Reforms should target misinformation that undermines voters' trust, says elections chief

The head up of Elections Canada says the Liberals' proposed electoral rectify jurisprudence doesn't adequately call concerns near bad actors attempting to sow doubt about the country's electoral system.

Chief Electoral Officer Stéphane Perrault told MPs on the House procedures committee that he's generally supportive of Bill C-25, but he also said the legislation could go further when it comes to concerns about the spread of misinformation.

"What is not addressed by this bill is a situation where inaccurate information about the electoral process is published with the goal of undermining trust in the election or its results," Perrault said Thursday.

C-25 was tabled in Parliament in late March and includes a number of reforms meant to crack down on foreign and domestic political interference. That includes foreign donations, bribery, disinformation and AI deepfakes of candidates.

The bill makes it an explicit offence to publish false information about the electoral process with the goal of tampering with the vote. But Perrault noted that provisions in Canada's election laws already prohibit the spread of such disinformation, and that it has been used in the past to go after bad actors.

The chief electoral officer said the legislation should be amended to explicitly include the spread of misinformation aimed at undermining faith in the electoral process.

"If someone is deliberately spreading falsehood to undermine trust in the result of an election, or trust in the election itself … there needs to be a mechanism in the act to address this," he said.

Perrault gave the hypothetical example of spreading altered images or videos showing "stolen or destroyed ballots." He also cautioned that the standard for such a violation should be high so as not to capture mere criticism of "the process or criticism of its administration."

Commissioner of Canada Elections Caroline Simard was also present at the committee Thursday to comment on the proposed legislation. But Simard, whose office is responsible for enforcing Canada's election laws, briefly faced questions about the recent leak of a voters list in Alberta.

Elections Alberta and the Alberta RCMP are investigating the leak after an Alberta separatist group known as the Centurion Project posted a database online that was built using information from the June 2025 electors list.

That list contains the personal information of all individuals who were registered and eligible to vote in provincial elections in Alberta at that time.

Elections Alberta has determined that the voter data used by the Centurion Project came from information that was legitimately obtained by the Republican Party of Alberta.

RCMP, Elections Alberta investigate Centurion Project separatist group

While the provincial election body received a court injunction last week that ordered the separatist group to remove the online database, questions have been raised about whether Elections Alberta could have acted sooner.

Jen Gerson, a journalist and political commentator who is co-founder of The Line on Substack, said she wrote to Elections Alberta on March 31 after a source contacted her about information on a website run by Alberta the Centurion Project that appeared to come from the provincial voters list.

Gerson said she was contacted by an Elections Alberta investigator the next day. Ten days later, she said she received a letter from Elections Commissioner Paula Hale saying that while her evidence was compelling, the agency was unable to investigate.

"The legislation requires that we must have 'reasonable grounds to believe an offence has occurred' to start investigations,” Michelle Gurney wrote.

During Thursday's committee hearing, Alberta Liberal MP Matt Jeneroux asked Simard about the Alberta case.

"Can you confirm that you are able to start an investigation on your own initiative, and that a complaint doesn't have to meet a certain minimal threshold in order to trigger an investigation like I believe it did in Alberta?" Jeneroux asked.

Simard responded that she could only speak to the Alberta case based on publicly available information, but she suggested that if similar evidence was presented to her she could launch an investigation.

"According to the Elections Act I can launch an investigation on my own initiative. In such a case, hypothetically, if this case were to occur federally, such a possibility [to launch an investigation] does indeed exist," Simard said in French.

Senior writer

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