National security adviser Nathalie Drouin said Monday that the Liberal leadership race will be monitored for signs of foreign interference by Canada’s Election Intelligence Task Force.
Mr. Drouin said that although leadership campaigns are carried out by individual political parties, they play an important role in maintaining the integrity of the democratic process.
The Election Security and Intelligence Threats Task Force, established in 2019 to protect the electoral process from foreign interference, includes representatives from CSIS, the RCMP, Global Affairs Canada and the Communications Security Agency of Canada. There is.
The Liberal Party has taken steps to limit voting in the leadership election to party members who are permanent residents, citizens or have status under the Indian Act.
The party’s old rules allowed anyone residing in Canada to vote in leadership elections, regardless of citizenship or residency status.
“What the party hasn’t done yet is say anything about how it will monitor and publicly report on signs of foreign interference,” said the Canadian expert on international governance, who served on Canada’s advisory committee.・Wesley Wolk, senior researcher at the Innovation Center, said: National security.
Mr Wolk said the steps taken by the party were good but incomplete.
The Liberal Party did not immediately respond to questions about how it would work with the Electoral Information Task Force.
Azam Ishmael, the party’s national director, said in a public inquiry into foreign interference last August that it would take the cooperation of hundreds of thousands of voters to jeopardize the vote for the national leadership, but that only a few hundred voters could cooperate. He said this could have an impact on the race for the nomination. .
“This is highly unlikely,” Ishmael told the commission, according to an interview summary released by the commission.
Mr Wolk agreed that the threat of interference in the Liberal Party’s election campaign was low, but “not because the Liberal Party has not yet indicated that it intends to take steps to actually increase the level of security surrounding the leadership contest”.
“But the real reason I say the risk is low is that, frankly, any of the usual villains in the foreign interference field can identify certain Liberal leadership candidates who favor their position over others. Because I don’t think so,’” he said.
The Liberal Party announced last week that voting to choose its next leader, and by extension Canada’s next prime minister, will end on March 9th.
