying social science techniques to them since 2019, has found that conservative content is being boosted by the algorithm. However, there is a question as to whether that’s because conservative users interact more with Musk, whose content is automatically promoted.

“Unduly influencing requires an investment of money, and he clearly has invested money in tweaking his algorithms,” Gaumond says.

Any kind of investigation would be hard-fought because it would involve commercial secrets. However, she suspects it could be easier to equate the practice of users buying a premium subscription’s “blue checkmark” to advertising because any user with one has their posts and replies amplified.

“They have increased visibility, and it fits the definition of political advertising under the Canada Elections Act,” Gaumond says.

At the Media Ecosystem Observatory, Director Aengus Bridgman says two incidents in the last year caught their attention. The first was an incident where bots promoted a Conservative event in Kirkland Lake, and the second was the Tenet media scandal in the U.S., where its content producers were found to have been paid by Russia.

Since the federal election began in late March, the Observatory has found a few noteworthy incidents, one of which was a Facebook group that seemed to have been purchased and renamed to advocate for 51st statehood.

“It used to be a buy-and-sell group, but now it’s advocating for racial purity and 51st statehood,” Bridgman says.

“It appears to be isolated and more of a quirk of the information space. It’s not good, but we consider it to be moderate in terms of scope and scale.”

Gaumond says the failure to pass Bill C-65 before the election, which sought to amend the Canada Elections Act, meant the loss of provisions addressing untraceable ad buys and a prohibition on political parties, candidates and a range of other electoral participants from accepting contributions in cryptocurrency or via pre-paid payment products given the difficulty in tracing them. Payments of the sort could allow donors to skirt existing contribution rules.

“It would have made a difference,” she says.

There are currently dormant Facebook groups up for purchase on crypto websites, and whoever buys them benefits from their thousands of members to promote content to.

“This is extremely hard to trace at the moment,” Gaumond says.

“The same is true of advertising by foreign entities, who are not allowed to fund third parties, but I’m sure we’ll see some funding through crypto, particularly given the proximity the right-wing ecosystem has with the crypto world.”

Bot accounts on X have become very aggressive about Canadian politics, with many pushing conspiracy theories. Bridgman says they’re keeping an eye on those and have seen a few blocked since the start of the election campaign. While that's good to see, it removes them as signposts for researchers to see what is coming down the pipe.

There has also been an upswing in accounts pushing falsehoods about Prime Minister Mark Carney having ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including unauthentic images likely generated by AI. Bot accounts and well-known Canadian accounts alike have spread those.

“None of this is good, but none of it is rising to the level that we would be really concerned about during an election,” Bridgman says.

“They are indicative of the state of the information environment, but they are not threatening to the election in a meaningful way.”

He says the use of foreign interference allegations to bludgeon opponents politically has become rampant and is not unique to one political party.

On April 7, for example, the federal Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force monitoring for foreign interference found Chinese accounts on WeChat promoting both positive and negative stories about Carney. The Conservatives immediately cited that as “proof” China was trying to interfere on Carney’s behalf. At the same time, there have been accusations that India tried to interfere in Poilievre’s 2022 leadership campaign.

Bridgman says the good news is that the Canadian public is more aware of issues of foreign interference, which helps overall resilience. And while the journalism community has come a long way in grappling with the issue, political parties have not.

“In many ways, this is one of the vulnerabilities,” he says.

“If you are going to politicize this issue at every opportunity to use it for political advantage, it does make it very difficult to have a conversation as a country about our information space when there’s a lot of finger-pointing, all of the time.”

But while there is more awareness, the lack of data transparency, including around information from platforms about user networks, is a major problem. Bridgman says it’s instructive that following the Kirkland Lake bot incident, four MPs from ridings in Northern Ontario wrote to Musk for information about the scope and scale of the issue and received no response.

“If that is the degree of transparency and information Canadian lawmakers can expect, there will likely be no data shared during the election,” he says.

“A bad case situation would be like the Romanian election, where TikTok played a major and decisive role in the first round of their presidential election and has been linked to Russian interference.”

Bridgman says this is unlikely to happen in the Canadian context, but it is possible. That potential, combined with the lack of data transparency, should be concerning and something Parliament turns its attention to.

Some examples of transparency include the Meta Ad Library, which allows users to search the ads running across Meta’s platforms and track the spending on those ads.

While tools like this should be maximized wherever possible, overall, Bridgman says transparency has declined across all platforms since 2021, including data on who is sharing or amplifying content.

“One of the things about the information space the Hogue Commission (on foreign interference) recognized, and that our security services are being dragged into, is that transparency is what works,” he says.

“Visibility, clarity and context in the information space are necessary, and if you hide things, we’re going to have a problem.”

Errol Mendes, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, says that although the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) would have at least forced a “duty of responsibility” on social media platforms to report their activities had it passed, he felt its provisions were too weak.

“I like the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which requires very stringent reporting and auditing to find out what is happening behind the scenes in terms of algorithms,” he says, adding he doesn’t think passing C-63 would have affected that much.

“Once a new parliament is in place, it’s time to rethink that whole area. Even though I’m regarded as a civil libertarian, I think we’ve pushed that freedom of expression agenda too far.”

For Mendes, part of the issue for Canada is that there is nothing in the current framework for digital transparency.

“This is one of the biggest issues that Canada has to come to grasp with after the election because we’re stuck between the free-for-all in the United States and the way the European Union has handled it by putting a responsibility on the platforms to come up with very robust monitoring systems and auditing reports.”

He points out that if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, the EU could levy fines of up to six percent of a company’s annual revenues, which could run into the billions.

Gaumond hopes that if we learned anything from Canada’s 2019 and 2021 elections, it’s that when things are awful in the U.S., we can be surprised by how resilient the Canadian election ecosystem is.

“It’s getting worse, there’s no doubt about it,” she says. “But it won’t be as dire as what we’re currently feeling.”