Foreign Affairs Committee on May 2nd, 2019

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

Hello. Bonjour à tout le monde.

As you noticed, I'm not Michael Levitt and I'm not Erin O'Toole either.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Almost.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

As the second vice-chair of the committee, I'll be chairing today's meeting in the absence of Michael Levitt and Erin O'Toole.

This is the 138th meeting of the committee, and we are continuing our study on threats to liberal democracy in Europe.

To do so, we start by welcoming the following two witnesses.

First, from London, England, we welcome Anne Applebaum. She is a historian, Pulitzer Prize winner, Washington Post columnist and Professor of Practice at the Institute of Global Affairs, London School of Economics.

Her publications include: Gulag: A History, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 and Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine.

That was published in 2017.

Ms. Applebaum, welcome to the committee.

Then, from Warsaw, Poland, we will welcome Rafal Pankowski, Associate Professor at the Collegium Civitas, Warsaw, and co-founder of the “Never Again” Association, which describes itself as the main anti-racist organization in Poland.

His publications include Neo-Fascism in Western Europe: A Study in Ideology, Racism and Popular Culture, and The Populist Radical Right in Poland: The Patriots.

Mr. Pankowski, welcome to the committee.

We'll start with Ms. Applebaum, who has 10 minutes, and then we'll go to Mr. Pankowski.

Ms. Applebaum, the floor is yours.

[Anne Applebaum, Professor of Practice, Institute of Global Affairs, London School of Economics and Political Science, As an Individual]

First of all, thank you very much.

I'm very flattered and delighted to be appearing before this committee by video link. I apologize that I couldn't make it there—maybe another time.

I've had a look at who's testified before you already, and I know you've discussed general issues of democratic decline in Europe. You also have Mr. Pankowski about to speak. He's a great expert on Poland.

I'm going to talk about something more specific today, which is the media and information environment that is enabling this decline not only in Europe, but also in North America. This is something I work on very specifically at the London School of Economics.

Clearly we're living through a revolutionary moment. So many elections and so many democracies are suddenly taking surprising turns. Nationalists and xenophobes—who sound the same—are winning support in countries with very different economic and political histories—from Poland and the Philippines to Brazil and the United States.

It's my contention that just as the printing press broke the monopoly of the monks and priests who controlled the written word in the 15th century, the Internet and social media have very quickly undermined not only the business model of the democratic political media that we've known for the last two centuries, but also the political institutions behind them.

Look at the democratic world. Everywhere, large newspapers and powerful broadcasters are disappearing. These old-fashioned news organizations might have been flawed, but many of them had as their founding principle at least a commitment in theory to objectivity, to fact checking and to the general public interest. More importantly, whatever you think about them, they also created the possibility of a national conversation and a single debate.

In some big European countries, well-funded public broadcasters who are obligated by law to be politically neutral still maintain that debate, but in many smaller European countries, independent media has become very weak or has disappeared. It has been replaced by very partisan media, which is either controlled directly by one party or via business groups connected to it. That means there is no broadcaster or newspaper that both sides of the spectrum consider to be neutral.

The result is polarization. People choose sides and move apart and the centre disappears. This has other side effects. In many democracies—and I would say the United States and Poland are two of the worst—there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. This is not just about different opinions or different biases; people actually don't have the same facts. One group thinks one set of things are true and the other believes in something quite different.

Social media accelerates and accentuates this phenomenon because it allows people, and indeed its algorithms, to sometimes force people to see only the news and opinion they want to hear. These algorithms reinforce narratives that have created homogenous clusters online. These are sometimes known as echo chambers. Members of an echo chamber share the same prevailing world view, and they interpret news through this common lens.

This polarization has numerous effects, and it is extremely detrimental to democracy. It creates distrust for what used to be considered apolitical, neutral democratic institutions, such as the civil service, the police, the judiciary and government-run bodies of all kinds. They can fall under suspicion because one side or the other, or maybe both, suspects that they have been captured by the opposing party.

It also has a lethal effect on traditional political parties, which were once based on real-life organizations, like trade unions or the church. Instead of looking to those real organizations, more and more people now identify with groups or organizations that they find online, or ideas and themes that they find in the virtual world. In many places, this phenomenon has also led to fragmentation and, again, increased partisanship.

It's very important that this new information network, with its divides and its suspicious plans, is also far more conducive than the old one was to the spread of false information and false rumours, either generated naturally or imposed from outside, as well as to campaigns of insider and outsider manipulation. To put it bluntly, and this has now been proved in several studies, people who live in highly partisan echo chambers are much more likely to believe false information.

We all now know that, famously, the Russian government was the first to understand the possibilities of this new information network and that it deployed trolling operations as well as fake websites and Facebook pages to increase polarization not only in the U.S., but also in the U.K., in Germany, in France, in Italy and across eastern Europe.

For an example, I took part in a data analysis project at the London School of Economics in the months before the last Bundestag election. We found that the messages of the AfD, the German far-right populist party, were being deliberately boosted on social media by pro-Russian media, as well as by trolls and artificially created botnets.

Some of them were originally created for commercial use and then repurposed for the election. They echo and repeat divisive messages—anti-immigration, anti-NATO, anti-Merkel, pro-Russia and pro-AfD.

Most of those who read mainstream media in Germany never even saw those messages, but the AfD's alternative echo chamber read them every day, and that was one of the factors that contributed to the surprisingly large support for the AfD in that election.

Although the Russians were the first to invest in these things, others are already following them—other governments, other political movements, private companies. It's important to remember that there's no big bar to entry in this game: it doesn't cost very much, doesn't take very much time, isn't particularly high tech, and requires no special equipment. It will happen—it surely has already happened—in Canada too. As I said, these are very simple and rather cheap methods to influence public debate, and everybody is now using them.

The most important point I want to make today is that at the moment there is no institution capable of stopping this kind of manipulation. Democratic governments don't censor the Internet. They aren't in the habit of funding independent media, and if they did, they would cease to be independent.

Militaries of NATO and international institutions are not set up to fight information wars either. Even counter-intelligence services are very queasy about taking part in political debates inside their own countries. It isn't their job to penetrate echo chambers, let alone to reinvigorate democratic newspapers.

Tech companies could help to solve this problem, but at the moment they have no incentive to do so. The new information network is also where Google and Facebook are making their money. Facebook and Twitter created the algorithms that spread shock and anger and conspiracy theory faster than truth—and these are of course the elements that contribute to the rise of populism—but censorship from Google or Facebook will not in the long term be any more acceptable or successful than censorship from a government. We may see some solutions from old media or from universities. There are journalists talking about reinventing what they do in order to create greater levels of public trust. There are media literacy campaigns and fact-checking websites.

If I were going to leave you with one thought today, however, I would say that there is also another precedent to remember for this historical moment. In the 1920s and the 1930s, democratic governments also found themselves challenged by radio and by new fascist movements across Europe whose early stars were all radio stars. Adolf Hitler and Stalin actually were excellent users of the radio. They understood it as a technology that could be used to provoke anger.

People began asking whether there was a way to marshal this technology for the purposes of democracy instead. One answer to that was the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was designed from the beginning to reach all parts of the country to “inform, educate and entertain”, in the famous phrase, and to join people together not in a single set of opinions but in a single national conversation that made democracy possible.

Another set of answers was found in the United States, where journalists accepted a regulatory framework, a set of rules about libel law, and a public process that determined who could get a radio licence.

The question now, I think, for Canada and for every other liberal democracy, is how to find the equivalent of those institutions in the world of social media. In other words, what regulatory or social or legal measures will make the technology work for democracy, for our society, and not just for Facebook shareholders?

This is not an argument in favour of censorship. It's an argument in favour of applying to the online world the same kinds of regulations that have been used in other spheres to set rules on transparency, privacy, data and competition. We can regulate Internet advertising just as we regulate broadcast advertising, insisting that people know when and why they are being targeted by political ads or indeed any ads. We can curb the anonymity of the Internet. Recent research shows that the number of fake accounts on Facebook may be far higher than what the company has stated in public. We could require them to eliminate those, because we have a right to know whether we are interacting with real people or bots.

In the long term there may be some more profound solutions. Think: What would a public interest algorithm look like or a form of social media that favoured constructive conversations over polarized ones.

Regulation is not a silver bullet; it's only part of the answer. The revival of democracy, which so long was dependent on reliable information in an era of unreliable information, is going to be a major civilizational project. It may take some time before long-term solutions to this problem are found.

I will stop there to let Mr. Pankowski continue.

Thank you very much.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

Thank you very much for your presentation and also for staying within the time limits.

We now move to Mr. Pankowski, for about 10 minutes.

[Dr. Rafal Pankowski, Co-Founder, Never Again Association]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your invitation. I am really honoured, and I am especially honoured to be invited alongside Anne Applebaum today.

During your discussions over the last weeks, there is one term that has come up, and for good reason. It's a colourful term that has been making a revival in both academic and non-academic discourses in the last couple of years, namely, fascism.

Some years ago, I wrote a book trying to propose my own definition, present my own understanding of the essence of fascist ideology. I would argue that fascism is the politics of total cultural homogeneity. Of course, Poland suffered enormously from fascism through the Nazi occupation, and the name of my civil society organization in Poland, “Never Again”, is not accidental, but it is good to mention that Poland also had its own fascist movement, which is now experiencing a kind of revival.

While historically Poland used to be one of the most diverse, multicultural societies, if not the most diverse society in the whole of Europe, today, due to those tragic events of the 20th century, Poland is one of the most mono-ethnic, homogeneous societies in the whole of Europe. There is a certain paradox in that, and I would say that a return to diversity, a return to multiculturalism in the case of Poland especially, would be a return to normality.

Unfortunately, what we witness is currently a move away from the appreciation of diversity as a value, a move away from the liberal democratic consensus. That worries me as a citizen of Poland, but I think it is not just Poland that is important here. Why Poland matters, and I hope it doesn't sound arrogant on my part, is that the democratic transformation of Poland in 1989 and in the 1990s was a watershed event, not just in Polish history but in global history. In a certain way, the democratic transformation of Poland symbolized the legitimacy of the post-Cold War international order based on the predominance of the idea of human rights and liberal democracy. In my view, the current crisis of the liberal democratic consensus in Poland symbolizes the much broader crisis of the post-Cold War international order.

Two main ideological drivers of this move away from the idea of diversity in Poland are known in other countries too: Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Islamophobia on that scale is a relatively new phenomenon in Poland. We can literally point to a moment in time when it skyrocketed. That was in the summer of 2015 during the so-called European refugee crisis. As we well know, it didn't really affect Poland in any meaningful, direct way, but it coincided with the electoral campaign in Poland where different right-wing and far-right groups competed amongst each other for who would present their group as more anti-migrant, anti-refugee and anti-Muslim.

I believe the repercussions of that wave of Islamophobia are still with us today, despite the fact that the Muslim community in Poland is very small. We are talking about maybe 20,000 or 30,000 people in a country of almost 40 million.

The second type of hateful discourse that is important here is anti-Semitism. That, of course, has a much longer history in Poland and the region of central and eastern Europe. Importantly, the language of hatred against the Jews is also, traditionally, the language of hatred against liberal democracy as such and against the very of idea of a diverse society.

On a personal note, I can tell you that I have dealt with the topic of anti-Semitism for almost 25 years now, so I knew it existed. In a way, it is really difficult to shock me in this field, but I didn't think I would live to see the kind of explosion of anti-Semitic discourse in the Polish media and politics on the scale we experienced in Poland last year, when anti-Semitic discourse really became very widespread, especially in the state-owned, state-controlled mass media, on a scale that didn't happen in many, many years in Poland.

The crisis of liberal democracy in Poland has many different dimensions. You are aware of many of them: the rule of law, media freedom, artistic freedom, etc. But what I think is possibly one of the most serious aspects of the crisis of liberal democracy in Poland is visible on the level of social values and the level of culture. Possibly the single most alarming aspect of this breakdown of liberal democratic values is the breakdown of democratic and humanist values among the younger generation.

There is another paradox here, because that goes against the perceived wisdom on the part of what you may call the liberal elite, which assumes that the new generation of people who are born and socialized in a new democratic society would automatically become more progressive, tolerant and open-minded than the generation of their parents and grandparents. What happened is actually something opposite. Radical nationalist and xenophobic ideologies were successfully transmitted to the younger generation.

As a social scientist, I can give you one or two figures showing this. For example, 82% of young people between 18 and 24 years of age are against accepting any non-European refugees in Poland—82%. The figure for the general population is 70%.

As another example, there is a new political bloc in Poland that is going to participate in the European Parliament election later this month. It is called Konfederacja—confederation. The ideology of this new bloc is summed up by one of its leaders officially. I quote, “We don't want Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes and the European Union.”

This new group got 31% of the vote among young men between 18 and 30 years old. Actually, it's the most popular electoral option among young men of this age. The next party is Law and Justice, the Polish ruling party, which is also right wing in many ways. It has 23% of the support among this group.

There are many more examples showing the explosion of xenophobic attitudes and far-right sympathies especially among the younger people in Poland. I think that tells us that we are going to have a much longer-term problem than is normally assumed or accepted.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

Mr. Pankowski, I would ask you to quickly conclude your presentation so that we can begin the questions and comments.

[Dr. Rafal Pankowski]

Of course.

I believe if there are any lessons that we can learn from the Polish case in the last few years, they are the following. First, the procedural constitutional framework of democratic institutions can be undermined by deficiencies in democratic culture. The second lesson, I believe, is the fact that the country's participation in the process of institutionalized regional integration, like the European Union, does not automatically guarantee progress in the field of intercultural understanding and inclusive identity, and such progress cannot be taken for granted.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ms. Applebaum, as well.

We will now move to questions and comments.

Ms. Kusie, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, Professor Applebaum and Professor Pankowski for being here with us today.

Professor Applebaum, I have the pleasure of serving on the trilateral commission with David Sanger, and I think he was ahead of his time with The Perfect Weapon in regard to the evaluation of cybersecurity and cybercrime. I certainly know that he meant it more in regard to the destruction of infrastructure and the manipulation of data as opposed to more manipulation of data and fake news as we've seen today.

We are moving towards the 2019 federal election here. I'm in the opposition. I'm the shadow minister for democratic institutions, and of course, I'm very concerned about the integrity of our electoral processes and our 2019 election. I would say that we are in a position here where we can identify the players in terms of foreign nationals, hacktivists as identified in the Canadian security establishment document of 2017. We can identify their motivations in terms of global spheres of influence, natural resources, the environmental causes such as this, but the question of course remains how. I'm very interested in what you talked about today in regard to the tech companies having very little incentive to step forward.

I know the present government has had little if any success in terms of their self-regulation, even in applying similar standards which these social media platforms apply for themselves in other nations.

However, there is of course the delicate balance, as you mentioned, of freedom of speech with the integrity of democratic institutions, as well as electoral processes. I'm very interested in a few things that you mentioned. You listed some specific examples. I was wondering if you could summarize those again, please. As well, you talked about time to apply regulation from other spheres. What other historical industrial spheres serve as a good framework for this? I'll start with that.

I'm also very interested in this public interest algorithm. When we have members of CSIS and the RCMP in front of us, I certainly see their postings for positions online and I can't help but wonder if they shouldn't make a trip to San Jose or go to the head office of Fortnite to try to poach.

Perhaps I could have your comments first in regard to that list that you mentioned previously, and what other industrial spheres you can take from.

Finally, I'll mention that I was a member of the Canadian foreign service for 15 years so this, as well, is of very much interest to me.

Thank you, Professor Applebaum.

[Anne Applebaum]

I think it's really important to...it's not so much that you can copy other spheres, but you can look for past patterns and use them. It's very important to understand there is not going to be a single silver bullet answer to this problem. We aren't going to come up with an Internet gadget that will fix it. There are people trying to do that and I've seen some of them.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

They do it.

[Anne Applebaum]

Think of it more like the way in which we regulated automobiles. At the very beginning, people just drove cars around and bumped into the horses on the street. Eventually somebody realized that no, we actually need traffic lights. Then they realized we need to paint lines on the road. Then people said that maybe the construction of the car itself is a problem and invented safer cars and eventually airbags and so on.

The whole long process of regulating cars and how they're used took a long time and evolved as the car technology itself evolved. I would think of it a little bit like that. We aren't going to come up with a single law that's going to fix this problem, but there are multiple things that governments can and should be doing. This ranges from media literacy education to teaching children—and not just children—how to use the Internet. We could also think about public service advertising in the way we used to, to get people to stop smoking with non-smoking campaigns. There could also be campaigns that teach people how to think about and use the Internet.

I do think that sooner or later we're going to need some kind of regulation of the social media companies and of the platforms. I would include Google in this. One thing that Canada might begin to think about is who the other countries are that it could work with toward this end. Obviously, individual country-by-country regulation is going to matter a lot less if we can pull together the EU, Canada, and in theory, the U.S., although the U.S. is going to be a difficult one. For Americans, these are native companies; they are “their” companies and it's somehow mentally harder, intellectually and psychologically harder, to regulate than it will be for Europeans and perhaps for Canadians.

In beginning to work with other countries, a lot of progress on thinking about regulation has been made in the U.K. Also, in France and Germany, there is a lot of public thinking and debate. I think it would be really important for Canada to be part of that conversation. There is also an EU-level conversation that you should be in.

When we begin thinking about regulation, we need to also move away from the idea that what we're regulating is content on the Internet, that somebody should sit in an office and say, “That's acceptable; that's not acceptable.” That's ultimately going to be very contested and we should begin thinking, instead, about what the rules are. What's creating the echo chambers on the Internet? What is it that the algorithms favour? Do we want to cut down, for example, or restrict the use of anonymity? Do we want to make it much harder for people to create bots and fake campaigns that artificially amplify some messages over others. That is something that is technically possible to do.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

Thank you very much, Ms. Applebaum.

I'm sorry, but we have to move to another round of questions.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

The next speaker is Mr. Wrzesnewskyj.

You have the floor for six minutes, Mr. Wrzesnewskyj.

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Professor Applebaum, first, let me congratulate you on having recently joined Johns Hopkins University as a senior fellow.

Professor, over the past decade we've seen what I call the Schroederization of key members of Europe's old-guard political elites. Politicians and ex-politicians corrupted by Russian billions act for the economic and geopolitical interests of Russia, as in the case of Nord Stream creating western hydrocarbon and economic dependencies.

Now we see an evolving new stage of this verse in Russian hydrocarbon money flows, and the nurturing and financing of enemies within—far right-wing, vast groups in central and western European countries that see liberal democracy in the EU itself as the enemy. It takes the form of significant loans to political parties, such as Le Pen's National Rally and material media support to candidates of Germany's AfD. In fact, in an article in January, you referenced Bundestag member Markus Frohnmaier, who the Kremlin called, in a leaked document, “our own absolutely controlled MP in the Bundestag”. Financing the staging of terrorist attacks in Europe against minorities, as happened in the fire bombing of a Hungarian cultural centre in Ukraine, has been exposed as having been done by Polish white supremacists paid by an AfD staffer in the German Bundestag using Kremlin money.

Recently, you and some of Europe's most important writers and intellectuals published an open letter in the Guardian sounding the alarm against the, and I'll quote it, “arsonists of soul and spirit who...want to make a bonfire of our freedoms”. The letter makes direct reference to May's European elections.

Can you tell us what's at stake in these upcoming elections?

[Anne Applebaum]

That's also a very good question.

The Internet manipulation that I spoke of is part of a larger set of issues. Mr. Pankowski also knows this very well. In addition to what's going on online, there is a larger Russian-backed assault on liberal democracy in Europe and an attempt to promote the far right to create ethnic conflict.

I should stress that although you are right to emphasize the Russian support for it, quite a lot of it is native, and there is plenty of native—native meaning native French or German or Polish or Czech—support for these movements and ideas as well. I don't want to imply that it's only or solely Russian.

In the European elections we have seen actually for the first time—and I have just written something about this that will be published on the weekend—some of these groups beginning to work together across borders in the online world and also even in the world of funding of one another's projects. We do see, paradoxically, a kind of cross-European internationalist nationalism whereby groups in different countries are seeking to support one another, so the far right in Germany supports the far right in France, which supports the far right in Poland and so on. That is one of the dynamics that we will be seeing in the coming European election. Really for the first time this internationalist nationalism will be working as a whole using common themes across Europe.

Just as a final point, we saw this, and it was fascinating, after the fire that took place in the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral days ago where there were similar responses all over Europe echoing and using one another's memes and language, and this is the kind of event that is now being promoted across Europe by similar kinds of groups.

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Dr. Pankowski, you contributed to a report that was released just the other day by researchers at Tel Aviv University in an annual worldwide anti-Semitism report. The report states that the spike was most dramatic in western Europe, that in Germany, for instance, there was a 70% increase in anti-Semitic violence. The report also points out that France, the U.K., Belgium and the Netherlands had high numbers of cases.

What's the role of Germany's AfD, France's National Rally, Orban's Fidesz, Austria's Freedom Party and others in creating the environment for the rise of anti-Semitism in western and central Europe?

[Dr. Rafal Pankowski]

I would like to stress that anti-Semitism is very important but it is not an isolated type of hateful discourse. Especially in central Europe I believe we have witnessed it for a long time now. We can notice that one type of hatred goes with other types of hatred, so we are rarely talking about isolated types of hateful discourse. Anti-Semitism, in many ways the revival of anti-Semitic discourse, is emblematic of a broader tendency, which can be labelled hostility to liberal democracy and diversity as such.

There is a certain difference between the west of Europe and central Europe in the specifics of anti-Semitic expressions. Certainly in the countries of western Europe we can observe a larger number of physical attacks against Jews. There are few of those attacks in central and eastern Europe, partly because of the fact that there are so few Jews in those countries. In Poland, depending on what statistics you look at, it's probably around 10,000 people only.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

Thank you, Mr. Pankowski.

Mr. Wrzesnewskyj's time is up, and it is now my turn to ask questions for six minutes.

Let me start with you, Ms. Applebaum. You raise the issue of social media. We have had guests in the past who talked about the consequences of the rise of authoritarianism and the role that social media plays in that.

I really liked your example about the evolution of cars. However, if we look at other countries, there are still various road safety codes or signs. We drive on the left in some countries, and on the right in others. So there is no international convention in that respect.

Perhaps we have the same problem with social media. Facebook or Twitter, just to name two, are international. So there is a need for concerted action at the international level. How can we go about this, knowing the magnitude of these social media empires?

[Anne Applebaum]

The only thing I would say to that is first of all, it has turned out, as the European Union discovered when it enforced these GDPR data privacy rules, that by passing them in one place, you do force the social media companies to act in other places. The GDPR rules in Europe have had a cascading effect around the world. It's not totally useless to do it even as a single country, but of course it would be much more powerful and much more effective to do it as several countries.

One of the things I'd love Canada to think about is whether North America and Europe, as the pillars of the western NATO alliance, should be thinking about adding a kind of disinformation or information security aspect to the alliance, maybe not within NATO, maybe alongside NATO. There's really a common interest in trying to figure out how to protect democracy in these circumstances.

On the one hand, it's not useless to do it by yourself; it can have an impact. On the other hand, adding this and expanding the concept of security to include this, I think, would protect all of our democracies.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

Thank you very much, Ms. Applebaum.

I would now like to hear your opinion, as well as that of Mr. Pankowski, on the following question.

Mr. Pankowski, I think you mentioned two political parties, the first called Confederation of Independent Poland, and the second, Law and Justice. Their platform indicates what they don't want, what they want to prevent, what they oppose. My question is the one that would come up in any country where such parties exist: what exactly do they want?

In the case of Great Britain, they wanted Brexit and they got it. Leaving the European Union has left the country in chaos. In the case of Poland or other countries where such parties exist, we know what they are against and that they were created to fight against a particular movement. However, to put it in less negative, more positive terms, what do those parties ultimately want?

You each have about a minute and a half.

Go ahead, Mr. Pankowski.

[Dr. Rafal Pankowski]

I think you are quite right to allude to what you might call the negative identity of those movements, which is much more powerful and much more important, frankly speaking, than are any of the positive proposals they are making. They definitely stand for a type of community defined through ethnonationalist ideology.

At the end of the day, the ethnonationalist type of community is very much defined by who does not belong, by the construction and the reconstruction and the reproduction of the enemy image. The enemies are ethnic minorities, religious minorities, ideological opponents and also sexual minorities. The targets change. We see there are a lot of targets to choose from, but the basic idea is relatively simple: It is the hatred of the other.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

Thank you very much, Mr. Pankowski.

The floor is yours, Ms. Applebaum.