Madam Chair, allow me to explain to the honourable member the reason I brought that up.
The use of exaggeration is an old political strategy in debate. I was talking about confidence and countries whose aim is to undermine Canadians' confidence in their elections and democratic institutions. That's the connection I was trying to make.
I see the honourable member nodding, so her understanding is greatly appreciated.
That's the end of my digression on the issue of confidence.
I was referring to that because the Prime Minister said yesterday that he was aware of the situation. As confirmed last week in an independent report, the Chinese government and regimes such as Iran and Russia have attempted to interfere not only in Canada's democracy, but also in other spheres of Canadian life, from our institutions and businesses to our research labs and even the day-to-day lives of Canadians. That is why I digressed in the first place.
As I've said, this isn't a new issue. It was around before this government's election in 2015. However, no other government had put any mechanisms in place specifically to counter this threat. We created the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, which gave members, themselves, access to unredacted information in real time on matters of national security, as is the case in other countries.
In addition, during the 2019 and 2021 elections, we established a non-partisan task force made up of senior officials, responsible for examining all the foreign interference attempts and reporting to Canadians on the integrity of our elections. The task force determined that the interference attempts had not affected the election results.
Be that as it may, the important thing is that we established those bodies. The task force is part of a mechanism, a protocol we created in 2019 to bring independent experts and senior officials together to communicate with Canadians at election time, in a clear and impartial way, in the event of an incident that threatened the integrity of the election.
Madam Chair, I see that other members would like the floor in order to participate in the debate, as you mentioned. I'm prepared to yield the floor, but I do want to point out that I haven't said everything I was going to say. My opposition to the member for St. Albert—Edmonton's fourth attempt at this motion is for good reason, so it is highly likely that I will have more to say in the course of this debate. For the moment, though, I will yield the floor to others so they can contribute as well.