Clarify when to tell Canadians of election interference, evaluation recommends

The federal government should explore lowering the threshold for when to notify Canadians about potential interference in the middle of an election campaign, says a report released Tuesday evaluating how an independent panel monitored the 2021 election.

The federal government should explore lowering the threshold for when to notify Canadians about potential interference in the middle of an election campaign, says a report released Tuesday evaluating how an independent panel monitored the 2021 election.

Former civil servant Morris Rosenberg, who was tasked with writing the independent report on the protocol designed to inform Canadians in the event of threats to the 2021 federal election, concluded it worked well overall.

But he made several recommendations on better informing Canadians about what the panel created by the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol would consider cause for concern and urged further study on whether to lower the bar on when to tell them about potential threats.

The report comes more than 17 months after the last election, at a time when media reports regarding allegations of Chinese interference in both the 2019 and 2021 elections have led to increased scrutiny of the protocol and calls for greater transparency over potential threats.

The protocol was created in 2019 to monitor threats to federal elections. If a threat meets its threshold, the panel created by the protocol can make an announcement to Canadians.

The threshold currently sets out several considerations, including the degree to which the incident undermines Canadians' ability to have a free and fair election, the potential for an incident to undermine election credibility and the degree of confidence officials have in the intelligence of information about an incident.

Rosenberg said the panel of five senior public servants did not find there was foreign interference in either the 2019 or 2021 elections that compared to the scale of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.