I'm sorry, Madam Chair. I would really not want to involve you in any discussion between me and my wife and Mr. Del Mastro's wife regarding our obsessive use of Facebook. Especially coming home on Saturday morning and going on it before kissing the kids has caused me much grief that I'd like to confess right now. I feel it is something that.... Let that be a warning to all young political staffers out there. Before you move up into the political realm, do not become addicted. I think this is the danger.
Saying that, Madame Chair, I also think it is an issue in terms of the danger, the two-thumbs approach to blowing your political career apart in this realm we live in. Before, you actually had to go and type up a press release and then actually send it out on a fax machine. So usually sober second thought would intervene. I've seen too many people do too many dumb things, and sometimes they don't mean to.
Mr. Del Mastro and I were on a committee last year where people were tweeting in the committee and making comments. Both Mr. Del Mastro and I rose on points of privilege, on the issue that we have to show a certain level of respect to each other. Twitter makes it too easy to throw rocks. I have a deep concern about the rock-throwing ability in Twitter and the anonymity. I share that with Mr. Del Mastro. I do think it is an outrageous world we're living in. But I don't know.... And this is why I guess I go back to the point of Facebook and Twitter.
If don't know if there's a step back from this digital Rubicon that we've crossed. We live in a new world where every morning I wake up and I've got 30 people tweeting me, and some days six of them are sending me hate messages. In a previous world, if they phoned me at home and sent me a hate message on the phone, I could call the parliamentary precinct and say, "Hey, I'm getting phone messages from somebody in Regina who is sending me hate messages". On Twitter, it seems to be a different realm.
But I don't know, having crossed that digital Rubicon, whether that is again the purview of our committee. We have found a situation where we've opened a Pandora's box here and I'm suggesting to my colleagues that we need to be very prudent about this because it does go back to the issues of free speech. It does go back to the issues of open government.
If we are going to go down this road, which I firmly believe is not something we want to do, for the issues of the staffer who lost his job, that's something I feel, or for the minister who's been exposed because of a divorce and what happened to him. But then also it's about the general principle—this is what we're talking about—the general principle that in the digital realm staffers who will be on Twitter and on Facebook will be exposed.
Madame Chair, just before closing, I want to point out how dramatically the world has changed. Last week I was in Rome for the investiture of Cardinal Collins. I saw a Capuchin monk talking on a cellphone in the church, and I was astounded. I looked around me and I saw people twittering during mass, with the Pope sitting 15 feet from us. When I was young, if that happened to me, my mother would have smacked me so hard I would have been out, and the nuns would have smacked me. It would have been game over.
But here I was with all these pilgrims and they were all on Twitter and they were all texting each other that they were there at a mass. I was astounded by that, Madam Chair. I thought this is a whole different world from what we were in five or ten years ago, that the people at St. Peter's Basilica were not living in the moment. They were letting everybody know they were there.
I say, as a former altar boy, that's cool. I admit I took a few quick little video clips myself just to prove I was actually in the building. I think we've crossed the digital Rubicon. I don't think there's a way we can bring this back. I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle. We don't put the lion back in the cage. It's the world we live in. We are going to be tested as parliamentarians in the coming years very sorely by the growing power of digital media to create campaigns, to intervene, to affect us. So we have to separate that.
This is why the issue of anonymous is a fair separation to go to the procedure and House affairs committee, but the issue of staffers making cracks or releasing information that might embarrass us, I don't think that's the purview. So if we're going to go down there, then I will support my honourable colleague and say that I think we're going to have to look at Facebook too. But I do that under the warning that I think we are going down a dangerous road. I'll leave that until we get to the next round.
