Canadian Cybersecurity Measures for Elections

By Katherine Rollings and Marshall McCann

Before the 2019 federal Canadian election, the Canadian Security Establishment (top Canadian security agency) released a memo stating that it was highly likely foreign actors would attempt to tamper with the upcoming election. The CSE was especially concerned about misinformation campaigns on social media — aimed at polarizing users’ political affiliations and swaying the election in a specific candidate’s direction. In the aftermath of the 2016 US federal election, these concerns seemed highly credible. Despite those concerns, the federal election ran relatively smoothly from a security perspective.

A lot happened to ensure that security.

In 2018, Canada amalgamated several agencies involved in cyber activity and security to create the Canadian Centre for Cybersecurity which exists under the larger umbrella of the CSE. The agency works to protect private and public Canadian entities from cyber threats, foreign and domestic. While a majority of its functions serve to monitor and intercept cyber threats, it also acts as an investigative resource for private and public entities, and as an educational resource for the country about cybersecurity.

The agency’s development in 2018 is no coincidence, it is a primary example of the federal measures the Canadian government took to protect Canadian cyber integrity as cyberattacks became more common.

A major area where the Canadian government has worked to develop cybersecurity is in the private sector. By creating baseline cybersecurity regulations for specific segments of the private sector, the federal government aims to make information hacks to companies more difficult (Wilner 2018). These regulations target companies that store and interact with heavy amounts of sensitive user data like banks, independent healthcare providers, and big tech.

Sources

Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. Canadian Centre for Cyber Security. (2021). Retrieved 21 April 2021, from https://cyber.gc.ca/en/about-cyber-centre.

Ljunggren, D. (2021). CORRECTED-Foreign interference in 2019 Canada election very likely -Ottawa. U.S. Retrieved 21 April 2021, from https://www.reuters.com/article/canada-politics-election-idUSL1N21Q0A9.

Wilner, A. (2018). Cybersecurity and its discontents: Artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and digital misinformation. International Journal: Canada’s Journal Of Global Policy Analysis, 73(2), 308–316. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020702018782496

“Symposium Cisco Ecole Polytechnique 9–10 April 2018 Artificial Intelligence & Cybersecurity” by Ecole polytechnique / Paris / France is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0