C79
History: Canada Awakens to New Threats of Foreign Election Interference Canadian governmental concern with heightened foreign interference in elections, using nontraditional methods such as cyber, was initially prompted by the experience of close allied partners in 2016, in particular, brazen Russian interference operations targeting the US presidential election and various forms of external interference in the “Brexit” referendum in the United Kingdom. The first step taken was to mandate CSE, Canada’s cryptologic agency responsible for both foreign signals intelligence and cybersecurity matters, to study the threat and report publicly (Office of the Prime Minister 2017). The first CSE (2017) threat assessment, Cyber Threats to Canada’s Democratic Process, was released in June 2017. Two subsequent threat assessment reports have been released on a biannual basis. The findings of these public threat assessments are discussed below. The Canadian government also proceeded to create an action plan, “The Plan to Protect Canadian Democracy,” which was announced at a press conference with three ministers in January 2019 (Gould, Sajjan and Goodale 2019). The action plan focused on four objectives: → enhancing citizen awareness; → improving readiness on the part of the “electoral ecosystem” to contend with foreign interference efforts; → generating expectations for social media platforms to take action to combat disinformation; and → combatting foreign interference, including building strong awareness of threats in cooperation with foreign partners.
Canadian National Security Approaches to Protecting Elections from Foreign Interference 79 The German BSI (Federal Office for Information Security) is a counterpart agency to CSE and its component Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. The BSI maintains a website at www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Topics/topics_node. html. While the BSI posts technical cybersecurity bulletins, it does not produce public cyberthreat assessments.
Wesley Wark 60
Special Report
Most of the action plan was domestically focused, but Canada pursued some new multilateral initiatives to enhance its capacity to defend the democratic process and combat foreign interference during elections.
