Cabinet to focus on election laws
Liberal retreat will look at ways to beef up bill to stop foreign election interference
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his newly shuffled cabinet will focus squarely on next year’s election at a twoday retreat this week — including a hard look at the very laws governing elections.
Last spring the Liberals introduced Bill C-76, aimed at preventing foreign interference in elections and regulating thirdparty advocacy groups, as well as undoing a number of controversial measures passed by the previous Tory government.
But insiders say the Liberals now want to beef up the bill, which was being studied by the procedure and House affairs committee when Parliament broke for the summer.
Among other things, the government wants to do more to ensure foreign actors or money aren’t involved in elections, require more transparency for political messaging on social media and prevent political parties from setting up ostensible advocacy groups to support them and help skirt spending limits.
Ministers, who will be in Nanaimo, B.C., on Wednesday and Thursday, plan to hear from experts on securing elections against cyberthreats, including Taylor Owen, a professor of digital media and global affairs at the University of British Columbia.
Owen co-authored a Public Policy Forum paper, which proposed options the government could adopt to prevent the use of social media to manipulate election results and spread disinformation and hate that erodes democratic discourse.
Among the options:
• Require publishers of online content to identify themselves;
• Make internet companies legally liable for the content that appears on their platforms;
• Require platforms to clearly identify “bots,” automated accounts used to amplify messages;
• Reintroduce a non-criminal remedy to respond to hate speech, along the lines of the anti-hate provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act, repealed in 2013 amid concerns it muzzled free speech;
• Require much greater transparency for political advertising on digital media;
• Design a “meaningful” way for Canadians to consent to the collection and use of their individual data.
Those proposals go much further than C-76. The bill would ban foreign entities from spending money to influence elections and prohibit anyone from knowingly selling election advertising space to foreign entities.