India, China, Russia and Pakistan could try to interfere in the Canadian general election, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service claimed on Monday.

The snap election is scheduled to take place on April 28.

Vanessa Lloyd, deputy director of operations at the spy service, said during a press conference: “We have also seen that the Government of India has the intent and capability to interfere in Canadian communities and democratic processes to assert its geopolitical influence.”

Canadian and “Canada-based proxies as well as contacts in their networks are increasingly relied on to conduct government of India foreign interference activities,” Lloyd added.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs has not commented on the allegations so far.

Ties between India and Canada have been strained since September 2023 when Justin Trudeau, the prime minister at the time, told his country’s Parliament that Canadian intelligence agencies were actively pursuing “credible allegations” tying agents of the Indian government to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar near Vancouver.

Nijjar was a supporter of Khalistan, an independent Sikh nation sought by some groups. He was the head of the Khalistan Tiger Force, which is designated a terrorist outfit in India. India rejected Trudeau’s allegations as “absurd and motivated”.

The Canadian official said on Monday that China “will likely continue to target Canadian democratic institutions and civil society to advance its strategic objectives”.

Chinese officials and proxies are “likely to conduct” foreign interference activities using a complex array of both overt and covert mechanisms, Lloyd said. “PRC [People’s Republic of China] is also highly likely to use social media and specifically target Chinese ethnic, cultural and religious communities in Canada using clandestine and deceptive means,” she added.

Beijing is also “highly likely” to use artificial intelligence-enabled tools to attempt to interfere in the election, the agency said.

The ties between Ottawa and Beijing have also been strained in recent years. On March 8, China imposed retaliatory tariffs on Canadian agricultural and food products. Canada had imposed levies on Chinese electric vehicles and steel and aluminium products in October.

Lloyd said that Russia had “undertaken sustained efforts to build dissemination networks” across social media platforms and news websites that “repurpose and amplify Kremlin talking points”. Kremlin is often used as a metonym for the Russian government.

The foreign intelligence agency also said that Pakistan “could potentially conduct foreign interference activities against Canada in line with its strategic aims to promote political, security and economic stability in Pakistan and to counter India’s growing global influence”.

Earlier allegations

This is not the first time Ottawa has made allegations of Indian meddling in Canadian elections.

A Canadian inquiry commission in January accused India of interfering in the country’s electoral process by clandestinely providing financial support to political leaders and engaging in disinformation.

The inquiry commission, tasked with investigating “foreign interference in federal electoral processes and democratic institutions”, alleged that India was the second most active country after China that was interfering with Canada’s electoral process.

The external affairs ministry has rejected the commission’s report and alleged that it was in fact Ottawa that was consistently interfering in India’s internal matters.

The Canadian report was the result of an investigation initiated in September 2023 following media reports about alleged meddling by foreign countries in Canada’s general elections in the 2019 and 2021 elections – both of which were won by the Liberal Party.

Canada was scheduled to conduct general elections by October, but the polls were advanced by Mark Carney, who replaced Justin Trudeau as the prime minister on March 14.

During the ruling Liberal Party’s leadership poll campaign, Carney had said that his government would look to diversify Canada’s trading relationships with “like-minded countries” and that “there are opportunities to rebuild the relationship with India”.