Thank you for that.
With respect to the protocol, it's there for a very particular purpose in a defined time frame: an election period.
I will note—as Cherie, my colleague from the service, mentioned before—there are avenues outside of that through which we can communicate trends, information and our understanding of a threat to the public. The service does this through outreach and issuing reports. CSE and the cyber centre do this by sharing and issuing reports. It is the nature of some declassified information. You lose some of the granularity of those details. What's important is that people understand where the issues lie.
The protocol itself is very specific to the election period. Whether or not we determine to go public, in the event we feel we cannot hold a free and fair election.... Again, that's a decision for a panel of senior deputy ministers to make.
We all have other avenues, and we use those avenues to communicate threat information and trends in order to educate and prepare people—