Thank you so much for the question.
We know that the Kremlin has global tentacles, and its security services certainly have global ambitions. This was the case in Soviet Communist times as well.
In 1992, a year after the collapse of the Soviet regime, when there was a court case going on at the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation with regard to the Soviet Communist Party, some of the archives of the former Communist Party's central committee were partially and cautiously declassified. Even from that small number of documents that were made public, the world was shocked by how far those tentacles from the Kremlin reached, including here in Canada, the United States and countries across western Europe.
The organization that came to power in Russia together with Putin in 2000, 26 years ago, is the same old Soviet KGB, just with a different abbreviation in its name. It's been doing exactly the same thing. We know about the massive media disinformation campaigns. We know about attempts to influence elections. We know about instances of transnational repression, which is one of the issues being addressed here in Bill C-219.
Because Canada is such an important part of the international community—Bill Browder was just saying how important it was to get the Magnitsky law passed here in Canada, and I fully concur with his assessment—and because Canada is a member of the OSCE, because it's a member of the G7 and because it's one of the most important countries in the world, it is very clearly one of the key targets of Kremlin attacks and Kremlin campaigns in all sorts of different ways, from propaganda and disinformation to physical attacks in terms of transnational repression.
I believe it is very important for this country to put up its defences against any potential attacks and close any potential gaps, loopholes and weak spots that could leave it vulnerable to hybrid aggression by the Kremlin, because that's its preferred method now. It's not going to send tanks or planes here, but what about hybrid attacks and hybrid aggression? It will very much do that, and it is important to be on guard against that and be defending yourselves against that.