Feds name task force to fight election meddling

Ottawa unveils plans to combat ‘misinformation, manipulation’ ahead of 2019 campaign

OTTAWA— The Liberal government is hoping that the combined efforts of Canada’s spies, senior public servants and a public education campaign will be enough to safeguard the coming federal election from meddling.

Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould revealed the government’s plan to protect the 2019 election from foreign, as well as domestic, disinformation and influence campaigns in Ottawa on Wednesday.

A team of five senior bureaucrats — including the clerk of the Privy Council, the national security adviser to the prime minister, and the deputy ministers of the justice, public safety, and global affairs departments — have been given the responsibility of informing Canadians of attempts to improperly influence the federal election.

Multiple agencies have been grappling with these questions for years, prompted by the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia attempted to sway the 2016 presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour. Similar allegations have been made in elections of some of Canada’s closest allies.

The government will also put up $7 million for public awareness campaigns aimed at making Canadians more resilient to propaganda and misinformation, largely in the online world.

“The strongest defence against threats to democracy is an engaged and informed public,” Gould told reporters at the National Press Building. “Citizens who recognize fraud, misinformation and manipulation when they see it online are less likely to fall victim to it.”

A permanent task force of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, including CSIS, the RCMP, and Canada’s cyber espionage agency the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), has been struck to detect foreign threats and recommend how to deal with them.

Attempts to influence Canadian domestic politics by foreign actors is nothing new. But the internet has changed the game from the spy-versus-spy Cold War era, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said.

“The old techniques of per- sonal influence are still used and abound in some circles,” Goodale, who is responsible for the RCMP as well as CSIS, told reporters.

“The big change (since the Cold War) is technology, the fact that now you don’t have to be in the same room, face-toface with the person you’re trying to influence or manipulate. You can do that by remote means, you can do that by electronic means, you can do it by a bot or a troll.”

“It’s the advent of that technology that makes things now so much more immediate, and the impact of that … is magnified many times over.”

In 2017, the CSE reported that hackers used “low sophistication” cyber attacks to attempt to influence the 2015 general election that saw the Liberals come to power.

The agency predicted that the 2019 election will see similar attempts.

One of the central questions that non-partisan public servants have been grappling with is how they could alert Canadian voters to a disinformation campaign aimed at influencing the election without appearing to influence the election themselves. The Liberal government elected to give that unenviable task to senior public servants, who will follow a “Critical Election Incident Public Protocol” to guide them in their decision to alert the public.