Social media companies have certainly invested quite significantly since 2016. One of the things you can read about in their open public communications is the degree to which they've built partnerships with the government. For Canada, I think that for any infrastructure in your country that could be manipulated, that ultimately becomes a very important step for tech companies to take.
If there isn't already an information sharing infrastructure or public-private co-operation mechanism that exists in advance of that election, I would say that we have something called the enduring security framework in the United States, which brings together key IT companies and infrastructure owners and operators with the intelligence community and the national security community to share threat information and design solutions. That's a bit of a longer-term thing, but that's one recommendation.
The second thing I would say is that, at least within our environment, within the United States for our elections systems, election registration is handled by different departments in each state. In those instances where they have not yet done so, organizations need to secure their data centres to prevent people from manipulating the electoral rolls and the registration rolls.
By analogy for Canada, figuring out who manages voter registration and where they store that data and on what server ultimately will help you to make the right investments for manipulating the actual outcome of the election.
I would say that another thing is informing the public very much about what could happen. I think the Department of Justice in the United States was very good at this. Harvard also had a non-profit program that educated secretariats of state across the country in crisis management. You can find that campaign on Harvard's website. It's the defending digital democracy project.