Thank you very much, Chair and committee members, for the invitation.
I'd like to start by saying that I'm intrigued at how, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the civilized world talked about the massive violations of international law, including humanitarian law. However, when cyber-attacks take place, there's little discussion of what laws are at play there. Let me say up front that in my view that is not a law-free zone. Part of my presentation today is to first of all talk about what's happening and then suggest ways in which we can insert a legal framework for these types of attacks, both domestically and internationally, starting with the present-day attacks and looking at future attacks by Russia.
We saw recently an attack on Global Affairs, which essentially halted several of it operations, and they had to bring in CSE to repair them. What I find intriguing is that just a month before, CSE had put out a bulletin that actually warned that there could be Russian-backed actors involved in many of the attacks, not just in Canada but around the world. I found it really intriguing that in that bulletin CSE was saying that while there had been “intrusions”—and that's the word they used—into critical infrastructure, manufacturing, health care and energy, there was possibly no real attempt to actually create disruptions in those areas unless there were international hostilities.
Well, I'm sure President Putin thinks there are international hostilities between Canada and Russia at the moment. Therefore we should be looking at Russia throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Ukraine, especially in the banking area, and that should give us a warning as to what “kitchen sink” could be coming here to Canada, given what Russia is doing in the Balkans, in Ukraine, etc.
What has been our reaction? Many of the previous presentations have pointed out the need to have proactive measures to stop this. I won't go into those. I think one of the key things we have to do is to start thinking about working with our allies not just to present a warning, in terms of politics or in terms of potential countermeasures, but also to frame it in the context that this is a grave violation of international law, including potentially humanitarian law if those attacks take place at hospitals or on water supplies, for example, which could possibly endanger many lives in grave violation of international humanitarian law.
Finally, before my time runs out, another area I think we should focus on is the grave impact of disinformation. As a recent official of Global Affairs said, the Russian trolls are blanketing Canada with disinformation, especially in those areas in which they think they can create the most massive distrust of government, and most recently those have included vaccines, vaccine mandates and other areas that could potentially result in the distrust of government and therefore, hopefully, distrust of what Canada is doing in supporting Ukraine.
Let me say that while many people may say it's not causing actual damage and so on, we need focus only on what's happened in the United States and in New Zealand, on that type of disinformation, especially the hateful type of disinformation such as the replacement theory, to see that it does cause death and does cause injuries.
One of the things I'm advocating is that in the absence of our having a domestic law dealing with online harms, we should be seriously thinking about how we can link in with, for example, the European Union, which is now putting forward a digital services act that would focus on the platforms themselves and put the onus on the platforms to have annual assessments and independent audits, and ultimately to back those up with a regulatory framework that could potentially have massive fines.
I know there could be lots of problems if we proposed such a law, in terms of, potentially, a massive backlash with respect to freedom of expression, but I think it's time we started looking at what the European Union is suggesting.
Finally, to finish off my presentation, I think we need to now think about working with our allies to present a collective security framework. When any of our allies is attacked, we would present a collective security framework equivalent to article 9 of the NATO Treaty and present that to Russia, to China and to other foreign states to say we will potentially respond with our collective strength and that could very well be the ultimate deterrent to some of these countries.
I'll leave it at that.