I'll be brief.
On the backlash, in the 1990s it was assumed that democracy was the only way. Everybody talked about that. The phrase was “the end of history”, which many of you probably heard, right? There was no other way, apart from democracy.
In the last five or six years, a whole group of countries—and in that group, unfortunately, I would put Russia, Venezuela—that started down the path of democracy have re-authoritarianized. The really scary thing about all of this is that not only have they re-authoritarianized, to use an infelicitous term, but they appear to be cooperating with each other, sending each other draft legislation on how best to do away with their democrats. This is a truly disturbing trend, and it's not one Canada should ignore.