Canadians were promised a tool to expose who’s working for foreign governments to sway our politics. After years of waiting, the Carney government finally switched it on this summer. Two months later, the public registry listed exactly two entries, the office had already leaked information belonging to a man targeted by Beijing, and enforcement hadn’t started.
That’s not a rocky launch. That’s a registry that exists mostly on paper.
The numbers don’t come close
The Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act passed Parliament in 2024 after years of reports about foreign meddling in Canadian elections. It finally went into effect on Aug. 4, 2026, and anyone with a pre-existing arrangement to influence Canadian officials on behalf of a foreign government had until early October to register.
Public Safety Canada’s own estimate was that 2,422 individuals or entities would need to register. When Foreign Influence Transparency Commissioner Anton Boegman appeared before the House procedure and House affairs committee on Oct. 6, he reported that his office had received about 30 submissions by the deadline. The public registry itself showed just two filings: one for concluded work for the U.S. State Department, and one for an honorary consul of the Republic of Korea.
Conservative MP Michael Cooper put the compliance rate at roughly 1 per cent. The commissioner’s answer? “I believe it has been a positive launch of the registry,” he told MPs.
Nobody’s enforcing it yet
A registry only works if people believe there’s a cost to ignoring it. So Cooper asked the obvious questions: were any notices of violation being issued? Were any investigations open?
Boegman’s reply, from the committee transcript: “We are taking steps to enforce the law. However, we have not yet commenced any work on that side.”
Read that twice. The law has been on the books since 2024. The deadline came and went. And the office responsible for enforcing it says the enforcement work hasn’t begun.
Leaking the wrong person’s file
It gets worse. Retired diplomat and China expert Charles Burton, who has been targeted by the Beijing regime, submitted a registration. The office’s reply went to a third party instead, and Boegman confirmed to MPs that it was a privacy breach. It was one of two privacy breaches his office has had since opening in August.
A follow-up call to discuss the breach with Burton didn’t happen because of a “major technical outage.” Separately, a registration published on the public registry “included some information that should not have been on the registry” and had to be pulled. Cooper said that filing involved a People’s Republic of China principal.
And for people who may be under surveillance by hostile states, the office still has no encrypted channel to contact it. Boegman said one is being set up but gave no date.
$29.4 million for a “minimum viable product”
Public Safety earmarked $29.4 million for the registry’s IT systems. Yet Boegman explained the repeated outages by saying the system had been set up as a “minimum viable product” so it could launch on Aug. 4.
Canadians waited two years for this. They paid tens of millions for the technology. What they got was a bare-bones system that misdirects sensitive emails and goes down when it’s needed.
Missing in action during the Alberta referendum
The timing makes the failure sharper. With Alberta heading to an Oct. 19 referendum, Boegman couldn’t say whether his office had received registrations from anyone working for a foreign government to influence that vote. “I have not yet looked at that information,” he said. “I’m getting briefed on it this week.”
He also said earlier meetings between Alberta independence campaigners and U.S. entities don’t fall under his mandate because they happened before the registry took effect.
Former NDP MP Charlie Angus, who voted for the law, says he raised concerns about U.S. interference in June and got back an email from an unnamed Public Safety official telling him to use an online correspondence form. “This is not a credible institution,” Angus told CBC News. “Why are we paying for this?”
The minister who wasn’t available
The person who should be answering for all this is Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree. He was invited to appear before the committee on Oct. 6. His office said he wasn’t available, and no new date was set.
In question period, he insisted the registry “is already done” and that “those who do not comply will face the full consequences of the law.” His spokesperson called it “only the beginning of the registry’s implementation.”
But “only the beginning” is exactly the problem. Foreign interference didn’t wait for Ottawa’s paperwork, and it isn’t waiting now.
The bottom line
The Carney government talks tough about protecting Canadian sovereignty. Yet when it came to the one tool built specifically to expose foreign agents, it delivered a bare-bones system, about 1 per cent of the expected registrations, two privacy breaches, and no enforcement. A minister too busy to explain it to Parliament is the final insult. Canadians deserve a registry that actually works, and a government that takes foreign influence as seriously as its speeches suggest.
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