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On Oct. 23, with the dust still settling aftet the election, it was quietly announced by the Privy Council Office that there had been no attempted foreign inference in Canada’s democratic process.

While it was reported by several national media outlets, if you blinked you likely missed this particular news item.

That no foreign malign actor even bothered to attempt to further divide Canadians during the 40-day campaign flies in the face of all the fear mongering reports leading up this year’s exercising of our democratic rights.

Last January, the threat was supposedly so real that Canada set up extensive counter-measures in an effort to limit the potential fallout from a coordinated campaign from foreign malign actors abusing social media platforms to spread hate.

In addition to making public appeals for the monitors of popular social media platforms to tighten up their own regulatory processes, the Liberal government also established a tiger team of five senior bureaucrats called the Critical Election Indecent Public Protocol.

This panel was headed by none other than the chief clerk of the Privy Council and included the federal national security adviser, the deputy minister of justice, the deputy minister of public safety and the deputy minister of Global Affairs Canada.

To support this collection of bureaucratic heavyweights, the government also established a special task force featuring the combined resources of Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS), the RCMP, Communications Security Establishment and Global Affairs' very own intelligence branch.

In other words ‘all the kings horses and all the kings men’ were mobilized to protect Canadians.

Despite this mighty defence system being in place last April, Global Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters that she was “very concerned that Russia is meddling” in Canada’s election. She claimed then that there had “already been efforts by malign actors to disrupt our democracy.”

That same month Facebook banned a couple of malign actors from using their social media site. However, both Faith Goldy and the Sons of Odin – the two users banned – are very much homegrown Canadian purveyors of divisive hate.

By September when the official writ was dropped, we had another warning of Russian meddling, this time from a report tabled by the U.S. based Jamestown Foundation think tank. They warned us that Russia would use the election process in Canada to advance Putin’s growing interest in the Arctic.

Well, for whatever reason, we are now being told by our extensive security apparatus that the feared interference never materialized. The foreign malign actors did not disrupt or attempt to disrupt our democracy.

Which means that all the division and hate, which emerged during the election, is on us as Canadians.

In the final days of the campaign, the Globe and Mail reported that the Conservative party hired Warren Kinsella to smear Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada. This is the sort of dirty trick political tactic we would have believed to be beneath Canada’s lofty democratic process. Turns out we’re apparently not above stooping that low.

Post election, we had the shocking incident wherein the campaign office of Liberal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna was vandalized. Red paint was used to convey a vulgarity that does not deserve repeating. That display of hate was not some malign foreign actor tooling about with a keyboard on the dark web. No, it was a real person with an unhinged view of what free speech entails. Trust me, hate speech is not free speech.

However, far more alarming than a bigot with a paint can was the post election rhetoric uttered by none other than Jason Kenney the premier of Alberta. With Trudeau’s Liberals failing to win a seat in Alberta, Kenney has already issued the veiled threat that without some form of reconciliation there will be long term damage to Canada’s national unity. In other words he is threatening to literally divide our nation.

So while the government tiger team of security experts may have indeed saved Canadians from those malign foreign actors, the question now begs who will save us from ourselves?