Thank you, Chair.
Mr. MacLennan, you began your presentation by talking about the retreat of democracy and then you expanded on that a little by saying we were still in the afterglow of the third wave of democratization with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact Soviet Union, but if we looked closely, we would have been able to see that democracy and the expansion of democracy were under attack at that time. We're still in that era, this hubris, the end of history, as many of the academics were talking about in the west.
Would you not agree that one of the first very clear signals to the west that democracy and that form of governance were under attack was the Orange Revolution of 2004? Some 50 million people in a country rose up because they saw their democratic aspirations being hijacked in a very methodical way by those who saw an alternate model of development, economic progress, under a system of autocracy. If we had looked closely, we would have seen that the beginnings were there in that time.
Would you agree with that premise?