The warning is contained in briefing documents drafted for Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director David Vigneault in preparation for a meeting he had with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this year.

That meeting focused on the rise of foreign interference in Canada — something CSIS says has become "more sophisticated, frequent, and insidious."

One way foreign states — including the People's Republic of China (PRC) — try to exert pressure on other countries is through media outlets, say the documents, obtained through an access to information request.

"In particular, PRC media influence activities in Canada have become normalized," it reads.

"Chinese-language media outlets operating in Canada and members of the Chinese-Canadian community are primary targets of PRC-directed foreign influenced activities."

CSIS director David Vigneault holds a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday, July 16, 2020. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

CSIS spokesperson John Townsend said foreign states target both mainstream media outlets — print publications, radio and television programs — and non-traditional online outlets and social media channels to pursue their goals.

"Mainstream news outlets, as well as community sources, may also be targeted by foreign states who attempt to shape public opinion, debate, and covertly influence participation in the democratic process," he said.

"Considering Canada's rich multicultural makeup, foreign states may try to leverage or coerce individuals within communities to help influence to their benefit what is being reported by Canadian media outlets."

China has an effective influence network, report finds

It's a tactic former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu said he knows all too well. He said he was targeted during the recent federal election by a misinformation campaign run through Chinese language media outlets and social media.

"If that's the normal behaviour, then we should really become concerned," he said. 

Chiu said he was attacked online as anti-Chinese after introducing a private member's bill that would require agents of foreign governments to register and report on their activities. He lost the B.C. riding of Steveston-Richmond East to Liberal Parm Bains by almost 3,000 votes.

"I just felt, first of all, very sad. I feel ridiculous. I feel sad because some of my fellow Canadians of Chinese descent, why would they even believe in this information?" he said.

Former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu says he felt targeted by misinformation during the last election campaign. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Earlier this year, Alliance Canada Hong Kong — an umbrella group for Hong Kong pro-democracy activists in this country — released a report alleging the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) runs a sophisticated network that inserts Beijing-friendly narratives into various media outlets.

The report says China has been exploiting a lack of oversight in short-staffed newsrooms to push the party line abroad.

It says China sometimes pushes those narratives in the open — through sponsored posts or advertorial inserts written by Chinese party-state media — while groups closely tied to Chinese authorities buy digital or print ads parroting party rhetoric.

"It's meant to portray that it's indicative they're the group that speaks on behalf of all Chinese folks, all the Canadian Chinese, which is just not true," said Ai-Men Lau, an adviser with Alliance Canada Hong Kong.

China also uses its toehold in Canadian ethnic Chinese media to keep journalists in line, she said. 

"For years, reporters in ethnic media are often required to self-censor themselves or face uprisings. We've seen journalists being fired. If they take a certain line, they don't get their columns posted anymore in ethnic media," she said. 

Alliance Canada Hong Kong's report says Beijing influences voices in mainstream media outlets as well.

"In the mainstream media, vocal supporters wooed through elite capture deliver Beijing's messages in op-eds and media appearances, helping to sway popular perceptions," says the report.

The CSIS briefing note said a number of countries (their names are blacked-out in the note) work to undermine Canada's political processes at the federal, provincial and municipal levels, and within Indigenous governments.

'Persistent targeting' ongoing says CSIS

The heavily redacted document says that politicians and party riding associations are targeted by these foreign influence operations, along with members of Chinese-Canadian communities.

Earlier this year, CSIS reported that foreign states were looking to bribe or blackmail voters and politicians. That same report said some such operations also rely on flattery, money and even romantic entanglements to push their agenda.

Ai-Men Lau said she expects to see China's harassment of dissidents abroad continue.

"You see out of Hong Kong, people are leaving and they're leaving because of the national security law. It's kind of like baggage — whether you want it or not, it follows you," she said.

"So that's something that I think Canadian officials or decision makers and policymakers and politicians need to think of when we talk about addressing these issues ... It's going to stay with us for a while."

Townsend said CSIS is reaching out to communities under pressure.

"While I cannot speak in detail about the specifics of our assessments and investigations, I can say that CSIS has observed persistent targeting of specific communities here in Canada, both in person and through the use of online campaigns, by foreign state actors," he said.

'Sunlight' policy needed: Vigneault

In his meeting with Trudeau, Vigneault said Canada has a role to play in calling out media influence tactics in public.

"Canada can make use of a policy that is grounded in transparency and sunlight in order to highlight the point that foreign interference should be exposed to the public and clandestine practices are not equivalent to public diplomacy," the CSIS briefing documents said.

"Various state actors are currently using foreign interference activities with limited impunity to undermine Canada's interests."

Chiu said he wants to see a stronger approach from the federal government.

"The Chinese government controls WeChat, has a monopoly on many Canadians' lives and their ears and their brains ... we need to find a solution to that," he said.

"We also need to monitor and make sure that our regulators ... make sure that ... broadcasters and the commentators are held responsible for this information they help spread, especially during the election or before the election."

Ai-Men Lau also called for more oversight to make sure China isn't manipulating media and threatening journalists.

CSIS said it recently increased its investigative efforts and triggered threat reduction measures — a term referring to its broad legal powers to reduce threats to the security of Canada.

The main restriction on CSIS's threat reduction powers is that the service can't intentionally — or by criminal negligence — cause death or bodily harm, violate sexual integrity or willfully obstruct justice.

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) released a report today — the culmination of more than a year of work — that examines Canada's security posture in the face of new dangers like the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 42-page assessment draws together research, interviews and public comments from senior security officials. It argues that virus outbreaks and destructive climate change events represent a whole new field of national security threats — one that demands more than an ad-hoc approach from the federal government.

"There is an expanded definition of national security out there that we should all be looking at," said Vincent Rigby, who was until recently Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's national security adviser.

"The traditional state-to-state threats that we have seen in the past are no longer [exclusive]. Things like pandemics and COVID-19, things like climate change, those do have national security dimensions."

The report calls on the federal government to build a better "strategic framework." It recommends the establishment of a new cabinet committee on national security chaired by the prime minister, which would have input from the public safety, defence and global affairs departments.

Members of the Canadian Armed Forces help with pandemic response at a long-term care home in Montreal on May 16, 2020. (Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press)

Some would say that's what election campaigns are all about. Seasoned pols will tell you there are no votes to be won in Weyburn, Saskatchewan with talk about freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.

But many experts say the reluctance of Canada's campaigning leaders to address the changing geopolitical landscape and the threats it may produce is myopic and dangerous — especially now, with the country slowly recovering from a foreign-spawned global pandemic that brought life as we knew it to a standstill.

'The world is a pretty angry place'

Those experts say they'd hoped the alarming world events of the past 18 months would force the campaigning parties to think and talk about national security and how Canada can protect its interests globally. It didn't happen.

"We're coming to this realization that the world is a pretty angry place," said Aaron Shull, managing director and general counsel at the Centre for International Governance and Innovation.

"Countries don't have friends. We have alliances and strategic interests, but we are now coming to the realization that we have to make our place in the world."

     A nuclear-powered Type 094A Jin-class ballistic missile submarine of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy is seen during a military display in the South China Sea on April 12, 2018. (Reuters)

Shull and University of Ottawa historian Wesley Wark are co-leading a project that hopes to re-imagine Canada's national security strategy.

Wark is one of the country's leading intelligence experts and has been a vocal critic of Canada's failures in pandemic preparation. He examined the foreign policy planks of each major party and found all of them wanting.

Vague, scattershot approaches to foreign policy

The Conservatives produced the most exhaustive list of promises but they were scattered and unfocused, said Wark. 

"None of the parties have a central coherent statement on national security. What is it? What does it mean to us?" said Wark. He summarized the Liberal government's position as status quo, while saying the NDP made some general pledges without a lot of specifics.

The Liberal platform contained no dedicated national security section — a puzzling omission, given the fact that the previous Trudeau governments spent enormous amounts of time and energy dealing with the fallout from external events: the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and the pandemic.

     A health worker takes a nasal swab sample of a Kashmiri to test for COVID-19 in Srinagar, Indian-controlled Kashmir, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021. (Dar Yasin/Associated Press)

Still, said Wark, a lot of thought is being given within government to reorganizing the national security framework. He said there is some "enthusiasm" on the part of senior bureaucrats for the project.

He said he hopes that revamped framework includes climate change and pandemics in a new definition of what represents a threat to this country's interests.

Reacting after the fact

Shull pointed out that, unlike other nations, Canada does not have a permanent cabinet committee to deal with national security matters.

"We tend not to treat national security issues with seriousness at the political level in the public discourse," he said.

"The pinnacle of national security in this country is the incident response group. It's an ad hoc committee of cabinet that meets on a periodic basis, but here's the thing — incident response by definition means you're already on your back foot. It means something is happening and you're responding."

Put simply, Shull said, what he and Wark are proposing is a new national security council, or some other body that would allow Canada "to lean into the world and not always be responding."

Afghan refugees are shown in an Italian Red Cross camp in Avezzano, Italy, on Aug. 31. (Andrew Medichini/The Associated Press)

He said the Trudeau government needs to ask itself what Canada's "core interests" are and how best to protect them.

Canada has not had a national security strategy since 2004. Shull said that means Canada doesn't have a current strategy.

AUKUS might be the catalyst that starts those discussions in Ottawa, Wark said — but first they'll have to overcome the widely-held belief in government circles that the Canadian public doesn't care about national security.

"It is a belief that is convenient to political cadres because national security discussions are often hard and complex," he said.

But COVID-19 itself was an external threat in the beginning. If anything, the pandemic might serve to convince Canadians that the time to have this conversation is now, Wark said.

It could take up to seven years for the Canadian military's recruitment efforts to recover from the fallout of both the sexual misconduct crisis and the pandemic, says the country's acting chief of the defence staff.

Speaking Monday at the Kingston Conference on International Security, Gen. Wayne Eyre said he's increasingly worried about the decline in the size of both the regular and reserve forces. He said he's particularly alarmed at the number of experienced leaders — officers and noncommissioned officers — who are putting in their release notices and quitting the service.

The matter was discussed as late as last week at a command-level gathering. Eyre said he's encouraging his senior leaders to stay and asking them to urge others to do the same.

"We need our mid-level leaders to dig deep and do this for the institution, to put service before self, not to retreat into retirement but to advance forward and face the challenges head-on," Eyre said in answer to a question about leadership during the virtual forum.

While leading during good times is relatively easy, Eyre said, the military now faces the challenge of rooting out a culture of misconduct and leadership impunity.

Eyre's remarks suggest he's had encounters with low morale among officers — the people he said he needs to rebuild the institution in the wake of the sexual misconduct crisis.

"Many of our senior leaders are looking up and saying, 'Yes, I don't want to be there.' But we need them," he said.

Eyre's predecessor as chief of defence staff, retired general Jonathan Vance, was charged by military police in July with one count of obstruction of justice in relation to an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Recent months have seen an almost relentless series of allegations of sexual misconduct touching the most senior ranks — including Eyre's predecessors, Admiral Art McDonald and retired general Jonathan Vance.

Nearly a dozen leaders have been accused of either sexual impropriety or of downplaying abhorrent behaviour. That's left many military officers and non-commissioned officers looking for the exit.

Eyre has described the brain-drain an "existential crisis" and a matter of national security.

The 'missing middle'

Compounding the problem for the Armed Forces is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has constrained both recruiting and training.

Eyre presented the defence conference with figures on Monday that show the full-time military is 7,500 people short of its required strength — an enormous gap in a regular force of around 70,000.

"And these are the heart of our command structure, the 'missing middle'– master corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, captains, majors, master sailors, petty officers, lieutenant commanders," he said. "All vital leadership roles, both in the field and as we address the existential imperative of changing our internal culture."

Stefanie von Hlatky, associate professor of political studies at Queen's University, said recruiting and retention were already major challenges for the Armed Forces before the pandemic and the latest episode of the misconduct crisis.

It doesn't help, she said, that two of the leaders who were supposed to oversee policies related to growing the Armed Forces have been either removed or sidelined because of misconduct claims.

"Leadership churn in the command tasked with overseeing recruitment and retention obviously isn't helping solve these broader personnel strains," she said, referring to the cases of Vice-Admiral Haydn Edmundson and Lt.-Gen. Steve Whelan.

Eyre said he's working on a recruitment plan and Von Hlatky said it seems tailored to address urgent personnel shortages.

There will still be challenges, she said.

"In convincing service members to stay rather than retire, Gen. Eyre will have to provide some compelling incentives because there is this dual challenge," she said. "The CAF is in crisis internally and out there, the competition for talent is fierce."

The Public Service Alliance of Canada represents 2,400 employees working in cryptography, applied mathematics, advanced language analysis and cybersecurity at the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). PSAC announced the results of the vote Wednesday.

"They perform vital work protecting Canada from foreign cyber and attacks, foreign hacking attempts," Alex Silas, PSAC's regional executive vice-president for the National Capital Region, told CBC News.

"For example, things that we saw this past July, there was an attempt to hack Canadian COVID-19 research. These are the workers that stopped that."

CSE, one of Canada's key intelligence agencies, employs about 2,900 people and is responsible for foreign intelligence and cybersecurity.

The vote comes nearly two years after talks stalled on a collective agreement. At issue is a change to the market allowance —  a wage supplement negotiated to close pay gaps with workers doing similar work in the private sector. It's a benefit often used to attract employees into highly technical jobs in the public service.

"CSE management is refusing to apply a wage increase to the portion of workers' salaries that is made up of market allowances," said Silas.

"To give you an idea, for some of these workers [that] represents as much as 10 per cent of their annual income. So it's a significant financial loss."

The vote does not mean workers are heading for the picket lines.

"We are now ramping up preparations and coordinating with our members to determine the precise actions that will be taken and their timing. But we emphasize that strike action can still be avoided if CSE management comes back to the table and steps away from its concession or agrees to arbitration," said PSAC spokesperson Alroy Fonseca.

CSE says services will continue

Christopher Williams, director general of CSE public affairs and communications services, said CSE's executive management team continues to work toward a resolution with the union.

"However, we can tell you that essential service agreements are in place to ensure that all areas of CSE have the people at work necessary to continue to provide for the safety and security of the public in the event of a strike," he said in an email to CBC News.

CSE has been sounding the alarm about the threat of cyber attacks on research facilities and the health care sector during the pandemic. It was one of the intelligence agencies that stated a hacker group backed by Russia "almost certainly" tried to steal COVID-19-related vaccine research in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.

Late last year, CSE warned that state-sponsored actors are "very likely" trying to shore up their cyber capabilities to attack Canada's critical infrastructure — such as the electricity supply — to intimidate or to prepare for future online assaults.

While the lights will remain on, the union says the agency will lose workers if it doesn't offer competitive salaries.

"What does it say about how we prioritize national security?" said Silas. "If CSE as an employer, as management, doesn't recognize the need to pay these workers a fair market rate, how are we going to attract and retain the talent needed for the important work of keeping Canadians safe from cyber attacks?"

"As physical infrastructure and processes continue to be connected to the internet, cyber threat activity has followed, leading to increasing risk to the functioning of machinery and the safety of Canadians," says a new national cyber threat assessment drafted by the Communications Security Establishment.

"We judge that state-sponsored actors are very likely attempting to develop the additional cyber capabilities required to disrupt the supply of electricity in Canada."

Today's report — the second from the agency's Canadian Centre for Cyber Security wing — looks at the major cyber threats to Canadians' physical safety and economic security.

The CSE does say in the report that while it's unlikely cyber threat actors would intentionally disrupt critical infrastructure — such as water and electricity supplies — to cause major damage or loss of life, they would target critical organizations "to collect information, pre-position for future activities, or as a form of intimidation."

Such preliminary attacks have happened already.

The report said Russia-associated actors probed the networks of electricity utilities in the U.S. and Canada last year and Chinese state-sponsored cyber threat actors have targeted U.S. utility employees. Other countries have seen their industrial control systems targeted by Iranian hacking groups and North Korean malware was found in the IT networks of an Indian power plant, it said.

The threat grows as more critical infrastructure goes high-tech.

Commercial espionage is already happening across a range of fields, says the CSE. (Shutterstock / Motortion Films)

In the past, the operational technology (OT) used to control dams, boilers, electricity and pipeline operations has been largely immune to cyberattacks — but that's changing as manufacturers incorporate newer information technology in their systems and products, says the report.

That technology might make things easier and lower costs, but it comes with risks, said Scott Jones, the head of the cyber centre.

"So that means now it is a target, it is accessible and it's vulnerable. So what you could see is shutting off of transmission lines, you can see them opening circuit breakers, meaning electricity simply won't flow to our homes to our business," he told reporters Wednesday.

While the probability of such attacks remains low, Jones said the goal of Wednesday's briefing is to send out the early warnings.

"We're not trying to scare people. We're certainly not trying to scare people into going off grid by building a cabin in the woods. We're here to say, 'Let's tackle these now while they're still paper, while they're still a threat we're writing down.'"

Steve Waterhouse, a former cybersecurity officer for the Department of National Defence who now teaches at Université de Sherbrooke, said a saving grace for Canada could be the makeup of its electrical systems.

"Since in Canada, they're very centralized, it's easier to defend ... while down in the States, they have multiple companies all around the place. So the weakest link is very hard to identify where it is, but the effect is a cascading effect across the country ... And it could impact Canada, just like we saw in the big Northeastern power outage, the blackout of 2003," he said.

"So that goes to say, we have to be prepared. And I believe most energy companies have been taking extra measures to protect and defend against these type of attacks."

In the future, attacks targeting so-called smart cities and internet-connected devices, such as personal medical devices, could also put Canadians at risk, says the report. 

Earlier this year, for example, Health Canada warned the public that medical devices containing a particular Bluetooth chip — including pacemakers, blood glucose monitors and insulin pumps — are vulnerable to cyber attacks that could crash them.

The foreign signals intelligence agency also says that while state-sponsored programs in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea "almost certainly" pose the greatest state-sponsored cyber threats to Canadian individuals and organizations, many other states are rapidly developing their own cyber programs.

Waterhouse said he was glad to see the government agency call out the countries by name, representing a shift in approach in recent years.

"To tackle on and be ready to face a cyber-attack, you have to know your enemy," he said.

"You have to know what's vulnerable inside of your organization. You have to know how ... vulnerable it is against the threats that are out there."

Commercial espionage continues

State-sponsored actors will also continue their commercial espionage campaigns against Canadian businesses, academia and governments to steal Canadian intellectual property and proprietary information, says the CSE.

"We assess that these threat actors will almost certainly continue attempting to steal intellectual property related to combating COVID-19 to support their own domestic public health responses or to profit from its illegal reproduction by their own firms," says the "key judgments" section of the report.

"The threat of cyber espionage is almost certainly higher for Canadian organizations that operate abroad or work directly with foreign state-owned enterprises."

The Communications Security Establishment Canada is pictured in Ottawa on October 15, 2013. The agency's latest threat assessment report looks at the major cyber risks threatening Canadians' physical safety and economic security. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

The CSE says such commercial espionage is happening already across multiple fields, including aviation, technology and AI, energy and biopharmaceuticals.

While state-sponsored cyber activity tends to offer the most sophisticated threats, CSE said that cybercrime continues to be the threat most likely to directly affect Canadians and Canadian organizations, through vectors like online scams and malware.

"We judge that ransomware directed against Canada will almost certainly continue to target large enterprises and critical infrastructure providers. These entities cannot tolerate sustained disruptions and are willing to pay up to millions of dollars to quickly restore their operations," says the report.

Cybercrime becoming more sophisticated 

According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, Canadians lost over $43 million to cybercrime last year. The CSE reported earlier this year that online thieves have been using the COVID-19 pandemic to trick Canadians into forking over their money — through scams like a phishing campaign that claimed to offer access to a Canada Emergency Response Benefit payment in exchange for the target's personal financial details.

Online foreign influence activities — a dominant theme in the CSE's last threat assessment briefing — continue and constitute "a new normal" in international affairs as adversaries seek to influence domestic and international political events, says the agency.

"We assess that, relative to some other countries, Canadians are lower-priority targets for online foreign influence activity," it said.

"However, Canada's media ecosystem is closely intertwined with that of the United States and other allies, which means that when their populations are targeted, Canadians become exposed to online influence as a type of collateral damage."

According to the agency's own definition, "almost certainly" means it is nearly 100 per cent certain in its analysis, while "very likely" means it is 80-90 per cent certain of its conclusions. The CSE says its analysis is based off of a mix of confidential and non-confidential intelligence and sources.