Sure. Information sharing in the national security environment is always a bit of a tricky thing. This is partly owing to its historical nature and partly due to the fact that the goalposts have shifted. It used to be spy versus spy; now Canadians—individuals—are in the crosshairs of foreign adversarial actors. That is a new phenomenon. For businesses, especially when it comes to cyber-espionage and cyber-enabled intellectual property theft, this is also relatively new. We're now in a moment when the tools of the trade are shifting, and maybe they are shifting a little bit slowly.
The point I would raise for this committee is, if you're focusing on what you can do.... I appreciate my colleague's point about surveillance capitalism and the business model of large platforms. If we could deal with that, we would have done so. What you can do practically is put pressure on to get the registry set up. The biggest piece of advice I would offer is to make sure it's resourced properly and you have good investigative capacity.
As for your question on information sharing, make sure the information is flowing between the agencies and the commissioner's office. The absolute worst possible outcome is that we go through all of this effort, we get Bill C-70 passed, we do these thoughtful studies and then the first prosecution collapses. The message this would send to adversarial state actors is not good.
I would say to put the pressure on and get this thing set up. You never want to deliver a birthday cake the Tuesday after a Saturday birthday. Let's get it done and make sure it's resourced properly.