Ottawa –
Canada’s chief electoral official is downplaying any suggestions that Elections Canada should directly run political nominations or leadership races.
Stephen Perreault, appearing at a federal inquiry into foreign interference, noted the importance of the parties controlling their own proceedings, saying that in any case federal agencies lack the resources to manage such disputes.
Elections Canada has proposed possible changes to safeguard nominations, including banning foreign nationals from helping select candidates, requiring political parties to publish their election rules and explicitly banning practices such as voting multiple times.
But representatives of some political parties have told the federal commission that such changes would be unwelcome, difficult to implement or potentially counterproductive.
A report released in June by the congressional committee on national security and intelligence expressed concern about how easily foreign powers could exploit loopholes and vulnerabilities to support their preferred candidates.
Perot said the committee’s work and the testimony heard in the investigation “highlights the vulnerability of the nomination contest, and indeed the leadership contest, in particular to potential foreign interference.”
“I think Canadians’ confidence is being shaken in that regard.”
In an interview with the committee in August, Perrault said Elections Canada is a “centralized organization that initiates operations in electoral districts across Canada when an election is called,” according to a summary of the report.
“We do not have the local structure or resources to engage in the sustained work required to manage nominations and leadership elections across the country.”
Perrault said such disputes could arise at any time in Canada, including during election time, but unscheduled elections and by-elections complicate the situation.
He told Elections Canada on Tuesday that Elections Canada is aware of about 850 nomination contests for the 2019 election and about 700 for the 2021 election.
“The timing of the election is unclear and the duration is unknown,” he said. “It could last from a few hours to a few weeks, depending on the party. Elections Canada does not have the permanent decentralized infrastructure to handle such administration.”
Perot said in August that to his knowledge, there is no other election authority in the world that has a similar system for running party nomination elections.
He also spoke of “the importance of party autonomy and the critical value of allowing political parties to establish their own rules and procedures for selecting their leaders and candidates,” the summary said.
Asked to elaborate on those comments during the appearance, Perot said the decision about who runs under a party’s banner “is, I believe, as central to the freedom of political parties as the decision about their platform.”
He told the committee that just because Elections Canada cannot administer its own nomination elections “does not mean it cannot improve the rules and safeguards surrounding leadership nomination elections.”
Perreault said Elections Canada has not yet finalized its recommendations.
The investigation on Tuesday also took a detailed look at cyber attacks targeting lawmakers.
Senate officials say they were informed of phishing emails targeting congressional accounts in January 2021, an attack later determined to be the work of hackers acting on behalf of Beijing.
Some of the emails made it through the firewalls and into senators’ mailboxes, but no one opened the messages and the attackers did not gain access to any information on the Senate server, officials said.
They outlined the sequence of events in interviews with investigative lawyers earlier this month. A summary of the conversation was released at an investigative hearing on Tuesday.
Officials said they immediately contacted the senator’s office to confirm the emails had been destroyed, and the Senate Office of Information Services searched the Senate database to confirm the emails had been deleted.
Earlier this year it emerged that some members of parliament and senators had come under cyber attack by hackers due to their involvement with the Inter-Parliamentary Union on China, which seeks accountability from the Beijing government.
However, the Senate Intelligence Service initially did not realize that the attack may have been carried out by Chinese hackers.
In any case, Senate officials told the committee that knowing the source of the attack earlier would not have changed the bureau’s swift response.
“We take these threats seriously and act swiftly,” Senate Intelligence Services Director David Bacher testified at the inquiry on Tuesday.
Vacher said the number of foreign-related attacks is on the rise but they represent a minority of the overall attacks the Senate faces.
But he said: “The geopolitical situation is so tense, it would be foolish to think that these attacks wouldn’t continue to increase in both number and sophistication.”
Benoît Decaire, the House of Representatives’ information technology officer, told the investigation that the phishing emails addressed to the eight lawmakers were quarantined by security features and did not reach them.
There are indications that messages have been sent to the personal addresses of some lawmakers, but these accounts are outside the jurisdiction of the House of Representatives.
With files from Anja Karadeglija.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 24, 2024.
