Can a referendum in the disinformation age be protected from foreign interference?

Not in Alberta in 2026, and that may be the point.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith poses for a photo at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kelly Geraldine Malone

Since I first wrote about the potential threat to Canada’s national security posed by the Alberta separatist movement here on January 8th, I’ve had to do quite a bit of media work. I’ve been interviewed by the CBC’s Frontburner podcast, CBC, the Toronto Star, RadioCanada, CanadaTalks Radio on SiriusXM, QR Radio Calgary, the Wall Street Journal, even the Spanish paper El Paìs. The story has drawn attention from the Financial Times, Le Monde, NBC, Der Spiegel, the Guardian, France 24, Al Jazeera. I take some small credit for exposing the line of threat.

But now that we have admired the problem, let’s move on to second order questions. One that keeps coming up is whether Canada is ready to defend an Alberta sovereignty referendum from foreign interference. It’s the right question.

Short answer: not even close.

Mitch Sylvestre, the separatist petition point man and gun shop owner, has told his organization they need to have the 178,000 signature before the hearing for an early April emergency injunction being led by the Sturgeon Lake Cree.

Mitch plans to end run the court and again steamroll the Treaty Rights of First Nations by presenting the required signatures in advance of the injunction case being heard.¹ I guess we’ll see sooner than we thought whether all the talk about getting a million signatures by early May is bull shit. The recent chatter is that the separatists are running out of momentum. They might have started with long lines around town halls, but now they are camped out in ditches with empty picnic tables trying to strong arm people into signing their forms. No matter how big your truck is, that won’t play well.

But there’s 213 days left before we trundle to polls through fall leaves and under gym lights behind cardboard dividers after what will no doubt be unconscionably long waits decipher nine referendum questions, with a potential 10th being about whether Alberta should cut itself loose from confederation.

In bureaucratic years, 213 days is like 2 hours. Safe to say this novel experiment came about just a bit too fast for sufficient wheels to turn to safeguard it from foreign interference in the disinformation age. It took the Federal Government three election cycles and a Public Inquiry to sort out the machinations and protocols of how it monitors and shares information and intelligence across the community and with the government in caretaker mode and with voters during the writ period for this purpose. This is sensitive work, done at pace, with serious political implications if you get it wrong. The Hogue Commission demonstrated that the federal government has a deep roster of professionals across an array of highly skilled departments and agencies who have thought long and hard about how to do this sort of work, and they still had room for improvement.

Here’s the long answer:

Any secessionist referendum is a provincial political process. This gives the province jurisdiction over safeguarding its outcome from the designs of malicious foreign actors intent on loading the proverbial dice in favour of their own preferred result—a successful Leave Vote. The last time we had a secession referendum in Canada was in 1995. We didn’t get hotmail until the next year. We were still ripping Pearl Jam and Oasis bootlegs from Napster. Social media wasn’t a thing. Our relationship with the US was chill. China was a developing economy.

Let’s make no mistake here, none of Canada’s present day adversaries are going to weigh in to keep us unified. A divided Canada, is a weakened Canada. In a post-rules based world order, in a post-truth era that is rapidly trending authoritarian, willingly exposing the nation to this sort of ‘direct democratic’ experiment is either pure folly or treasonous on its face. It is the antithesis of responsible government.

Provincial jurisdiction, no provincial capacity

It should go without saying that the Province has no experience running a referendum process on a question of such consequence. It has no independent provincial intelligence service or a provincial cyber security capacity. It doesn’t have a capability to trace foreign funds or dark money entering the process. It has no independent non-partisan task force set up to monitor the referendum and advise Albertans of foreign interference that is occurring in real or next to real time. The only thing they’ve done is ask people to renew their driver’s licenses so they can get citizenship markers added.² That belies a profound lack of understanding of the foreign interference threat vector, that is either willfully ignorant or intentionally aimed to abet external influence over the process.

Elections Alberta

Elections Alberta is the department that would be responsible for ensuring the integrity of the referendum. Their organizational chart demonstrates the lack of capacity to defend a provincial sovereignty referendum from foreign interference coming from extremely capable state-based adversaries.

Just eight contract investigator positions exist in the chart below. It is not known how many of those positions are currently filled.

Elections Alberta Organizational Chart. Available: https://www.elections.ab.ca/about-elections-alberta/organizational-chart/

Last December an additional $6.7 million was added to Elections Alberta’s baseline funding level to help handle recall petitions, but the Globe and Mail has reported that the agency’s compliance and enforcement budget remains unchanged from last year at $695,000.³ A recent Elections Alberta investigation into the losing side of non-binding referendum on support for a coal mine in Crowsnest Pass took eight months to complete.⁴

So Elections Alberta has a tiny budget, contract investigative staff, and even for the most banal and inconsequential investigations can take up to eight months to make a determination.

Expecting Elections Alberta to conduct complex, transnational investigations into foreign interference and disinformation campaigns set up in the way it is with likely no connectivity to or support from the Federal security and intelligence architecture is fanciful.

One might even go so far as to call the move stunningly irresponsible. Setting in motion a democratic process as consequential as a secessionist referendum without the safeguards in place to defend the integrity of its outcome in this disinformation age is profoundly dangerous.

The Federal Security and Intelligence Architecture

Can we expect the organizations that comprise the national security community to become engaged?

Let’s start with CSIS.

Director Dan Rogers, was asked about the issue back in November of 2025 after his first ever address on the state of our national security. Rogers responded that the CSIS Act restricts the agency from looking at a category of activities that could be described as “lawful advocacy or protests or any sort of political debate.”⁵ That’s the right answer and quotes almost verbatim from the CSIS Act.

Pushed further later in the day on the CBC’s Power and Politics, Rogers eventually conceded that “we definitely have to be attentive to the possibility of information operations or interference.” He didn’t concede that the binary choice of a referendum was any more vulnerable to foreign interference than a general election with multiple parties running candidates in 343 separate ridings. But did note that anytime foreign adversaries seek to divide Canadians and amplify certain narratives is a concern for his agency. “We have to position ourselves to be able to identify those intentions and actions by foreign states,” said Rogers.⁶

In watching the Director’s appearances that day one got the impression that he hadn’t expected to be questioned on the topic of Alberta separatism quite so thoroughly. Amidst the dark milieu he deals with daily, it’s hard to imagine that he, or the intelligence service he leads, has much time to consider hypothetical threats on the somewhat distant horizon coming from Alberta of all places.

It’s fair to say that the more recent international media coverage of the Alberta Prosperity Project and their trips to Washington D.C. to solicit assistance from the Trump Administration to break up the country might have altered his calculous somewhat. But it bears repeating that as of November, CSIS was likely looking at a plethora of other national security threats and hadn’t turned its collective mind to the rather ‘provincial’ threat of the Alberta Prosperity Project.

Federal Policing

Moving on to the RCMP—my former agency. Federal policing investigations on average take several years—4.3 (to be exact) according to the 2022 Federal Policing Annual Report.⁷ So even if the federal force were to take on a novel, complex, politically fraught investigation, in a province in which they also handle the contract policing, it wouldn’t happen in time to have any meaningful prophylactic impact on the integrity of the referendum process. In other words, the damage would be long done before any charges were laid.

That being said, the federal government has recently furnished the justice system with exquisite new law that would be well-positioned to factor into a referendum process that could be rife with foreign interference.

Now punishable with life imprisonment is the following offence per the newly enacted Foreign Interference and Security of Information Act:

Influencing political or governmental process

20.4 (1) Every person commits an indictable offence who, at the direction of, or in association with, a foreign entity, engages in surreptitious or deceptive conduct with the intent to influence a political or governmental process, educational governance, the performance of a duty in relation to such a process or such governance or the exercise of a democratic right in Canada.⁸

What constitutes surreptitious or deceptive conduct is the key here, and then connecting that conduct to the mens rea of intentionally influencing a political process. To be clear, I’m neither lawyer nor criminal investigator; but lets reason through this in lay terms.

If someone were to trace an evidentiary line from Washington to a leader of the APP and show that a particular thread of disinformation that was being perpetrated by that leader on social media about, for example, the ‘Chinese Communist control of Ottawa’ being a rationale for separatism, and they were to show that a foreign entity (someone in the US State Department, for example) had conspired to construct that line of disinformation and had made an agreement with or instructed that APP leader to expound it on social media platforms, and that the vast global network of far right bots and so-called influencers had been enlisted to amplify that piece of disinformation in a clear attempt to influence the provincial referendum, well…perhaps someone or other could find themselves in a bit of hot water. And playing fast and loose with foreign powers and falsehoods while holding the rest of the country hostage would be proven to have severe consequences.

Rapid Response Mechanism

Global Affairs Canada has a shop dedicated to reporting on state-sponsored disinformation aimed at influencing democratic processes. Whether GAC would be willing to report on American funded and generated disinformation, much of which emanates directly from the White House, is an open question. My guess is that they will hesitate to involve themselves not just out of fear of upsetting a potential new CUSMA deal, but also for fear of inflaming the separatist movement further. I wouldn’t rule GAC out completely, but if they play a role at all it will be a rather minor one. They don’t have enforcement powers. So accordingly, all they could hypothetically do is provide warning of the disinformation. Sunlight being the best disinfectant.

Foreign Influence Transparency Commissioner

Lastly, let’s consider the new kid on the block, the Foreign Influence Transparency Commissioner. I watched with some interest Anton Boegman’s appearance at the Standing Committee on House Affairs. In my early assessment, he’s well-suited to the position. But he’s got his work cut out for him, as he acknowledged that part of his job will be to build the nascent registry with what sounded like few positions to work with, and a limited budget of $25M over the next ten years. With an annual budget of roughly $2.5 Million to cover salary and overhead, he’ll be lucky to field a staff of 20 full time equivalents.

Boegman doesn’t know when the registry will be up and running, and hasn’t been involved in any hiring to this point. There is a transition team working on the file in Public Safety, but beyond that Boegman had little to offer on the registry’s state of readiness.

If Boegman’s office is just a registry, it will be the paper tiger of all paper tigers. My read of the new Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act and its regulations law though is that if required registrants fail to register a “description of the arrangement” they have with a foreign principal, significant monetary penalties up to a million dollars could be issued. The registry itself is to have a public facing element to it as well, which would allow Canadians to see, in theory, what foreign actors have relations with the Alberta Prosperity Project and any other entities aiming to factor in the referendum.

At his confirmation hearing, Boegman was asked by Alberta Senator Paula Simons whether his office could have a bearing on the Alberta secession referendum. He confirmed that the new law he would preside over would indeed cover provincial processes such as referenda.

If he can stand up his office in time, Boegman could have an important role to play in defending the integrity of an Alberta secession referendum from foreign meddling. It will be a race against time and against the inertia of the federal bureaucracy.⁹

Conclusion

Are we ready for foreign interference in a secession referendum in 2026? At the provincial level in Alberta, the answer is not even close. There is no capacity to insulate the referendum the provincial government is orchestrating from malicious foreign interference and disinformation aimed at destabilizing if not dismantling the remaining liberal democracy in North America. Is this intentionally the case? Have the UCP intentionally left the barn door open and invited the wolves in amongst the chickens?

We will see how far the UCP goes in reaching out to the Federal Government’s security and intelligence community for assistance in preserving the integrity of their grand experiment in direct democracy that is scheduled to take place on October 19th. We will also see how willing and able the Federal security and intelligence community is the deal with such a novel threat amidst the myriad of other priorities it must juggle.

This is the situation in which we find ourselves as spring arrives in Alberta. We are a few weeks away from finding out whether our future in Confederation will be put on a ballot with nine other populist questions designed to stir fear, outrage, and division, while inviting meddling from abroad.

It is crucial that we recall that none of us voted for this. We live in a representative, constitutional democracy, not a pure one. If the UCP wanted this, they could have run in 2019 or in 2023 or as a separatist party; they could have run on a MAGA-adjacent, anti-immigration platform; they could have said straight up that they exist to end Canada as we know it. They didn’t, and yet here we are.

When there are quislings within, foreign interference is only part of the problem.

1.

2. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-foreign-interference-9.7114928

3. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-experts-worry-elections-alberta-lacks-resources-to-deal-with-foreign/

4. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-experts-worry-elections-alberta-lacks-resources-to-deal-with-foreign/

5. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-23/

6. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6978393

7. https://rcmp.ca/sites/default/files/doc/rcmp-federal-policing-annual-report-2022.pdf, pg. 10

8. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/o-5/

9. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2232747/foreign-influence-commissioner-could-monitor-an-alberta-referendum-on-separation