Safeguarding Elections

Backgrounder

Canada is taking the following new measures to protect the 2019 General Election:

Enhancing Citizen Preparedness

  • Establishing the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol, a mechanism for communicating with Canadians during the writ period in a clear, transparent, and impartial manner about incidents that threaten the integrity of the election.
  • Creating the Digital Citizen Initiative to support digital, news and civic literacy programming and tools to improve Canadians’ resilience against disinformation
  • Increasing the reach and focus of Get Cyber Safe, the national public awareness campaign created to educate Canadians about cyber security and the simple steps they can take to protect themselves online, to include greater linkages to cyber threats to Canada’s democratic processes.
  • Releasing the 2019 Update to the Cyber Threats to Canada’s Democratic Process, the public assessment of threats to Canada’s elections, political parties and politicians, and media.

Improving Organizational Readiness

  • Offering additional cyber security technical advice and guidance to political parties to enhance security.
  • Offering classified threat briefings to key leadership in political parties to promote situational awareness and help them to strengthen internal security practices and behaviours.

Combatting Foreign Interference

  • Leveraging the newly-established Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force to improve awareness of foreign threats and support assessment and response.
  • Managing criminal investigative files concerning foreign actor interference via the RCMP.
  • Activating the G7 Rapid Response Mechanism to strengthen coordination among G7 democracies in responding to threats to democracy, and monitoring malign actors in the social media space.

Expecting Social Media Platforms to Act

  • Engaging with social and digital platforms to encourage them to implement specific measures to increase transparency and combat the spread of disinformation.
  • Providing guidance to social and digital platforms to ensure integrity, transparency and authenticity ahead of the 2019 federal election  through The Canada Declaration on Electoral Integrity Online.

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