Thank you for the question. I appreciate the chance to clarify.
I would say three things very rapidly.
One is that when I look at the opinions of Canadians versus people in other countries, there's just less political room in terms of support from Canadians for government to regulate or try to regulate the online space. There is also less trust that Canadians have in other actors to regulate, whether it's the tech companies or whether it's civil society groups that take part in that regulation.
It's like we're in a little bit of muck here, trying to figure out, if we want to regulate online platforms, how we're going to do it, Mr. Kurek. That's the first point.
The second one is that it took us a long time to get to the place where we are in terms of campaign finance, where we limit donations pretty severely, we limit the spending and we try to constrain debates and elections largely to parties and candidates. I think most MPs would agree that this works, in that it allows for a focused conversation during elections, if you will.
We have legal precedent to do that, but that model is not going to work in a world in which a lot of speech can be generated by non-humans and be generated very cheaply. The two mechanisms you use, via money—who can speak and how much they can speak—don't apply in the online space. I think that's a difficult position.
I think, just candidly.... This is a political comment, which I'm a bit reluctant to make, but why not? I'll make it.
I think it's difficult to deal with these issues when the.... It's not the legitimacy of an election, because our election was legitimate, but the question about why the last one or two elections turned out the way they did is itself contested by the subject matter. It makes it hard for all of you as parliamentarians to sort through this.