While foreign actors are working to influence Canada, how safe your voting is?

When Henry Chan, a democratic activist in Hong Kong, decided to run to nominate the Saskatchean party in his hometown of Saskaton, he did not expect to get out of the experiment and wonder whether he was a target for foreign intervention.

Chan says he was contacted at his meeting by a person who later discovered on social media relations with the Communist Party of China. In a private conversation, the person asked him, “What was ready to do for the Chinese people.” They offered support for his candidacy in return.

Chan did not take it. He did not win the nomination, and the Saskatchewan Party did not even win this seat in the legislative body in the vote of provinces last year.

After watching his struggle in his campaign to obtain party officials, he abandoned what they felt was voting in the nomination meeting, Chan left with questions that remain about the integrity and security of the entire process.

“In many of these nominations, there are no bases at all. It is basically Gong’s offer,” Chan told CBC News. Anxiety More than just local policy may be in playingCall public safety authorities.

Attempts in foreign intervention

Once a week during this federal election campaign, correspondents in Ottawa are briefed by senior security and intelligence officials on an unusual topic: whether the vote they cover remain safe from foreign intervention.

Officials say they discover efforts for the influence of political opinions of Canadians, including Coordination On the social media in Chinese to “pollute” the digital environment with both positive and negative on the liberal leader Mark Carne.

Weekly surroundings are the first for the federal election campaign. This race comes a few weeks later made by Judge Mary Jose Hug 51 recommendations to secure Canada elections from intervention.

Its achievement in the 2019 and 2021 elections did not conclude sufficient attempts by foreign intervention because of the influence of its results – but she wrote that intervention, misinformation and misinformation will only increase in future competitions.

All this has Canadians asking about the safe vote of these elections.

“Attempts to intervene are only: attempts,” Bridget Walsh of Canada Security Security Foundation, Canada Security Agency in Canada, told a press conference earlier this month.

The aim of these updates is not to raise baseless concerns about this vote that is manipulated by hostile foreign actors, this is the opposite. If more voters understand the threats, officials hope that they are smart enough to discover fake news before forming their political views.

This awareness may be particularly important in these elections, with Hogue’s recommendations to a large extent, and the changes suggested by the chief electoral officials have not been changed to enhance the safety of democracy in Canada so far in Parliament.

Fake news in the swing?

Gloria Fong is slowly cared for these repairs. It is a defender of democracy in Hong Kong and an alliance of human rights groups that have been pressured for years to create a transparent record in Canada.

Fungi concern that Canadian political parties are still naive about how easy this is for consular officials and other agents in creating networks capable of penetrating their campaigns and addressing their opinions.

She said: “I have already seen signs of … the fake news that spreads in some swinging contestants, which is the goal of the goal of the Chinese Communist Party.” “I warned against the Ministry of Public Safety and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on this issue, but I do not think they took it seriously.”

She says that her network was the first to discover a campaign to establish a coordinator on WeChat during the last elections Targeted And other conservative candidates who criticized human rights violations in China.

Investigation of Hogue’s investigation of this misleading information and agreed that it could have affected some voters – although it was not clear whether this was already assigned governors in 2021.

Lack of transparency to support doubts

Hug’s investigation also indicated its easiest to penetrate as easier than general elections. Intelligence disclosure warned against interfering in the party’s attempts The races that have chosen conservative leader Pierre Boelifri In 2022 and Carney earlier this year.

Two Indian Canadian candidates were excluded from the liberal leadership race due to the unlimited rule violations: Chandra Aria and Ruby Ruby. In the DHALLA case, the party claimed that its campaign activities may be a foreign intervention if it happened during a federal campaign. DHALLA denies committing any violations.

Balpreet Singh, the lawyer who represented the Sikh coalition in the general investigation, fears that the liberal party that the Hogue Committee has not learned. It represents the Canadians who disagree with the opinions of these two candidates on Indian policy and have not supported their nomination.

However, Singh hopes that the liberals were more transparent about the reason for their exclusion.

“What does this say about racist candidates in general?” He said. Confidentiality “plays towards this … the racist tropes that we see that these are not the real Canadians.”

“It was really better to explain the reasons.”

Education, not censorship

After the British exit from the European Union in the UK and the 2016 US elections, the chief election official, Stephen Perlete, said that the elections realized Canada that it needed to start working with security partners to ensure that the integrity of the elections was not at risk.

I told Perralt CBC News that these events have taught him not all Canadians understand concepts such as the principle of secret voting.

As an experimental project, Elects Canada has rented Punjabi teachers, Cantonian and Mandarin for civil education programs, with new materials in more languages ​​to help voters understand the inserted guarantees to protect voting safety.

However, fighting misleading is not something that Perolt believes is suitable for his role. Instead of enhancing general confidence in its neutrality, attempts to organize political speech can cause prejudices.

He said, “The impact on the accuracy of information related to the candidate, party or platform will lead to a strong undermining of my credibility,” he said.

“I think it’s something that I cannot do without putting in the danger of my office legitimacy.”