Elections chief to talk about interference

OTTAWA— Should political parties hold back dirt on their rivals if that information came from a hacked source? Canada’s elections chief wants to start that conversation. Speaking to MPs on Thursday, Stéphane Perrault said he plans to meet with federal parties to discuss how they can help ensure the integrity of the 2019 election.

“What happens if a party receives a tantalizing offer about hacked information (about) an adversary party? Are they going to jump on that offer or are they going to agree not to share it?” Perrault said. “We have to work with parties and what they can do, because we all have a shared interest in the integrity of the electoral process.”

Perrault was speaking to the House of Commons access to information, privacy and ethics committee, which has spent months examining the fallout from Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The study has often strayed from the specifics of how 87 million Facebook users’ data was purloined for political manipulation schemes to more general threats facing Canada’s next election. For almost a decade, Perrault said, the agency has had a team assessing threats to the integrity of federal elections.

The past few years has likely kept them busy, as the U.S. has been unravelling Russian meddling in the 2016 election that brought Donald Trump to power. It may seem unlikely that Canada’s partisans would hold back information that could damage their rivals, especially with both the Liberals and Conservatives promising a bitter electoral battle next year.

But Elizabeth Dubois, a University of Ottawa professor who researches media manipulation and political uses of social media, said it’s in the parties’ self-interests to do so.