I know we're later going to be discussing the witness list for the study of the growing Facebook scandal. I am concerned, and want to put it on the record for my colleagues to think about it. Right now in the United Kingdom, the question of whether the Facebook platform was used illegally to undermine the Brexit vote, and possibly change the Brexit vote, may have a direct Canadian link to Jeff Silvester and the work that AIQ did. It's my understanding that Mr. Silvester, because of jurisdictional limitations, is refusing to testify before the U.K. committee.
However, it would be well within the mandate of our committee to call Mr. Silvester to testify because of the power of the third party operators to misuse personal data and possibly undermine the Brexit leave vote. To that end, if we agree to bring him to testify, which we could by subpoena if necessary, we should make the U.K. committee aware of our work so that the U.K. committee, if it has questions about how the referendum was undermined by this misuse of the Facebook platform, could provide us with briefing notes as well, so that we could get this thing done.
We're talking about something that's much broader in terms of potential impact on the democratic process than we've looked at in the past. There would be an urgency to it, and I would certainly be looking to my colleagues to say it would be well worth our while to reach out to the U.K. committee at this time.