No evidence federal election was affected by foreign interference, commissioner says

OTTAWA — Canada’s elections commissioner said Wednesday she has no evidence to suggest the federal election result in April was affected by foreign interference, disinformation or voter intimidation — even though the volume of complaints about the campaign shot way up.

In a preliminary report, Commissioner Caroline Simard said her office received more than 16,000 complaints about the spring campaign that ended on April 28 — seven times the number of complaints received in the 2019 and 2021 elections.

And while Simard’s office said some of those numbers are due to “amplification” — multiple complaints about the same issue — the number of complaints about foreign interference, artificial intelligence, disinformation and voter intimidation was lower than her office had expected.

“So far, based on our initial observations and the information we have, there is no evidence to suggest that the election outcome was affected in any way,” Simard said in a news release.

She was not available for an interview Wednesday.

In a statement issued to The Canadian Press, her office said “things like elections advertising, false statements, allegations related to voting (photos of marked ballots), would all have been areas where we observed some degree of amplification.”

Simard’s office had closed about 2,330 files as of the end of April, with another 16,115 still to go.

Simard’s office said several complaints it received suggested mistaken beliefs about what is actually illegal in elections, or a misunderstanding of which section of the Canada Elections Act was broken.

“For that reason, it is important to note that these preliminary figures represent raw data that are subject to change over time.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 25, 2025.

Nick Murray, The Canadian Press