As voters head to the polls on April 28, federal party leaders will try to persuade Canadians that they are best placed to defend the country against President Donald Trump and keep this country “strong and free.”

While they target each other with criticism and a fair bit of mud, the leaders will have to lay out their plans for dealing with the threats and opportunities Canada faces.

One of the greatest threats is the spread of disinformation in the media and on social networks. Hostile actors – whether foreign or domestic – are flooding our media space with false and often hateful content that aims to provoke us, divide us, and eventually destroy us.

In her report on foreign interference in Canadian elections and politics, Justice Marie-Josée Hogue wrote that disinformation is “noxious and it is powerful.”

“It poses a major risk to Canadian democracy,” she wrote after a 16-month investigation. “If we do not find ways of addressing it, misinformation and disinformation have the ability to distort our discourse, change our views and shape our society. … It is an existential threat.”

In her report, Hogue focused on overseas threats. Russia, China, India, and Iran are all implicated. 

The rising danger is from the United States, where Trump spews disinformation virtually every time he speaks or posts on his Truth Social platform. He has plenty of willing and unwilling accomplices who either believe his version of the truth or are merely happy to add to the mayhem.

“The flood of disinformation is in essence a modern form of psychological warfare”, said veteran journalist Kevin Newman in an opinion article in The Globe and Mail. 

He lamented the lack of preparedness in Canada to confront these attacks. “It is a colossal failure,” Newman wrote. “The highest calling of any leader and a country’s military is to protect its citizens from harm. We have been left utterly defenseless in this fight for our minds and our sovereignty.”

Both Liberal Party Leader Mark Carney and Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre have vowed to boost spending on Canada’s military to reflect a new world order in which the United States is untrustworthy and NATO is seriously weakened. 

How will they deal with the threat from digital warriors – both state and non-state actors, foreign and domestic – who poison our information ecosystem?

Several of our NATO allies have initiated agencies to identify, analyze, and counteract the threat of disinformation and other forms of digital attacks. Canada needs to mount a similar effort.

At the same time, mis- and disinformation thrive when trusted sources of news are undermined or left to wither in an economic environment where media business models have eroded, and newsrooms have shrunk.

CBC provides an important source of news and information for Canadians across the country and World Press Freedom Canada supports its continued funding while eliminating advertising from its news channels that compete with private sector platforms.

As WPFC President Heather Bakken recently told a Senate hearing, CBC is the country’s most trafficked source of online news and an essential service for much of the country, particularly in rural and remote areas.

Public broadcasting should be viewed as a reliable source of news, as well as a platform for a national dialogue that keeps one end of the country informed about what the other end thinks and is doing. 

At the same time, many of Canada’s private news organizations have been acquired by corporations that show little regard for public interest journalism. They include American hedge funds that have somehow dodged Canadian ownership rules.

There are legitimate concerns about independence when governments fund newsrooms. The greater danger is that they cease to exist altogether, or are simply unable to produce needed public-interest journalism. Arm’s-length support, delivered through the tax system, is essential.

In parallel, parties must commit to properly fund access-to-information systems so that media and the public can hold the government, its agencies, and Crown corporations to account by publishing accurate, factual reports of their activities. 

The press itself needs to be accountable, too. Politicians should seek to correct errors, omissions and perceived biases, but without condemning journalists in general or targeting individuals for doing their jobs.

World Press Freedom Canada urges all parties and their leaders to commit publicly to defend this country against the onslaught of disinformation and strengthen this country’s media ecosystem in support of our democracy.