I won't take five minutes.
Thank you very much for hosting this study. I'm grateful for your doing it because it's the first time I've talked to anybody about this issue. This is two months later, and that's unacceptable for sure.
Going back, yes, I was furious. I was livid when I got the call from IPAC. We had a joint conversation, as my colleagues have already indicated. The anger left, but then I was left with a huge disappointment, as my colleagues have said. This is not what I would have expected. More importantly, you know, it happened. The firewall held, and because of that, they felt there was no reason to tell us. Well, I want to know.
All of us on this panel do a lot of human rights work, and we take on some pretty hot topics in the House of Commons and outside the House of Commons. I think the intent of a lot of this is to intimidate all of us so that we will stop standing up on behalf of people who don't have a voice. I think that a big, important part of our job is not just to represent our local constituents but also to be a voice for those who are voiceless. It's because of members of Parliament that some of the progress we are seeing in different files is happening, whether it's the Tibet file, the Iran one or the Taiwan one, of course. It's because members of Parliament had the courage to stand up and be counted.
Yes, they did this and we didn't get notified, so let's move on. What did we learn from this? I think I always try to figure out what good comes out of a negative situation. My anger is gone, but my disappointment is still there. My hope is that we are going to use this as an opportunity to put down the when, how and where. My hope is that all of us become much more aware of the threat that we could be under and take more responsibility, ourselves, to make sure that we are protecting our systems. I'm told that turning them off once a week helps to eliminate any viruses or anyone trying to access them. That's a very simple thing. No one's ever told me that in the many years I've been here. However, we need to get serious. We need to, with your help, put a plan in place.
I mean, I didn't even know who to ask about any other damage that might have been.... I had no idea after all the years I've been here. I know the Sergeant-at-Arms is there, but I had no idea where to go, who to ask or how to better protect myself. I think those are things about which we are all or we have been, until now, extremely naive, but based on recent conversation with CSIS and others that I asked for.... There is AI that can clearly reproduce me at another meeting a half an hour from now that I'm not at, but it could look exactly like me with this AI business going on.
I think we are under much more threat now than we've ever been previously, and we need to figure out how to do that. How are we going to protect each other? What's the role and who puts what into place? It needs to be more public. I think our Liaison Committee should also report once a year at minimum, along with all the other reports, on how many cybersecurity issues there have been and that kind of issue. We need to become more knowledgeable, and you have the role of coming up with those suggestions.
I think there needs to be much more emphasis put on parliamentarians being respected, as my colleague mentioned. Thinking that we're dispensable and that, therefore, they won't bother to tell us that there has been something on social media attacking us—that if we don't know ourselves, they're not going to tell us.... Well, their job is to make sure that we are protected. When we talk about trying to get more people to run for public office, if they're going to run for public office, we have the responsibility, at least, to make sure that they have all the tools necessary to be protected so that they and we can do the jobs that we all want to be doing here.
Thank you very much.