Canada is hot off the heels of a couple of important elections, and we are poised for an upcoming federal election. When it comes to election security, "disinformation" is one of those buzz words that gets thrown a lot from people of various political backgrounds. Regardless of your politics I think we can all agree that in order to have free and fair elections, the public discourse needs to be grounded in some version of "the truth". We thought that we would explore the realm of disinformation in this post and see what resources and guidance the Government of Canada has on this subject.

What is disinformation?

Various definitions of disinformation exist in the cyber security and political security landscape. For example, the Canadian Center for Cyber Security defines disinformation as:

refers to false information that is intended to manipulate, cause damage and guide people, organizations and countries in the wrong direction

Here is another definition from the UK government

… as the deliberate creation and spreading of false and/or manipulated information that is intended to deceive and mislead people, either for the purposes of causing harm, or for political, personal or financial gain. Misinformation is the inadvertent spread of false information.

While most of us would recognize many elements of the definitions above as simply "marketing", disinformation is very contextual and, ultimately, is in the eye of the beholder. Political disinformation, for example, would be false or misleading information about political events (or people) spread with the intent of causing harm. Importantly, disinformation is generally separated from the concept of misinformation solely based on the intent of the actor spreading the information. This becomes interesting when you are reading government reports as intent can be hard to pin down. When politicians believe the lie they are telling, is it disinformation or misinformation?

Disinformation Research in Canada

Over the past several years, Canada has been exploring threats to the democratic process. This threat assessment has been conducted by the Canadian Center for Cyber Security and receives updates periodically over the last few years. The latest report is the National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026. You can also have a look at the Cyber Threats to Canada's Democratic Process: 2025 Update.

There are a couple of key takeaways when reading this guidance:

1. There is an uptick in AI-driven disinformation. While determining the source of particular examples of disinformation is more of an art than a science, the argument is that with the quality/cost ratio of LLMs increasing the ability for threat actors to create convincing disinformation (think deepfakes) is increasing.
2. Elections are under attack in most democracies, and generally by the usual suspects.
3. Even unsuccessful disinformation can work to erode public trust in the democratic process

The 2025 update is an interesting read even though it is extremely high level.

In producing this report, we relied on reporting from both classified and unclassified sources. CSE's foreign intelligence mandate provides us with valuable insights into adversarial behaviour. Defending the Government of Canada's information systems also provides CSE with a unique perspective to observe trends in the cyber threat environment.

And comes to the following main conclusion:

While it is difficult to predict what disinformation or influence campaigns will gain traction, we assess that it is very unlikely (i.e. roughly 10-30% chance) that disinformation, or any AI-enabled cyber activity, would fundamentally undermine the integrity of Canada's democratic processes in the next Canadian general election. As AI technologies continue to advance and cyber adversaries improve their proficiency in using AI, the threat against future Canadian general elections is likely to increase.

How can I learn more?

The nature of disinformation makes it a naturally thorny subject to discuss accurately, let alone devise plans to combat. The Canadian government has several links and resources for you to learn more and to help prepare yourself. Here is a summary:

Combatting foreign disinformation and information manipulation talks about actions the Canadian government is taking to counter disinformation. This includes monitoring, raising awareness, exposing examples of disinformation, and going after threat actors using disinformation.

Online Disinformation is a more approachable resource for Canadians, focused on providing tips and tools to help spot disinformation when using content online.

How to identify misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation aims to provide awareness on the topic and examples of what to look out for.

Countering Disinformation: A Guidebook for Public Servants goes father than the other resources by providing actions that one should take to help against disinformation.