Why Canadians must brace for U.S. election interference

It was a campaign dominated by trade policy. The ballot question: to impose retaliatory tariffs on the U.S., as the Conservative leader urged, or to seek free trade, as Liberal Wilfrid Laurier was pitching.

MacDonald warned that his opponent was opening the door to American annexation. The election, he said, would resolve “the crisis of Canada’s fate” and show Americans that “we would fight for our existence as they would.”

The re-election of MacDonald’s party was summed up elegantly in a biography of the Tory leader by the late Toronto Star journalist Richard Gwyn. Canadians, he wrote “voted to go on being Canadians.”

And from Washington, Harrison reacted in a manner that will be frighteningly familiar to those of us who hang on Trump’s every Canada-focused utterance: “Canada,” Gwyn cited him as saying, “can offer us nothing we cannot duplicate.”

With this country set for an election campaign to begin on Sunday, it’s a cross-border crisis, fight and decision Canadians will be forced to confront once again, 134 years later.

And, once again, the whims and will of Washington loom over Canadian politics. But this time there are much greater abilities to sway or swing the outcome.

Already, we see the White House at work — all too often, in fact.

This week, Trump was back on Fox News talking about Canadian pre-election polling that showed a rebound for Mark Carney’s Liberal Party against Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives.

Where an American president would, by custom, refrain from public comment, Trump instead picked his preferred winner.

“The Conservative that’s running is stupidly no friend of mine,” Trump said of Poilievre.

“I think it’s easier to deal, actually, with a Liberal, and maybe they’re going to win, but I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me at all.”

In these fraught political times, with every word from the White House being picked apart for strategic implications and next moves, panning the Tories and promoting the Grits throws everyone into a tail-spin.

With all the major parties lined up in opposition to Trump’s tariffs and territorial threats, the American president’s kiss can be poison, his venom something like a badge of honour.

Or perhaps, as some have suggested, Trump is aware of the revolt underway in his coveted 51st state, and dabbling in reverse psychology — a masterful, mind-messing move in a game of “5D chess.”

Whatever he is doing, it appears to be part of a considered plan to keep Canada off balance and under America’s thumb — something that seemed unfathomable just a few short months ago.

And the Canadian government is treating it as a very real threat, as seen by the scramble to bolster diplomatic ties in Europe, find new military suppliers and forge alternate routes to new trading markets.

In the world of geopolitical studies, Trump’s America is waging what might be considered “below threshold” attacks against Canada. These are tactics short of tanks, bullets and bombs, including the use of disinformation as well as diplomatic and economic aggression to achieve dominance, according to a recent Centre for International Governance Innovation paper.

The term is normally employed in the context of Russia and China, which have a long record of using cyberattacks, social media networks and disinformation to sow confusion among their adversaries, particularly during elections.

But it increasingly applies to the Trump administration’s approach to Canada-U.S. relations.

“My view is that the intention behind rhetorical statements, behind tariffs as a form of economic warfare, is to fundamentally undermine Canada’s sovereignty, Canada’s political stability and economic security,” said Wesley Wark, a security and intelligence expert and former member of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council on National Security.

“In the coming federal election, I think we can expect to see some of it in terms of White House pronouncements that will be designed to deliver impact on the federal election, whether it’s from Trump, or White House officials, or from Elon Musk.

“I expect to see all of that — what you might call an influence operation.”

The goal, Wark said, would be to undermine Canada, extend American control “or even to fundamentally destroy Canada as a country.”

Just two months into Trump’s four-year term, there’s already a troubling precedent for election interference.

The frontrunner and eventual election winner, Friedrich Merz, denounced Musk’s intervention, saying he could not “remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of the Western democracies.”

Unperturbed, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance went on to meet with Weidel while attending the Munich Security Conference, where he also delivered a blistering speech critical of Europe, accusing it of having lost its democratic values.

In the address, he also raised concerns about the legitimacy of the Romanian presidential election, in which initial results were thrown out after the pro-Russian candidate, Calin Georgescu, was found to have benefitted from a shadowy social media campaign that the country’s intelligence agency said had Russia’s fingerprints.

“If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country,” Vance said, “then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

And a few days before voters in Greenland cast their ballots in an election dominated by the question of independence from Denmark and the threat of annexation by the United States, Trump struck a conciliatory tone to residents of the strategically placed Arctic island.

“We strongly support your right to determine your own future,” he said in an address to Congress, adding: “But we need to get (Greenland), really, for international world security, and I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it.”

The election of Mark Carney as Liberal Party leader may have given the White House some pause, or at least reason to recalibrate their approach to any planned Canadian interventions, said Michael Williams, a University of Ottawa professor and expert in right-wing political movements.

“Where they tend to have somebody they would like to do well or to win they tend to be fairly overt about it,” he said. “What I find really interesting is they don’t actually seem to find that person in Canada.”

Trump, who Williams described as “a personalist politician” — one who revels in branding opponents with humiliating nicknames and personal insults — “has been quite quiet on Carney,” he noted.

“My guess is that they’ll see where the numbers are on that and then try and decide exactly how they will come at it. It seems to me that Trump goes with his gut on a lot of this stuff. You never really know which way it’s going to come out until it comes out.”

Another possibility is that Washington is retooling its Canada strategy after seeing their northern neighbours coalesce rather than crumble in the face of tariffs and sovereignty threats. Trump has certainly taken note of Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s recent election win after campaigning that he was the best leader to stand up to America’s threats. 

Threatening to slap a tax on U.S.-bound hydroelectricity, or cut it off altogether, earned Ford what might be Trump’s highest praise. He referred to the Ontario leader as “a very strong man in Canada.” (When he backed down amid the lure of negotiations, Trump boasted that Ford has withdrawn his “little threat,” while Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, dismissed the Ontario premier as “some guy in Ontario.”)

Wark noted that for foreign influence operations to have impact, “there has to be a receptive audience, and there has to be a kind of pre-existing narrative that it can play to and amplify and boost.”

In the target countries or regions, disinformation or misinformation campaigns have amplified angry sentiments about migration, demonized Ukraine, inflated crime statistics and — that lingering grievance — stoked anger about vaccine mandates and public health restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the German election, the AfD won greatly increased their vote share and finished a strong second place. In Greenland as well, the party that was most open to having deeper economic ties to the U.S., the pro-independence Naleraq, won eight seats in Greenland’s 31-seat Inatsisartut, or Parliament.

With the exception of a fringe Make Canada Great Again movement that shares Trump’s priorities — tackling immigration, crime, government spending and woke ideology — Canadians have shown few signs of clamouring for American statehood, Williams said.

“Canada — a country that really has not had a strong or serious sense of itself for quite a long time now — all of a sudden becoming quite focused in quite a different way, I think.”