Thank you.
Just to go back to what I was saying, I will go back to Mr. Cooper's opening remarks on this and double-check the record afterwards. Thank you for the point of clarification from him.
I also wanted to mention that despite the fact that, clearly, based on Mr. Kolga's testimony, much of this election interference and disinformation campaign went back to at least 2014 under the Harper government.... In fact, I would just point people to the Library of Parliament briefing, which we were all given and clearly states:
In January 2019, the federal government announced an action plan to safeguard Canada's elections and democratic institutions in anticipation of the October general election that same year. Since then, elements of the plan have been evaluated, and measures have been improved and renewed for subsequent elections.
It details that the plan has “four pillars”, including “enhancing citizen preparedness; improving organizational readiness; combatting foreign interference; and building a safe information ecosystem”. Then it goes into more detail on combatting foreign interference.
It's a mischaracterization for anyone to say that the current government has not taken steps to prevent foreign interference. It in fact has an action plan, and it has set up SITE, which is the security and intelligence threats to elections task force, as well as the G7 rapid response mechanism, and there's more.
I think it's a mischaracterization to say that nothing has been done. I think it's important to put that on the record.
I also agree with Ms. O'Connell when she asks, “Why the focus only on China?” I mean, we've heard testimony from CSIS that had indicated Russia and Iran. It's also in our other briefing documents. I think it's important for us to consider all foreign state actors in terms of interference in our elections. It would I think be important for us to ensure that if we're doing a fulsome study we consider all threat actors.
The last thing I really wanted to say is about paragraph (b) in the motion. I have no problem extending this study and having some additional meetings and additional witnesses. I think it's great. I don't see why we needed a Standing Order 106(4) meeting today to determine that, because we could have done that based on consensus quite easily without this meeting, in my opinion. I do think that paragraph (b) is problematic, which is based on our good faith agreement to finish two other studies, one on hybrid and the other one on precinct security. Those would be overridden by what's been put forward today. I have a real issue with that, because we had a good faith agreement on it and I really don't think it's appropriate for us to now override that.
Certainly, I could see a situation where that might happen if something were extremely urgent, but in this case, we already had decided to do this study. I think we're already in agreement that we could have some additional witnesses and some additional meetings. It just doesn't strike me that this should all of a sudden supervene things or become the highest priority on our agenda when we have two other studies that clearly were priorities before.
We clearly decided to study foreign interference as the third priority. Now we're saying that all of a sudden foreign interference in our elections should be the first priority. Well, we already decided that the priority among those three studies would be to complete the two that were already started and to then move on to this one. That was a good faith agreement that we had. Members on that side had all agreed to that. I'm not sure why they would renege on that agreement now. I think it's important for us to call that out and to actually work through setting our priorities.
That's all I have to say. I do have other things, but I'll leave it at that for now. Thanks.