I was also surprised to see that this Ontario MPP appeared on Russia Today. I think it's the first instance of an elected Canadian official appearing on Russian state media.
The fact that the same MPP tweeted that Russian state media was more trustworthy than Canadian media was also quite surprising and disappointing. First of all, tweeting that sort of a comment exposes his followers directly to Russian cognitive warfare. It sends them down a rabbit hole where facts no longer matter. I think those followers are probably having challenges with some of that already, and that tweet doesn't help in that regard.
I've been warning about this problem, quite frankly, since before 2014. We saw the types of narratives we're seeing right now connected with the protests emerging two years ago, when the pandemic began. We were warned by the European External Action Service that Russia would be exploiting COVID and would be using it to divide and polarize us. We've been seeing this all along, and now we're seeing the results of that to a certain degree.
Much of that is organic. There are genuine frustrations in society and these are the types of frustrations and emotions that the Russian government exploits in order to further divide us. That is the primary objective of Russian state media. It is to divide, polarize and undermine democracy.
We can put a stop to this. This means, as I mentioned earlier, setting up a task force to address this and placing sanctions on Russian state media, so that they're not allowed to use our airwaves to broadcast their information. Right now RT and Russian-language state media is available on Canadian cable systems, as is Chinese state media.
We should be looking at all of these, cutting them off and limiting their opportunity to affect Canadian political debate.