Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, colleagues.
While there will always be an enumerable list of important issues that we need to cover and explore and, in many cases, rehash and review, I share Mr. Fergus's concern about our not getting to the matters of the day.
In my own riding of York Centre, the digital space is a terrifying one. It's filled with hate. It's filled with anti-Semitism. It's filled with inciting language that disrupts the lives of many constituents in my community. They are are asking us time and again how we, as a government, find the fine line in making sure that freedom of speech is available to every constituent in the digital space they use, while at the same time making sure that communities and their narratives and sense of safety are there, not only in their day-to-day lives out on the street, but also in the digital [Technical difficulty—Editor] how their information is accessed, who is seeing it and so on and so forth.
We're not getting to those important conversations while the rhetoric and the temperature in the digital space continues to become hotter and hotter. We're not really taking the time in this important forum to table those discussions.
I agree there are things that we take a day on here or there, but things like AI, facial recognition, public access to information, how the digital space is used and how it moves forward to protect Canadians' information, while also protecting them from these kinds of vulnerabilities are things we haven't got to. It's an important time to do that.
When we take time going back over old reports that have been concluded, when we take time to tweak them a bit more, we're not getting to the issues of the day that are keeping Canadians and members of my constituency up at night with regard to these platforms and how we create a safe space for the people using them.
I ask colleagues to consider that as we move forward and line up what we are going to discuss here and what the issues are that Canadians are not just asking, but demanding, of us. Community after community is asking us to engage with what happens in the digital space, yet we can't seem to get there. These technologies are evolving more quickly than our discussions, I can assure you. If we don't get to these matters of the day, I fear for what.... We're not serving Canadians well when we don't address these issues here in this forum.
Good work was done last session by the colleagues at this table. Some of them are not here. I read parts of the report. I haven't read it completely from first the page to the last page, but good work was done.
If we keep going backward, we're not moving forward on really critical issues that matter to our constituents today. I'd be terribly disappointed to see that we failed them.