Thank you very much for the question.
I think it's a very important and timely question to be asking. It has been four weeks now. I haven't had the opportunity at this point to sit down with CSE. We've had some preliminary discussions, but that's something that will be coming in the near term in terms of what this looks like and what the breadth of the mandate will look like.
My mandate letter talks specifically about political parties and ensuring that the Communications Security Establishment is analyzing, monitoring, and reviewing what the potential threats to political parties' information systems could be and then providing information as to how they can protect themselves.
It's really important that we do this right and that Canadians have the confidence that this is not about the CSE going in and looking at political parties' information systems, but rather about them providing an overview about best practices on how they can protect themselves and identify potential emerging threats.
The conversation you raised this morning was in regard to a young man who works in artificial intelligence who was talking about the fact of how news sources in many ways, in some respects, can be targeted to individuals based on their preferences and the silo effect of how we consume media and information as citizens. His concerns were about how we ensure that we get a diversity of views that are reaching many individuals.
I think that is definitely an area we need to be considering and looking at. It's something that I'm definitely concerned about, but it's a question of how we as a government, we as parliamentarians, and we as political leaders engage with this. I think in Canada we have one of the highest per capita uses of Facebook, and we know that Facebook and other social media will push information to you based on your own preferences. So how do we ensure that people are getting a diversity of viewpoints to make informed choices, but also have the digital literacy to be able to look at these and understand where they're coming from and make those informed choices?
It's a really important conversation to be having. It's something to start thinking about. As political leaders, it's incumbent upon us to make sure that we're doing what we can to ensure people have that access to diverse points of view and different sources of information. I think it's a really important thing.
It will be about us determining what is the breadth of democratic institutions in Canada and does that include the media, and then how do we work in partnership with the media for them to have access to those tools as well. That's something that I think will come in time. Of course, I welcome points of view and ideas or thoughts from either this committee or other members of Parliament on that.