I certainly concur with the importance of finding ways for us to examine the inherent privacy protections for Canadians on social media platforms.
What I caution against, though, is limiting it in scope to one particular company. I'm a firm believer that what we witnessed with Cambridge Analytica, with Facebook and what Mark Zuckerberg was capable of with the various insurrections around the world, and with Twitter with Elon Musk.... We would probably benefit from broadening the scope to all social media platforms.
The challenge I have when we single out one particular company is that—while I think they're all villains in this regard—we're going to miss some of the other hostile actors. I'm just wondering if around the table there would be an appetite to broaden the language of the motion to include references to all major social media platforms. When a security analyst comes, I would suggest that they come prepared to speak on all of the companies, because they likely would have done security-intelligence threat assessments on them. I think it would be better for the House to receive all the information. That would be my preference.
I would say that I'm also cautious that sometimes we fall into rabbit holes, doing what I'll call “red-baiting” around China in particular. China's not the only hostile actor in the world. Let's be very clear about that. There are many hostile actors. I'm not suggesting that it's not one, either. I don't want to just always have the attention on China. I think we should look around the world. Referencing the on-device tracking that we had.... We found that there are numerous countries involved in this. It would be interesting to see where the other ones fit into this discussion as well, Mr. Chair.