I'll break that up into two parts. I think that this disinformation, as we've seen, is happening not only in Ukraine. It happens on a worldwide scale. It happens in Canada. One merely needs to scan the television channels and certain Internet sites to get that stream of consciousness and thought.
Again, we can give you our observations of what's happening in Ukraine. There are attempts by media and civil society to support open media, to support independent journalism, and to provide counter-information. It's not a good idea to shut down media, but it's a good idea to provide balanced information both in Canada and in Ukraine on what's happening.
What we do at the Ukrainian Canadian Congress is put out a daily bulletin and a weekly bulletin. We do our best to inform our community here, and the diaspora does its best to inform itself of what's happening. We definitely see strong attempts to influence world opinion.
To your previous question, I was going to say that our concern is that there has been this talk of “Ukraine fatigue” and “Russia fatigue”. The most important thing, in our view, is to not accept these as borders and to not accept the current situation as “that's just the way it is, so let's move on”, so to speak. It's important not to accept the outcome of the disinformation as accurate or relevant.
Both at the community level in Canada and in working with our diaspora around the world, the Ukrainian government is struggling to figure out how to provide in Ukraine—and this goes back to the question of legitimacy and systems—accurate information to people in multiple languages, but I think this goes to the broader issue that we're seeing right now in Europe in terms of the electoral processes that are happening and the various ways that disinformation can happen through funding certain media outlets and political parties, and through civil society or NGO groups that are funded in murky ways.
I think all of us must remain vigilant. Not only is it a problem on the ground in Kiev, but it's something that is actively happening around the world, and not just on Twitter. All of us can be easily manipulated into thinking that everything's fine or everything is one point of view or the other. We support the balance. We support independent journalism. We support the sharing of information with multiple sources, broadly speaking, and we question anybody who doesn't, anybody who says it's a one-sided story, so “end of story”. This is where we welcome the interest of this committee and others in talking about Ukraine. I think that your trip and this kind of discussion balance the disinformation and show us that there is an international effort to find out what is actually happening on the ground.