Six months after the Liberal government released draft rules for its new foreign influence registry, Canada still does not have an operational database of agents working on behalf of other states.
Now, civil society organizations and diaspora groups are urging the government to move ahead with the registry that would publicly disclose who is lobbying on behalf of foreign — and sometimes hostile — governments.
“This has been dragging on for far too long … It’s not like these foreign authoritarian adversaries are pulling back on these operations, they’re only intensifying,” said Marcus Kolga, a human rights advocate and the founder of DisinfoWatch.
“Because right now there really isn’t a consequence to interfering in our democracy. Whether it’s disinformation, transnational repression, (the consequence) just isn’t there.”
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Canada is an outlier among its close allies in lacking a public-facing registry for foreign agents. The Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act (FITAA), introduced in 2024, was meant to address that gap in the wake of news reports detailing alleged foreign meddling in Canadian politics.
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The liberals are probably trying to see how best to word it so the US and Israel aren’t caught in the net
“If you put China, Russia, Iran together, they are spending billions annually in terms of foreign interference,” Kolga said.
Yeah yeah, the US funding Alberta separatists I’m sure won’t fall into this category and is completely legitimate stuff.