The Minister reiterated the government's expectation that it expects social media companies to take concrete actions to help safeguard this fall's election. The members of this committee on both sides of the table lack confidence in any of the social media companies to do what they profess. As has been said here today, their focus is on growing their business plans and profitability, not on protecting privacy. We've heard that from the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, the British Columbia privacy commissioner, the U.K. privacy commissioner, and any number of other individuals. The bad faith some of the social media companies have demonstrated in appearing before us I think prompted the question: why does the Minister have to wait six months when we have very little confidence and expectation that they will behave better?
I'll give an example. Last year when Mr. Chan first appeared before us I asked a question. During the course of our meeting a viewer, a follower, emailed and asked about the Russian false posting in Latvia, which used old pictures of an infamous Canadian convicted military officer wearing a woman's bikini. The message on that email warned Latvians that Canadian soldiers leading the battle group task force in Latvia would attempt to encourage homosexuality among Latvians. Mr. Chan said he didn't know anything about that. More than a month later my office communicated with him again and said that the posting we talked about when he was at committee was still up. Although Mr. Chan, and certainly the Facebook employees who were watching the many monitors that he references, obviously did nothing until we prompted again a month later, three days later it was taken down. Again, do any of you at that table really have the confidence in the social media, that I believe members of this committee do not have, to prevent the sorts of things that we fear may well happen during the election process?