Disinformation and foreign interference are two of the biggest threats facing Canada’s electoral system and it will take everyone working together to counter them, says Canada’s chief election watchdog.
Speaking in an interview with CBC News to mark the end of his 10-year term as Commissioner of Canada Elections, Yves Côté said online disinformation is one of the biggest challenges he’s had to face and noted that it can be difficult to be optimistic about the future.
“I think there are all kinds of challenges that are lurking and some of them are becoming perhaps worse as we move on with time,” Côté said.
However, he noted there is a solution if various groups can work together.
“Nobody should just get discouraged and abandon the fight or abandon the project,” he said.
“I think many people have to contribute and I think that it’s a job of politicians of all stripes, of institutions, of media, of academics. It’s all kinds of people that have to pull together and say this is a danger.”
WATCH | Yves Côté on complex challenge of disinformation and foreign interference:
Disinformation and foreign interference are key election challenges, commissioner says
4 hours ago
Duration 2:18
Outgoing Commissioner of Canada Elections Yves Côté talks about key challenges facing Canada’s electoral system.
Disinformation against electoral system troubling
Côté said he is particularly troubled by disinformation attacks against the Canadian electoral system.
“When people are trying to convince others that the way in which votes or ballots are counted does not work,” Côté said.
“When they try to misinform people about where they can vote, how they can vote or where, they try to raise issues with the professionalism or the competency of, for example, Elections Canada or our own office for reasons that have no foundation to them, I find that very, very troublesome.”
Côté said he has negotiated agreements with companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook that help to streamline the process of obtaining information when his office has to investigate a complaint, but he said he does not have agreements with other “foreign agencies” like Tencent, the company that owns the popular Chinese-language app WeChat.
Côté’s departure at the end of this month comes amid these new technological challenges that likely couldn’t have been imagined 10 years ago when headlines were dominated by the robocall voter suppression scandal during the 2011 election, when voters in several ridings received automated telephone calls with recorded messages directing them to the wrong place to vote.
His successor, Caroline Simard, begins Aug. 15.
Foreign interference ‘difficult to investigate’
In addition to the challenges posed by disinformation, Côté said Simard will have to contend with the threat of foreign interference in elections.
“For us as an enforcement agency it poses all kinds of challenges, especially if those foreign countries do not have good working diplomatic relationships with us,” Côté explained.
“It’s very difficult to investigate, very difficult to get the evidence that you might need to build a case, and then, of course, it’s very difficult to bring these people before Canadian courts, assuming that you were able to gather the evidence you needed to do so.”
In a recent interview with CBC Radio’s The House, former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole revealed that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) informed his party during the last election of attempts on WeChat to influence the race in a number of ridings with false information.
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Côté said his office has relationships with CSIS, the Canadian security establishment, the RCMP and various police forces.
“Certainly, we’ve heard of the fact that there have been campaigns like this or allegations that there have been campaigns like this and this is a topic that we are greatly interested in,” said Côté.
In addition to the attempts that Canada Elections is aware of and can decipher, he said there are also things happening under the radar that they don’t know about.
“There are the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. So that’s a very complex thing where we have a role to play.”
Safeguarding voter privacy
Another challenge is safeguarding the privacy of voters.
Currently, federal political parties are exempt from federal privacy legislation. Côté said he received several complaints about political parties misusing voters’ private information.
“Given the framework that currently exists, there was nothing really we could do because the act is so open and so generous or so not restrictive enough in terms of what political parties are doing.”
Côté pointed to new legislation in Quebec that will subject parties and candidates to privacy rules, something he hopes to see the federal government adopt. He said he also supports a recommendation made by Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault to restrict hate groups from forming recognized political parties.
Some voters have said in the past that they didn’t want to be listed on the electoral roll out of concern that their information could be accessed by individuals or groups who promote hate.
In the end, Côté feels his term has been a successful one, increasing the independence of the Commissioner of Canada Elections office and obtaining changes, like the introduction of administrative monetary penalties as an alternative to prosecution for some elections law violations.
“We have a good team and we certainly have a commissioner, an incoming commissioner, that is highly competent and highly qualified to take over from me and take the office to higher and better places.”
CALGARY – MEG Energy says it earned $167 million in its third quarter, down from $249 million during the same quarter last year.
The company says revenues for the quarter were $1.27 billion, down from $1.44 billion during the third quarter of 2023.
Diluted earnings per share were 62 cents, down from 86 cents a year earlier.
MEG Energy says it successfully completed its debt reduction strategy, reducing its net debt to US$478 million by the end of September, down from US$634 million during the prior quarter.
President and CEO Darlene Gates said moving forward all the company’s free cash flow will be returned to shareholders through expanded share buybacks and a quarterly base dividend.
The company says its capital expenditures for the quarter increased to $141 million from $83 million a year earlier, mainly due to higher planned field development activity, as well as moderate capacity growth projects.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
Premier David Eby is proposing an all-party committee investigate mistakes made during the British Columbia election vote tally, including an uncounted ballot box and unreported votes in three-quarters of the province’s 93 ridings.
The proposal comes after B.C.’s chief electoral officer blamed extreme weather, long working hours and a new voting system for human errors behind the mistakes in last month’s count, though none were large enough to change the initial results.
Anton Boegman says the agency is already investigating the mistakes to “identify key lessons learned” to improve training, change processes or make recommendations for legislative change.
He says the uncounted ballot box containing about 861 votes in Prince George-Mackenzie was never lost, and was always securely in the custody of election officials.
Boegman says a failure in five districts to properly report a small number of out-of-district votes, meanwhile, rippled through to the counts in 69 ridings.
Eby says the NDP will propose that a committee examine the systems used and steps taken by Elections BC, then recommend improvements in future elections.
“I look forward to working with all MLAs to uphold our shared commitment to free and fair elections, the foundation of our democracy,” he said in a statement Tuesday, after a news conference by Boegman.
Boegman said if an independent review does occur, “Elections BC will, of course, fully participate in that process.”
He said the mistakes came to light when a “discrepancy” of 14 votes was noticed in the riding of Surrey-Guildford, spurring a review that increased the number of unreported votes there to 28.
Surrey-Guildford was the closest race in the election and the NDP victory there gave Eby a one-seat majority. The discovery reduced the NDP’s victory margin from 27 to 21, pending the outcome of a judicial review that was previously triggered because the race was so close.
The mistakes in Surrey-Guildford resulted in a provincewide audit that found the other errors, Boegman said.
“These mistakes were a result of human error. Our elections rely on the work of over 17,000 election officials from communities across the province,” he said.
“Election officials were working 14 hours or more on voting days and on final voting day in particular faced extremely challenging weather conditions in many parts of the province.
“These conditions likely contributed to these mistakes,” he said.
B.C.’s “vote anywhere” model also played a role in the errors, said Boegman, who said he had issued an order to correct the results in the affected ridings.
Boegman said the uncounted Prince George-Mackenzie ballot box was used on the first day of advance voting. Election officials later discovered a vote hadn’t been tabulated, so they retabulated the ballots but mistakenly omitted the box of first-day votes, only including ballots from the second day.
Boegman said the issues discovered in the provincewide audit will be “fully documented” in his report to the legislature on the provincial election, the first held using electronic tabulators.
He said he was confident election officials found all “anomalies.”
B.C. Conservative Party Leader John Rustad had said on Monday that the errors were “an unprecedented failure by the very institution responsible for ensuring the fairness and accuracy of our elections.”
Rustad said he was not disputing the outcomes as judicial recounts continue, but said “it’s clear that mistakes like these severely undermine public trust in our electoral process.”
Rustad called for an “independent review” to make sure the errors never happen again.
Boegman, who said the election required fewer than half the number of workers under the old paper-based system, said results for the election would be returned in 90 of the province’s 93 ridings on Tuesday.
Full judicial recounts will be held in Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna-Centre, while a partial recount of the uncounted box will take place in Prince George-Mackenzie.
Boegman said out-of-district voting had been a part of B.C.’s elections for many decades, and explained how thousands of voters utilized the province’s vote-by-phone system, calling it a “very secure model” for people with disabilities.
“I think this is a unique and very important part of our elections, providing accessibility to British Columbians,” he said. “They have unparalleled access to the ballot box that is not found in other jurisdictions in Canada.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
WINNIPEG – A public memorial honouring former judge, senator and chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into residential schools, Murray Sinclair, is set to take place in Winnipeg on Sunday.
The event, which is being organized by the federal and Manitoba governments, will be at Canada Life Centre, home of the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets.
Sinclair died Monday in a Winnipeg hospital at the age of 73.
A teepee and a sacred fire were set up outside the Manitoba legislature for people to pay their respects hours after news of his death became public. The province has said it will remain open to the public until Sinclair’s funeral.
Sinclair’s family continues to invite people to visit the sacred fire and offer tobacco.
The family thanked the public for sharing words of love and support as tributes poured in this week.
“The significance of Mazina Giizhik’s (the One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky) impact and reach cannot be overstated,” the family said in a statement on Tuesday, noting Sinclair’s traditional Anishinaabe name.
“He touched many lives and impacted thousands of people.”
They encourage the public to celebrate his life and journey home.
A visitation for extended family, friends and community is also scheduled to take place Wednesday morning.
Leaders from across Canada shared their memories of Sinclair.
Premier Wab Kinew called Sinclair one of the key architects of the era of reconciliation.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Sinclair was a teacher, a guide and a friend who helped the country navigate tough realities.
Sinclair was the first Indigenous judge in Manitoba — the second in Canada.
He served as co-chair of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba to examine whether the justice system was failing Indigenous people after the murder of Helen Betty Osborne and the police shooting death of First Nations leader J.J. Harper.
In leading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he participated in hundreds of hearings across Canada and heard testimony from thousands of residential school survivors.
The commissioners released their widely influential final report in 2015, which described what took place at the institutions as cultural genocide and included 94 calls to action.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 5, 2024.
