This article was first published by The Toronto Star
Canada now has a “Foreign Influence Transparency Registry,” announced Aug. 4 by Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree. This comes after efforts that began as far back as December 2022, forged in a cauldron of public, often sensational, concerns about Chinese political interference.
The Canadian registry joins schemes to address foreign influence activities already present in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. The U.S. regime is the oldest, dating back to 1938. The U.K.’s is the most recent, having come into force in July 2025, while Australia introduced its system in December 2018. Canada, in constructing its new registry, had lots of lessons to draw on. We placed our bet on the Australian model. The reason for this has never been clear, especially in light of criticisms as to that model’s ineffectiveness and tendency toward overreach.
Anton Boegman, the Canadian registry’s first commissioner, has plainly stated it will neither “solve foreign interference in Canada” nor identify overt foreign influence or acts of transnational repression. Those tasks will remain within the purview of CSIS and other elements of our national-security system. Instead, the registry will, as Boegman put it, increase transparency “around legitimate activities.” In other words, it will mostly catch the good guys.
The foreign influence registry is not targeted specifically against identified malicious foreign state actors such as Russia and China. It is — in a polite, Canadian way — country-agnostic, not a blacklist of the sort that had once so concerned officials in the public safety ministry. The Canadian scheme failed to adopt the U.K.’s two-tiered approach, which allows the British government to designate foreign states of concern and focus the registry’s attention on them.
Instead, the scope of the registry is very broad, arguably too broad. If you go to its new website, for instance, you are greeted with a simple questionnaire to help you determine whether you need to register. It asks: “Are you or your entity undertaking activities to influence a political or governmental process in Canada at the federal, provincial, territorial, or municipal level?”
Your choices: yes, no, not sure. I suspect many first-time visitors will check the “not sure” box.
If you do, you’ll be asked whether you are an exempt official or have an “arrangement” with any foreign entity or government. (An arrangement can be almost anything; it need not be formalized or documented.) Then you get to the final, key question about your activities, which may include communicating with Canadian public office holders at any level of government, “organizing public meetings or advocacy efforts,” sharing or publishing information “related to a political or governmental process” (including on social media) and providing services.
That’s a very broad, problematic, speech-chilling and vexatious net the government has cast, one that needn’t have anything to do with malicious foreign influence or activities contrary to Canada’s interests. Any kind of harms test is missing. Say I had a conversation with a visiting NATO delegation and decided to write something in favour of a particular defence policy that I believed Canada should adopt — or say I’d had discussions with the Ukrainian ambassador to Canada and decided to advocate that Canada provide more assistance to Ukraine. Registration would await me. And if I failed to register, I might face a steep fine.
There is a case to be made, and it’s been made in other jurisdictions, that foreign influence registries can deter malign activity. It’s just a hard case to prove. The new U.K. scheme also argues that it will provide informational openings for targeted action by security agencies. Again, it’s hard to say whether this will prove true.
What is certain is that Canada’s influence registry will be a costly and resource-intensive bureaucratic machine. The money allotted to it could arguably have been better spent on bolstering the capabilities of CSIS and the RCMP, enhancing public education (the very best deterrent) and improving outreach to and engagement with those communities in Canada that have been most affected by foreign interference.
And one other thing is certain: changes to the registry will be required at some point down the road. Even Boegman has acknowledged this fact: “It will need to be tweaked, and it will need to be updated as it is implemented, as we see how it … covers the activities that are supposed to be covered.”
That’s honest talk, and a lot more of it will be necessary to convince Canadians of the real — not merely symbolic — value of this new registry.
