Thank you.
Those are three different issues. Electoral reform is an incredibly difficult process and cannot be implemented anyway in the time you have before 2019. That's an issue I wanted to peg for future debate in Parliament and to think it through. Participation is a very long-term process, and I think some of the initiatives here, for example, allowing Elections Canada and the commissioner to engage in civic education and civic information is absolutely vital. I'm really pleased that's been restored.
One threat that I think absolutely has to be addressed is cybersecurity and fake news, one of the issues that we all know is being debated widely. For example, Germany very recently passed new legislation that made it the responsibility of the major social media platforms to monitor what was going on and where they were able to detect examples of Russian influence in particular. Social bots can be detected through technology to make sure that the media platforms are responsible for that and that they would be fined if, for example, they found instances of hate speech or other things. We know how divisive that was. The Russians essentially seeded information into the American campaign on both sides.
A lot of that information fuelled racial hatred either from those who claimed that the police were responsible or those who claimed the African American community was responsible. It's an incredibly difficult issue to monitor effectively but I think that's a danger for Canada as well. We don't want social intolerance, lack of social trust, and Canadian democracy to be polarized by foreign messages that aren't simply advertising.
As I read the bill, advertising for third parties, partisan advertising, is covered but these other forms of information communications aren't necessarily being covered, and that I would think Elections Canada or the broadcast regulators or other agencies should look into very hard.