The Foreign Interference That Canada Isn't Tracking

The Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act was passed in 2024, and then Cabinet drafted some proposed regulations, and published the regulations for public consultation in January 2026.

A lot of the ideas that Ottawa is considering are common sense — a better transparency framework and the creation of an independent commissioner to monitor state-sponsored foreign interference.

But there’s one big blind spot in the government’s proposed approach. Canada is not looking at the corporate foreign influence that is increasingly a feature of geopolitics.

(Back in January, Shield submitted a policy brief to the government making this point.)

Ottawa is clearly thinking about foreign governments and their agents acting to influence Canadian policy and undermine our sovereignty.

But foreign companies, billionaires, and NGOs can exert political influence without disclosure if they’re not directly acting on behalf of a foreign government. This gap matters as corporate and national interests increasingly intersect — as we are seeing with the Trump administration and firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta.

Earlier this month, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer complained that Canada’s sovereign cloud policies are a potential trade irritant. This is in line with the U.S. National Security Strategy published last year, where the government explicitly said that its aim is to use a geopolitically dominant position to secure sole-source contracts for American companies.

Is this foreign interference? What about when big technology companies have also sought to influence our policy discourse in deceptive ways?

In 2023 the University of Toronto Law Faculty came under fire for accepting US$450,000 from Amazon to fund research focused on competition and antitrust issues. When UofT was organizing events related to this research, Amazon provided a list of preferred speakers to select from. The Amazon money was not disclosed to faculty members or visiting participants in the program leading to concern about how such gifts might impact academic freedoms.

Academic freedom is not entrenched in Canadian law, but an independent higher education ecosystem is essential to our democracy. Maintaining a healthy academic culture is a more difficult prospect as institutions feel pressure to take donations from big corporations as funding dwindles.

Our current policy frameworks don’t capture this kind of corporate influence. The Lobbying Act doesn’t distinguish foreign from domestic lobbying. The Canada Elections Act only covers election periods. The Investment Canada Act only reviews acquisitions. CSIS must identify a clear security threat to act. There is clearly a no-man’s-land where foreign money is influencing Canadian politics, but nobody is mandated to act. And in fact, the foreign players aren’t even required to disclose their involvement.

So, what’s the solution here?

The issue isn’t clear-cut, and as we’ve illustrated in the past, it’s actually rather complicated to even come up with a firm definition of what a “Canadian” company is, versus a foreign one.

There are some targeted regulatory amendments as part of the foreign influence regulation that would help:

• Require specific disclosure of advocacy work from companies above a defined market-cap threshold;
• Mandate disclosure when lobbying positions closely track a foreign government’s stated policy priorities;
• Prioritize strategic sectors where the sovereignty stakes are highest.

The point is transparency—not prohibition, protectionism, or a blanket suspicion of foreign engagement.

More than anything, though, we think this issue highlights the enormous complexity of creating more resilient and sovereign systems for Canadian democracy.