Bill C-25 — Strong and Free Elections Act

Bill C-25, the Strong and Free Elections Act, amends the Canada Elections Act with a package of measures on foreign interference, political-party privacy, nomination and leadership contests, political financing, and enforcement. It was introduced on 26 March 2026 by Steven MacKinnon, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, and received royal assent on 18 June 2026 as Statutes of Canada 2026, c. 20.

It is tracked here for its deepfake measure. The Act extends the impersonation offence in section 480.1 of the Canada Elections Act so that it clearly covers false representations made by technological means — a manipulated image, voice imitation, or audio recording of an electoral actor that is likely to be mistaken for the real person and is made or distributed with intent to mislead. "Electoral actors" here means the Chief Electoral Officer and Elections Canada staff, election officers, leaders of registered and eligible parties, candidates and prospective candidates, and nomination and leadership contestants. Equivalent protections were added for nomination and leadership contests, and the impersonation, disinformation, and computer-misuse offences now apply outside the election period and to conduct outside Canada.

Before this amendment the offence turned on misrepresenting identity: it reached someone who falsely represented themselves, or another person, to be an electoral actor. A deepfake of a real party leader falsifies nothing about identity — the person depicted genuinely is the leader — and instead fabricates the words and conduct attributed to them, which an identity-focused offence did not reach. That is the gap the Act closes. There is a defence where the material was manifestly for the purpose of parody or satire.

The Act's reach stops at impersonation of a named electoral actor. AI-generated political content that does not imitate a real electoral actor remains unregulated by the Canada Elections Act — including synthetic footage of fictitious scenes and people used in party advertising, which entered Canadian federal politics during the bill's passage when a June 2026 attack ad used AI-generated video of invented food-bank lineups. Nor does the Act require AI-generated election material to be labelled as such. Commentators have described it as a first step that will need revisiting as the technology moves.

The Act's remaining measures — anonymous and foreign contribution bans, political-party privacy policies and breach notification, higher administrative monetary penalties, expanded powers for the Commissioner of Canada Elections, and changes to ballot length — fall outside this tracker's AI-governance scope and are summarized only in passing.