China, Russia, India will likely try to interfere in federal election, task force sayson March 25, 2025 at 10:00 am

Hostile threat actors will be using more sophisticated methods than in the 2021 election that will be even harder to detect, according to Canadian security officials

CSIS Deputy Director, Operations, and Chair of the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force Vanessa Lloyd speaks during a news conference in Ottawa on Monday, Mar 24, 2025. Photo by Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — China, Russia and India can and will try to covertly and illegal influence the ongoing federal election using more sophisticated methods than in 2021 that will be even harder to detect, according to top Canadian security officials.

On the full first day of the campaign, the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) task force laid out some of the top state foreign interference threats to the federal election.

Vanessa Lloyd, deputy director of CSIS and the chair of the SITE task force, said that:

People’s Republic of China officials and their proxies will likely use both overt and covert tools like artificial intelligence to deceptively target Chinese Canadians to promote its views or suppress criticism.
The Indian government both can and will likely attempt to interfere in the elections using its networks of allies and proxies in Canada to “assert its geopolitical influence” and meddle in democratic processes.
Russia, which has built sizeable influence networks through social media and (real and fake) news websites, will likely use them to amplify its government’s views and manipulate information directed at Canadians.
Even the Government of Pakistan might try to combat India’s growing global influence all the while promoting its own interests during the election.

What’s for certain is that the rudimentary techniques that hostile threat actors used against Canadians in 2021 have been honed and further tested, making them even more dangerous and hard to spot.

“Most threat actors remain likely to conduct threat activities and have likely adapted their tradecraft to further conceal their foreign interference activity, making it even more challenging to detect,” said Lloyd.

In her final report published in late January, Foreign Interference inquiry head Marie-Josée Hogue found that foreign interference tainted some ridings in the 2021 federal election but ultimately did not sway the result.

She also called on the federal government to significantly bolster its defences against the growing threat of foreign interference before the imminent federal election.

Of her 51 recommendations, roughly half required legislative changes. Because Parliament was prorogued on Jan. 6 by then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the election was called before its return, none of those have occurred.

Privy Council Office assistant secretary Allen Sutherland told reporters that the government has already made good on recommendations to improve communication to Canadians and within the public service regarding foreign interference threats.

He said Monday’s press conference was a first of regular updates from the SITE task force on potential threats to the election. He also said to expect more disclosures like a brief warning in February of a “malicious” online campaign against Liberal leadership candidate Chrystia Freeland.

Sutherland also pointed to additional funding for elections monitoring and a new focus on open-source scanning and reporting.

“Some (recommendations) take a little longer to implement, but we certainly moved on the ones that we can,” he said.

In the meantime, Chinese cyber threat actors were actively looking for ways to break into government, political party, media and critical infrastructure systems on the eve of the federal election.

Friday, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) warned that a China-based actor had done reconnaissance scanning on Canadian networks in recent weeks.

“Reconnaissance scanning is not an indication of compromise. It is used to gather information, look for possible vulnerabilities, and may be a precursor to further malicious actions,” CSE wrote on social media.

According to SITE, one of the biggest emerging threats to this election are artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

In a recent biennial report on threats to the country’s elections, Canada’s cybersecurity agency offered a stark and sobering warning of how the recent boom in affordable and quality AI-powered software can pose serious and growing threats against the country’s democratic system.

Coordinated social media influence campaigns by China rife with disinformation, personalized spam emails using stolen personal data, spoof media websites run by Russian propagandists and even fake porn of politicians are just some of the tools opponents can use to influence Canada’s elections.

CSE’s report said Canada’s main foreign state adversaries use AI to orchestrate large online disinformation campaigns, process tremendous quantities of stolen or purchased data for “targeted influence and espionage campaigns” and generate fake images and videos (called “deepfakes”) of politicians to discredit them.

“Over the past two years, these tools have become more powerful and easier to use. They now play a pervasive role in political disinformation, as well as the harassment of political figures,” reads CSE’s report.

“They can also be used to enhance hostile actors’ capacity to carry out cyber espionage and malicious cyber activities.”

Both SITE task force members and Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault said they are particularly concerned about deepfakes and wrong information about the elections being spread on social media.

So, both organizations independently wrote to the main social media platforms calling on them to help patrol for misinformation and disinformation about the election that could influence the vote. They said they had received some responses and Perrault committed to posting them all online when possible.

He said that responses from X and TikTok noted that “they accept that there is concern about synthetic content that can be misleading” and have committed to taking action against it.

“We’ll see what happens during the election, if their commitment is true,” Perrault said.

National Post

cnardi@postmedia.com

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