With nine month to go until Canadians head to polls to elect the next federal government, Ottawa unveiled a series of new measures aimed at further beefing up Canada's electoral system against foreign interference, and enhancing its ability to defend the democratic process from cyber threats and disinformation.

The new measures unveiled Wednesday in Ottawa by Minister of Democratic Institutions Karina Gould, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan will focus on four areas.

These include taking proactive measures to combat foreign interference, enhancing citizen preparedness, improving coordination between Canada’s security agencies and calling on social media platforms to take “actions to increase transparency, authenticity and integrity on their systems.”

A new panel and a task force

A woman holding a baby enters a polling station to vote in Calgary, Alberta, October 19, 2015. The federal government setting up a five-person panel of senior bureaucrats to sound the alarm when a serious attempt to meddle in the election by a foreign actor that could threaten the integrity of the electoral process has taken place. (Mark Blinch/REUTERS)

Ottawa is also setting up a five-person panel of senior bureaucrats to sound the alarm when a serious attempt to meddle in the election by a foreign actor that could threaten the integrity of the electoral process has taken place.

The panel will consist of the Clerk of the Privy Council, the federal national security and intelligence adviser, the deputy minister of justice, the deputy minister of public safety and the deputy minister of Global Affairs Canada (GAC).

The government is also setting up a new task force composed of members of Canada's security and intelligence agencies — the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), along with GAC — to try to prevent clandestine forces from influencing the electoral process.

The Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force, chaired by the CSE, Canada’s signal intelligence agency, will work to identify foreign threats to Canada's electoral process and help the government respond, Goodale said.

(click to listen to Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale's remarks)

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“Whether it’s hacking, intimidation, bribery or whatever, they have the tools and the skills to identify the interference and its source,” Goodale said.

Role for political parties, news and social media outlets

Political parties in Canada bear a particular responsibility for securing their own IT infrastructure against unlawful access by foreign and domestic actors, Goodale said.

To help them in that task, the federal government will provide security briefings to key members of national political parties with appropriate security clearance to warn them of any threats, Goodale said.

The news media also have a key role to play in safeguarding the integrity of Canada’s democratic process, he said.

“Never has journalism been under such pressure from those who would masquerade as legitimate but whose strings are pulled by foreign authorities as they use cyberspace to manipulate,” Goodale said.

Finally, social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook have a very important role to play in ensuring “that they are contributing to and not detracting from political discourse,” Goodale said.

“Individually and through the Five Eyes and the G7 we have challenged the social media operators to help us combat such evils as terrorist propaganda, the sexual exploitation of children and human trafficking,” Goodale said. “More and more insidious foreign interference to subvert democracy is being a...