Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's good that you could be with us here today, Mr. Wylie. You are certainly a whistle-blower of some note, and your comments a couple of months ago, saying “It is extremely uncomfortable to consider that our democracy may have been corrupted”, have resonated and sparked investigations like that of our committee today. I would also note that over the years you have been a participant—an architect, if you will—of the dark art of psychographic micro-targeting and, I think, in some ways comparable to the arsonist who sets the blaze and then calls the fire department.
On January 2, 2016, you sent an email to Mr. Cummings, who you had briefed on the Leave project—the Brexit vote, the referendum in the U.K.—and followed up asking for an early meeting to consider the proposal you made, again, as you said, your in-depth technical briefing on psychographic micro-targeting. However, you also said in that email to Mr. Cummings, “Some of us will be in Ottawa this month”—January 2016—“working on a similar project for a major Canadian political party.” We know now that this was the Liberal Party of Canada, and I'll come back to that later on in my questions over the next couple of hours.
I'd like to go back a decade, though, and just establish a little bit of ground information. Is it correct that you worked in the office of the Liberal leader under Stéphane Dion and Michael Ignatieff between 2007 and 2009 and launched a project that was described as “information management”?