I was the director of policy and the deputy principal secretary to the Premier of Ontario from 2011 to 2016. I was there for former premier Dalton McGuinty and former premier Kathleen Wynne. I was the platform lead on the 2014 campaign.
At that time, frankly, these issues were not as pronounced. There was a media ecosystem that was out there. There was online campaigning. People appeared to be getting information from a variety of sources. Mistrust and the toxic authoritarian populism that started to emerge in North America was not as apparent then. Primarily after I left the premier's office, I know that former premier Wynne faced a certain amount of personally-directed hate, as did caucus members, as did people from a variety of political partisan persuasions as elected officials.
While I wasn't involved in the 2008 campaign, with some of the events that you described, we actually did do a study in 2019 as part of the Facebook ad transparency work that we were trying to bring. We allied with a researcher who was bringing disclosure to whom was being targeted by Facebook ads. That, along with a website called Who Targets Me, is still a project that's under way with our collaborators over in the U.K. and Ireland.
We did a study at that time, not focused on the provincial election, which prompted, with other efforts, a pretty good Facebook political ad transparency registry to be created. The entity that you described and a number of others with either generic names or names that weren't quite reflective of what they were actually promoting were some of the main buyers of online ads on Facebook in the 2009 campaign.
The names of the organizations would not tell you, with much specificity, what they were actually about.