Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue did not mince words in her final report on the public inquiry into foreign interference. Released in 2025, the report called information manipulation, whether foreign or domestic, “the single biggest risk to our democracy” and an “existential threat” requiring further work. Yet when the federal government produced Bill C-70, the Countering Foreign Interference Act, it largely skipped over the disinformation problem altogether. The bill modernizes the CSIS Act, creates a foreign agents registry, and gives the courts new instruments to punish clandestine activities on behalf of foreign states. These are useful tools, but they are not the right tools for the threat the Commissioner spent two years studying.

This gap should worry anyone who watched the inquiry. Foreign actors did target the 2019 and 2021 elections at the riding and nomination level, although the Commission concluded that general election results were not changed. Yet, the Commission also concluded that the deeper damage from foreign interference does not come from busing students to a nomination meeting. It comes from disinformation that polarizes the public and corrodes trust in institutions. Despite its conclusion, more than 80 percent of the Commission’s recommendations still focus on the machinery of federal institutions: intelligence, police, departmental coordination, Elections Canada. The category the Commission calls “civic resilience” gets less attention than it warrants.Civic resilience reaches two actors who actually play a decisive role in whether a disinformation campaign succeeds: the citizen-consumer and the social media platform.

What Ottawa is Already Doing, and Where it Stops

Canada is not doing nothing. The Government of Canada’s........

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