Thank you, Madam Chair.

Distinguished members of the committee, good evening from Washington, D.C., and thank you for inviting me.

I was asked to discuss the collaboration of my organization, the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, with the Government of Canada and Microsoft on a joint initiative that brought together leading experts, policy-makers and industry professionals from around the world to produce a practical guide of best practices that key stakeholders in democracies can use to counter foreign interference in elections.

To provide some context to what motivated us to join this partnership with your government, it's worth briefly explaining the genesis of the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

We launched in the summer of 2017 to put Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election into context for American policy-makers and offer solutions on how to better defend our democratic institutions and processes from autocratic threats, not just from Russia but from other state-sponsored actors like China and Iran.

The name “Alliance” was very deliberate. What happened in the United States did not occur in a vacuum. Over many decades, Russian interference has targeted numerous democracies, including several of the U.S. and Canada's allies and partners in Europe. Autocrats' tools of interference, which include cyber-operations, malign finance and information manipulation, among many others, have been refined to exploit modern technologies and target all sectors of democratic society.

We knew that as a civil society organization we had some small role to play in facilitating the exchange of best practices between governments, companies and other civil society organizations, and that we could learn lessons from across sectors and national borders in order to offer guidance to policy-makers and shut down institutional vulnerabilities in our democracy. In this regard, our partnership with the Government of Canada and Microsoft on combatting election interference as part of the French government's Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace was at the heart of what we do.

The compendium of best practices that we published along with the Government of Canada and Microsoft offers reminders of best methods to secure election infrastructure, procedures to ensure voting integrity during the pandemic, transparent ways of communicating with the public about threats to elections, and best practices in building citizen resilience to disinformation. It even highlights examples of Canadian good practice, which include the Canadian Heritage programs to fund civil society initiatives to tackle election-related misinformation and disinformation, and the government-wide critical election incident public protocol. If used as intended, Canada's protocol should be an excellent model of transparency and communication with the public to reduce the likelihood of politicians' manipulating threat information about election interference.

This compendium of best practices is not just in circulation in Canada and the United States, of course. It is being put to good use around the world. Anecdotally, U.S. government colleagues have informed me that they disseminate the compendium to government counterparts in the global south, where many nations are under-resourced and increasingly at the forefront of Russian and Chinese malign influence operations.

In Canada, you do not need me to tell you that foreign interference in democracy remains a serious challenge. The rise in Chinese state-sponsored interference in Canadian democracy through targeting specific ridings and candidates in elections, malign financial coercion and subversion of civil society, including the Chinese Canadian diaspora, have been well documented and on the agenda of your committee, of course. Russian state-sponsored actors have amplified domestic divisions on issues of heightened political sensitivity, including the war in Ukraine, vaccination mandates, the “freedom convoy” in Ottawa and economic hardships facing Canadian voters.

Undermining Canadians' confidence in democratic governance and the integrity of Canadian elections is an overarching objective of these authoritarian regimes. Therefore, the compendium of best practices that we published continues to be a useful guide, not just in Canada but for democracies worldwide. It's illustrative not only of the importance of cataloguing the policies and procedures that can secure elections to rising autocratic threats, but also of the utility of conducting such multi-stakeholder exercises.

No nation, government, company or civil society organization is an island unto itself. By working together as allies and breaking down barriers between governments, industry and civil society, we will be better positioned to secure democratic elections and institutions from an ever-evolving autocratic threat ecosystem.

I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much.

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