I'd like to thank the member for throwing me these softball questions.
I would say that liberal democracy lives off a very clear separation of powers and it lives off independent institutions, including in particular independent prosecutorial services that are not subject to government pressure. I am far from an expert in Canadian politics, and I can't comment on the details that you alluded to, but what I would say is that there is always a danger in liberal democratic systems that any government will be tempted to overstep the boundaries of its appropriate authority or that it may try, in various ways, to influence independent agencies about politically sensitive matters. It is absolutely important for liberal democracy that opposition parties stand up to that and for the media to report those things critically.
I would also want to emphasize that there's a real distinction between governments that are committed to liberal democratic values, and don't always live up to their own standards when they are in a complicated situation—and that should be condemned—and authoritarian populists who don't acknowledge the legitimacy and the importance of those distinctions in principle and go out of their way to try to undermine the ability of those kinds of institutions and norms to actually safeguard the political system.
We all as citizens need to be very watchful when governments fall foul of those rules in any kind of way. However, as a political scientist who has studied the impact of populist governments compared with the impact of non-populist governments, it is very clear that the danger to democracy is very serious when this is part of an ideological approach and a consistent set of attacks on institutions, rather than when it is a regular scandal, which you get in every democracy in the history of the world, where people sometimes fail to live up to the standards that they set out for themselves.