QUESTION PERIOD — Democratic Institutions
Security of Election Process
February 5, 2020
Leader, to protect last October’s election, the government put in place an internal team responsible for publicly sounding the alarm if it discovered evidence of interference or foreign influence.
Immediately after the election, some officials indicated that they had discovered attempts to spread misinformation. Additionally, notes obtained by the CBC revealed that there were still deficiencies in how Canada managed the security of its elections.
Leader, first of all, can you tell us what deficiencies were identified that threaten the integrity of the electoral system?
Thank you for your question, senator. As you may know, one of the greatest challenges facing a democratic system like ours is protecting our systems and institutions from attack without revealing how we do it.
If those who wish us harm know our game plan, that makes their job easy. With all due respect, I don’t think it would be appropriate or in the interest of national security for the government to disclose everything it may have found. These circumstances demand that the government collaborate with the team of experts.
Canada has top-notch teams of experts whose job is to detect breaches, close them, and employ every legal means to protect us, and I’m certain that is exactly what we’re doing.
The last time I heard an answer like that — saying that we can’t talk about security measures because that would be a breach of security — I was visiting the LG2 dam, whose offices were broken into a month later. That is not exactly a reassuring answer.
Last week I was at the Council of Europe where there were discussions of aspects of democracy that had been altered as a result of foreign intervention.
There was talk about various ways to prevent this type of situation, such as regulating information from web giants such as Facebook. The minister provided a protection plan before the election. For its part, the Trudeau government, which intended to have a plan to protect the electoral system, disclosed a good portion of that plan. It was made public.
Leader, I will repeat the question. Which parts of the protection plan didn’t work?
It’s probably down to my French not being clear enough, but I think you might have misunderstood my answer to your question.
All I was saying was that when you find a problem within a system, the last thing you should do is reveal the problem publicly to anyone who could exploit it. That’s what I meant to say.
You probably know that before and during an election, the government works regularly with a team of experts to make sure all systems are safe. Experts work 24/7 to search for potential problems and try to fix them.
Senator, again, it would be unwise and irresponsible to discuss the details of what the experts found, because doing so is not in the national interest.
