I can reconstruct it.
We had seen Russian interference in the French election in 2017. We had seen Russian interference in the German election in 2017. We learned a bit later that there had been Russian interference in the American election of November 2016. There had been, in Australia, a considerable amount of attention to potential Chinese interference in Australian politics. I'm sure some of you have read the book that came out in 2018 in Australia on that topic. Australia legislated on foreign interference around December or January of 2017-18.
The question that was posed was, if the security and intelligence community became aware of attempts to disrupt the election...and it might be very subtle through disinformation. That was how the French election was attacked. It was disinformation through cyber-attacks and social media. It could also be denial of service attacks on Elections Canada, or it could be any number of pathways to interfere in the electoral process. Who was going to call it out?
If it was the minister of the day or the Prime Minister of the day, they were involved in the election campaign under way. They would be open to accusations that they were either blowing alarm bells for political reasons or withholding information for political reasons, so it was important to come up with somebody who could be the whistle-blower on foreign interference during an election campaign, during the caretaker period.
The alternatives that I remember kicking around would have been an independent commissioner or the panel that we came up in January 2019. It was my recommendation to the Prime Minister that we go with the panel that was created in 2019 and has been in place ever since.