Thank you very much for having me today.
Thank you for the testimony.
I had a question about the foreign influence and how we regulate that. I was speaking with an Internet advertising firm, and they said they have an ability to do something called geofencing, which is taking a geographic area and buying all the social media and all the online ad presence in one particular geographic area, for example, an electoral district. That's very useful for us, because we know during our election that perhaps we could spend some of our advertising saturating our own local area with election pledges and those types of things.
However, my concern is that this technique can also be used by non-Canadians. We just had an election in British Columbia, which was very close. The balance of power hangs on one seat. You could see somebody seeing that coming and deciding to buy all the social media and all the online presence within that one particular electoral district and try to push it toward one party or another.
Say, a Chinese company decides they want to do that, and they flood this particular electoral district with hundreds of thousands of dollars of online advertising. What is the recourse under the current law? Obviously that's foreign money coming into our electoral system, but because it's through an online presence, how would you approach laying charges or even investigating that situation?