Foreign attempts to undermine the 2025 federal election were detected, but when Canadians went to the polls, they freely and fairly exercised their right to vote, according to two reports issued Thursday.
On Thursday, the federal government published a “retrospective report” on the implementation of the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol (CEIPP) panel during Canada’s 45th general election, as well as the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) task force’s “after-action” report on the April 28 vote.
Over the course of the election period “instances of foreign interference” were observed, “such as transnational repression, inauthentic and coordinated amplification of online content, and online threats such as scams and disinformation,” federal officials said.
Though, “these efforts were judged not to have affected the integrity of the election,” as they were characterized as “small scale,” and in some instances, difficult to attribute to a foreign actor.
A few of these instances were discussed openly – with varying degrees of detail in an effort to balance disclosure and amplifying interference efforts–during weekly briefings the task force responsible for monitoring possible threats to Canada’s federal elections held during the campaign.
For example, in early April, SITE came forward to say it had observed an “information operation” from a Chinese news account with links to the People’s Republic of China, on the social media platform WeChat, targeting Prime Minister and Liberal Leader Mark Carney.
The task force shared during that briefing that it noticed large spikes of “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” before the campaign and during the writ period, and that the Liberal Party of Canada had been briefed.
At the time, SITE said the case was contained and not “affecting Canadians’ abilities to make an informed decision about their vote,” but the organization – which was criticized for not speaking out about interference efforts during the 2019 and 2021 campaigns – felt it was important for voters to be aware.
Similarly, SITE went public just a week before the vote about a “digital transnational repression” campaign against Conservative candidate Joe Tay in the riding of Don Valley North, Ont. In this case, the task force said it “observed inauthentic and coordinated amplification of content related to the bounty and arrest warrant against Mr. Tay as well as content related to his competence for political office.”
Beyond these instances, officials Thursday cited activity by the Russian Federation, and “actively monitored for potential foreign interference related activities” from the governments of India and Pakistan, but offered no indication that specific meddling efforts were observed from those two countries.
Further, “no cyber incidents directed at the integrity of the elections were detected” during the campaign, and violent extremist actors “were not observed engaging in any threat-related activity directed at the election.”
That said, citing the nature of the communication environment making it “probably impossible” to keep track of everything, an official said in French on Thursday that there are likely “things that we were unaware of.”
Officials say Canadians should “remain vigilant,” even outside of election times, as threat actors may also meddle in political processes between votes.
Thursday’s topline findings about meddling attempts during the last campaign echo findings made in mid-September in a separate report from Elections Canada on the 45th general election.
That report stated that while “many false or misleading narratives arose” throughout the campaign, the agency did not detect “any evidence of foreign interference, criminal activity, cyber security incident or coordinated disinformation campaign impacting the administration of the event.”
In addition to the list of lessons learned and recommendations to further bolster Canada’s resilience to foreign meddling contained in the reports released since the election concluded, the federal government said today it is also still “carefully considering” additional suggestions made previously by the foreign interference commission, and other intelligence bodies.
