Bill C-70 Is Not Enough: Canada Needs Media Literacy in Schools and Real Rules for Platforms
The Foreign Interference Commission identified disinformation as the single greatest threat to Canadian democracy, yet Ottawa’s signature legislation barely touches it.
Canada needs to build resilience against disinformation by strengthening media literacy and holding platforms accountable for how harmful content spreads.
Professor of Political Science at the Université du Québec à Montréal
Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue did not mince words in her final report on the public inquiry into foreign interference. Released in 2025, the report called information manipulation, whether foreign or domestic, “the single biggest risk to our democracy” and an “existential threat” requiring further work. Yet when the federal government produced Bill C-70, the Countering Foreign Interference Act, it largely skipped over the disinformation problem altogether. The bill modernizes the CSIS Act, creates a foreign agents registry, and gives the courts new instruments to punish clandestine activities on behalf of foreign states. These are useful tools, but they are not the right tools for the threat the Commissioner spent two years studying.
This gap should worry anyone who watched the inquiry. Foreign actors did target the 2019 and 2021 elections at the riding and nomination level, although the Commission concluded that general election results were not changed. Yet, the Commission also concluded that the deeper damage from foreign interference does not come from busing students to a nomination meeting. It comes from disinformation that polarizes the public and corrodes trust in institutions. Despite its conclusion, more than 80 percent of the Commission’s recommendations still focus on the machinery of federal institutions: intelligence, police, departmental coordination, Elections Canada. The category the Commission calls “civic resilience” gets less attention than it warrants.Civic resilience reaches two actors who actually play a decisive role in whether a disinformation campaign succeeds: the citizen-consumer and the social media platform.
What Ottawa is Already Doing, and Where it Stops
Canada is not doing nothing. The Government of Canada’s “Plan to Protect Democracy” rests on four pillars: citizen preparedness, organizational readiness, combatting foreign interference, and a healthy information ecosystem. The government put in place a number of initiatives to achieve it. The Critical Election Incident Public Protocol and the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force monitor each campaign and inform the public of credible threats. The Protecting Democracy Unit inside the Privy Council Office and the National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator inside Public Safety Canada coordinate the federal response. The Rapid Response Mechanism shares intelligence with G7 partners, the EU, NATO, and observer states. The Digital Citizen Initiative at Canadian Heritage funds research and civil society work on resilience. The 2018 Elections Modernization Act forces platforms to keep a political advertising registry. The Online Harms Act, Bill C-63, was tabled in 2024 but died on the order paper when Parliament dissolved ahead of the 2025 federal election.
What Canada has assembled, in other words, is a multifaceted approach that mixes tactics and regulatory styles. What it has not assembled is anything that meaningfully addresses how disinformation is consumed, and how disinformation is circulated.
Ottawa cannot do much about the production of disinformation. The cost of producing it is already low, and artificial intelligence is driving it lower. An intervention with any weight has to happen further down the chain.
Build the Immune System: Media Literacy in Schools
The reason disinformation works is that it lands on people who are already primed to believe it. The research is consistent: pre-existing attitudes, partisanship, and polarization predict both who accepts disinformation and who resists being debunked. Once a person is radicalized into an alternate reality, the conventional debunking tools mostly fail. Hence, the leverage lies upstream before foreign influence campaigns hit.
Finland’s National Media Education Policy, adopted in 2019, runs media literacy through every level of public education from pre-school onward. Children learn how information ecosystems work, how to spot falsehoods, and how platform incentives shape what they see. Finland now ranks first in Europe on resilience against misinformation. Sweden, the Netherlands, Latvia, and a growing list of American states have taken similar steps; Canada has not.
Canadian federalism makes a single national curriculum impossible since education sits with the provinces. But Ottawa can build a framework, fund it, and work with provincial, territorial, and Indigenous partners to adapt it. The Digital Citizen Initiative already funds ad hoc work in this area. Formalizing the effort would consolidate expertise that academic and civil society partners have already developed.
Regulate the Circulation, Not the Speech
The other leverage point is the platform. The assumption that the invisible hand of the information market will sort this out is delusional, and platform self-regulation has consistently demonstrated its limits.
The EU’s Digital Services Act requires very large online platforms to identify, analyse, and mitigate systemic risks, including those tied to electoral processes. Platforms must stand up dedicated election teams, ease access to official information, label content from foreign state entities, configure their recommender systems so that disinformation gets less amplification, and demonetize disinformation. Independent auditors verify compliance, and certified “trusted flaggers” from civil society feed the system. Non-compliance can cost six percent of global annual turnover.
Stronger regulation is not censorship. The DSA explicitly favours measures like algorithmic down-ranking and demonetization over deplatforming, precisely because they limit the reach of disinformation without policing speech. Taiwan offers another model: posts containing disinformation are greyed out and labelled, the user has to click through, and the labelling itself becomes a teaching moment. The post stays up, but the amplification stops.
We can expect opposition to regulation. The Conservative Party opposed the Online Harms Act and would likely oppose any DSA-style regime. Civil liberties groups including Amnesty International and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association have warned that the Online Harms Act risks chilling lawful speech. Those concerns are legitimate and should shape the final outcome, but they do not justify keeping the status quo, which leaves the consumption and circulation of foreign disinformation to a self-regulating private market that has shown it will not regulate itself.
There is no silver bullet here. Media literacy and platform regulation will not address transnational repression, the role of encrypted messaging apps, or the way Canadian politicians normalize polarizing rhetoric. But they can target two stages of the disinformation process where Canadian governments actually have authority to act. Bill C-70 was a start; treating it as the finish line is a choice Canada cannot afford.
Their recent article, “Countering foreign disinformation: Building a resilient Canadian democracy through stronger education and regulation,” is published in International Journal and available here.
