Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'm very sorry about that. I hope I didn't cause the interpreters any discomfort or injury. That was never my intention. I got a little carried away, there. It's probably from sitting through the many hours of this committee and doing all this research. I apologize.
I keep coming back to this point: The truth really does matter in our democracy. What we've seen is, these misinformation campaigns have an impact. They are a real threat. We need to be evolving our approaches and strategies to combat them.
In this particular case—where we have Conservatives claiming things that are, quite frankly, not verifiable or corroborated by any evidence—we have to be very careful and cautious. We have to hone in on the key questions, here. Are these misinformation campaigns having an impact on Chinese Canadian voters' intentions, as has been claimed?
I think the answer in this report, again, is another corroborating piece of evidence, in addition to expert testimony. They came to the same conclusions through independent means. When you have multiple pursuits that are independent of political influence coming to the same conclusion, you have to go, “Okay, maybe those are approximating the truth pretty closely.”
That's the conclusion I'm drawing from all of this, which I think is quite rational. I pride myself on operating on the principle of sufficient reason, which is this test: If you say something that conflicts with my world view, argument or position on something, and I think it has merit—even if it has partial truth—I will take it into consideration. I will try to understand how I can benefit from that and change my perspective based on that. In this particular case, however, I feel as if opposition parties are just denying the facts. They're saying, “No, we're going to believe the allegations flying around and not look at the facts and information.” That's why I'm very animated about this, Madam Chair.
It's a shame that it's in my constituency week. It's not that I'm opposed to doing great work on behalf of Canadians in a constituency week. I would be doing that whether we were in this committee or not. It's just that I'm diving into extensive reports on this topic during a constituency week. I would rather—as Ms. Blaney said, the other day—be meeting with my constituents. I feel they are very important to meet with. I've had to cancel meetings for the day. All of that is fine. If opposition members would rather do this, then it's fine. I will continue to bring facts and information to this conversation. My arguments will be based on that.
I'm going to get back to this report. There are a few other findings, here, that I want to share. I think they're important ones.
Another key finding, on page 66 of this report, is that, “Canadian voters do not consider China to be a top electoral issue during the 44th Canadian election.” They did an analysis of all the federal election issues. China, or foreign affairs related to China, was not one of the top issues in the last election. Again, it's not me saying this. It's an independent report that surveyed all the different issues. I think it's interesting to conclude that. People are claiming things like, “This had an impact on the election”. We've had some extreme cases and claims made by Conservative members of Parliament and the leader of the official opposition related to this.
Other times, we've had more, I would say, benign claims that it's going on. Again, the argument is this. If independently verified groups have done work to say that China and foreign affairs related to China weren't a top election issue and we can also see that the relative response and engagement of the online misinformation campaigns that were state-sponsored had no verifiable impact at all on voter intentions or behaviour and were a very small slice of what was happening during the election, then why would anyone ever try to claim that somehow the overall election results were changed as a result of foreign interference, when we know that the vast majority of it was online? That, to me, goes to the heart of some of the arguments and perspectives that we've heard.
Another finding: “We see no evidence that China-related issues were consequential for the election, nor that the content circulated on social media had any influence on opinions at a national level.” That's another pretty telling conclusion, which I think speaks volumes to how disappointing it is that we're continuing to do this.
Finally, maybe I'll just quickly summarize some of the recommendations. I think there is some real importance to these, and there are only four. Bear with me for a few more minutes and I will wrap up by summarizing these conclusions.
One of them is to develop a community of practice focused on tackling misinformation in Canada. This is the type of recommendation that I would put a lot of weight into and say, yes, this is something the PROC committee could be recommending. It's something that probably coincides with some of what we've heard from the experts in this committee. This relates to that fracturing of the information ecosystem that I talked about at the beginning, which is one of the key vulnerabilities.
If you developed a community of practice that includes government bodies, researchers, media organizations and civil society organizations all working together, that would really help combat that fracture in the information ecosystem. In other words, that coalition or the community of practice, which would share best practices, could really leverage all of the expertise and the reference points and perspectives that people have in order to enhance our ability to tackle this in a really comprehensive way. That, to me, is a really solid recommendation. I think we should heed that advice from these professionals and recommend that in our future report.
Another one is to engage in strategic countering of misinformation. I found this one really interesting as well, because the focus here is on strategic. I think they've concluded throughout this report that there are certain things that spread and have more influence than others, and there are certain segments of the population that are, perhaps, more vulnerable or more predisposed. There are social media platforms that are targeting information based on critical issues, based on polarizing issues. There's the amount of exposure one has. There are a whole bunch of factors, and I don't think they are saying that a spike in misinformation during the election period is the biggest threat. I think they're actually saying the biggest threat is the ongoing ubiquitous nature of misinformation throughout Canadian society, which is being consumed every single day and polarizing the views of our population over time.
To me, both of those kinds of observations would require us to be very strategic about where to focus resources. What's having the most impact on Canadians and what is the biggest threat to Canadian democracy and our electoral process? To me, I think that is another really worthwhile recommendation.
The third one is, “Increase public resilience to misinformation”. I think this is one that our government has done considerable work on, but I think we could certainly benefit from a lot more. This, again, is that public awareness piece, the digital literacy skill building of the public to be able to identify misinformation when they see it, which is not easy. I, myself, have moments in my political career where I'm looking at information online and wondering if I should I really share it. Is that a view that...? I don't know. It's questionable. We need to be promoting that critical lens.
There are a whole bunch of aspects of developing public resilience to misinformation that I think we could do. There are some more specifics in this report.
Lastly, the fourth recommendation is, “Extend initiatives to limit and counter misinformation to non-election periods”. This is something Morris Rosenberg had mentioned in his report. He basically says that we should be looking at foreign interference outside of the caretaker period during the writ. Outside of elections, we should be monitoring and tackling this stuff.
I would say the government has been doing that, but I think we need to step it up. Based on these conversations, I think we could probably all agree that we should be doing that. I think there's a lot of opportunity there to dig in deeper. Outside of election periods, we could look at all the misinformation that's being circulated.
Here's another quote: “The threat to democracy may lie more in the slow, steady erosion of factual agreement, institutional trust, and social cohesion than in a flurry of election activity.” I think that's where we need to focus. That's the true threat to Canadian democracy. It's not just during election times.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be monitoring and doing all we can to prevent foreign interference during election times, but we have set up the processes for doing that and they are working. Could they be improved? Yes. I think we have said that from day one. We're open to that and all of us, I think, take that responsibility very seriously.
I think it involves continuing to adapt our efforts and include more strategies that will work and tactics that are better suited to that evolving threat environment. That includes non-election periods. That would be now. We should be monitoring and trying to combat misinformation online all of the time.
There are some specific recommendations here. One of them is, “Governing bodies may also wish to examine whether a regulatory regime in place during elections should be broadened to cover non-election periods, including but not limited to ad transparency, algorithmic audits, and limits on the use of foreign funds for advertising and partisan activities.”
Our government has done work on that.
Again, I'm not saying we can't improve things, if there are additional things we can do. We should look at those. Bill C-76, the Elections Modernization Act, prohibits third parties from using foreign funds for partisan advertising, and prohibits foreign entities from spending on partisan advertising both during the pre-election period and during the election period. It requires online platforms to publish a registry of partisan advertising. There are significant things we've already done on foreign funds for advertising for partisan purposes. The algorithmic audits and algorithmic transparency are things we've been talking about, and government has had quite a few conversations about them in open forums. I've gone to several events to talk about that with colleagues and debate that topic, and we could be looking at that.
There's lots to do, and there's a lot of benefit to working together, but I don't see how we get past the impasse we're at when opposition members won't agree to being fact-based, and look at the reality of what the government has done, and also look at the independent reports that are corroborating some of the big findings we have all heard now over and over again. It's not as if people can claim they haven't heard, or they didn't know, when they're going out saying misleading things. They know there is credible evidence of all the things our government has done to combat foreign election interference.
We've heard from the national security and intelligence community about all of the independent mechanisms. It said the last two elections were free and fair. We've heard all of this corroborated in multiple ways. The things that are being claimed are just, you know....It calls them into question. It's really disappointing, when you feel, as a member of Parliament, you're putting your best foot forward and want to do good, meaningful work for the benefit of the public, and we end up having to play partisan games. We're roped into it in a constituency week, when we should be with our constituents. I'm sure many of us would rather be working in our communities, meeting with our constituents today.
I'm happy to talk about this, and I have lots more to say. I have quite a few other really substantive reports that corroborate what we've heard from all of the experts, both the folks on the panel, the critical election incident public protocol, and all of the national security and intelligence experts. We've had it mentioned again by Conservative senators, and the former Conservative campaign manager from the last election. We've heard it from the former CSIS director. We've heard it over and over again. Hopefully, we can base ourselves in some factual information, move forward with this study, and get wrapped up with some really solid recommendations that the government can use to protect our democracy from these very serious threats.
With that, Madam Chair, I will wrap up here, and cede the floor.
I look forward to hearing from my esteemed colleagues.
Thank you.