MEDDLING IN DEMOCRACY
Canada’s intelligence community has identified foreign actors attempting to directly influence the upcoming federal election campaign
OTTAWA — Canada’s intelligence community has identified foreign actors attempting to directly influence the upcoming federal election campaign, a Toronto Star and BuzzFeed News investigation has learned.
Canada’s domestic spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), said Tuesday that “threat actors” have already launched attempts to sway voters ahead of the Oct. 21 federal election.
And the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the country’s cyber-defence agency, has briefed senior political staff of one federal party about “covert and overt” attempts to influence the campaign.
CSIS has also been involved in those discussions.
The agencies would not reveal the exact nature of the attempts to influence but said the scope of “foreign interference activities can be broad,” including statesponsored or influenced media, hacking and traditional spy operations.
“Threat actors are seeking to influence the Canadian public and interfere with Canada’s democratic institutions and processes,” Tahera Mufti, a spokesperson for CSIS, wrote in an emailed statement.
“For example, over the years (CSIS) has seen multiple instances of foreign states targeting specific communities here in Canada, both in person and through the use of online campaigns.”
A senior government source said that diaspora communities are being targeted by foreign actors in an attempt to sway the election’s outcome. The source, who has direct knowledge of Canada’s efforts to safeguard the federal election, was granted anonymity to speak frankly about ongoing national security issues.
While national security sources had previously said Canadian political parties have been targeted by sophisticated state-sponsored hacking campaigns, the motive for those campaigns was not publicly linked to attempts to meddle with the election.
Then on Friday, CSE confirmed it is briefing Canada’s major political parties on “covert and overt foreign interference activity” aimed at influencing Canadian voters — although the agency stopped short of publicly confirming such campaigns have already been detected.
The briefings included select security-cleared political staff and discussions around unclassified and classified material, the agency said.
Unclassified material would be information already in the public domain, while classified would be intelligence gathered by Canada’s spies or security partners.
The federal political parties were briefed so that they can “strengthen internal security practice and behaviours,” the agency wrote in a statement.
CSE refused to discuss the nature of any specific threat — or who may be behind it. But the Canadian government currently has strained relationships with some of the dominant players in cyber-warfare and espionage.
They include China, with Beijing demanding the release of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, holding two Canadians in detention on spying allegations and sharply restricting Canadian agricultural exports.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday he had “a number of conversations” with Chinese President Xi Jinping about the detained Canadians — former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor — at the recent G20 meeting in Osaka, Japan.
“This is an issue we take extremely seriously,” Trudeau told reporters in Toronto. “I had a number of conversations with President Xi directly on this and the larger issue of Canada-China relations.”
Other well-known cyber-players — Russia, Saudi Arabia and India — have also had tense relations with Ottawa.
How seriously Canadian political parties are taking those threats is an open question.
“While the Liberal Party of Canada does not comment on specific security precautions, our party takes these considerations very seriously,” party spokesperson Parker Lund wrote in an email.
“Due to the classified nature of the briefings (with CSE), we cannot confirm anything we’ve heard within the briefings,” wrote Cory Hann, the Conservative party’s director of communications.