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Karina Gould, the minister of democratic institutions, Ralph Goodale, the minister of public safety, and Harjit Sajjan, the minister of national defence, pointed to examples of foreign meddling and told reporters that one-fifth of the tweets in the last month of the U.S. presidential election were generated by bots. International security agencies say the U.K.’s Brexit referendum was fraught with disinformation and then there’s the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data scandal. Both international and Canadian intelligence services say Canada is not immune to such threats.

As a result, the government is establishing a supposedly non-partisan, five-member panel of senior bureaucrats to inform candidates, election officials and groups if they have been a target of an attack

NDP MP Nathan Cullen says since all of those bureaucrats are appointed by the Prime Minister, the Chief Electoral Officer — who is appointed by Parliament — should be included. That’s a valid idea.

But, what’s bizarre about this is the government is not mandating that Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites proactively work to block bots from posting fake news. Rather, the feds are just asking these increasingly suspect platforms for their good will and only plan to inform Canadians after the damage to an election has already occurred or is occurring.

Stephanie Kusie, the federal Conservative’s democratic reform critic and the MP for Calgary Midnapore, says detecting cyber attacks is as difficult as detecting free radicals or radiation: “You know it’s out there, but you don’t know how it’s coming at you.