Thank you.
What's strange about the bill is that some false claims are prohibited, so why not prohibit all false claims? It does make sense to require that the claim was made knowingly, because then you're targeting only the poster—not the people who share it, who may not know that it's false.
The commissioner of Canada elections and the Chief Electoral Officer said in 2018 that if you require proof of intent, it makes it unenforceable. Just say that for anything related to the election you make a false claim about—and I would extend it right through to the period between elections—and any statement you make about any policy-making process that is false, you will be sanctioned. It will be removed from social media.
As Professor Tenove mentioned, it's very difficult during an election campaign period to react quickly enough and to have it judged as false and removed, but it still needs to be there to discourage the rampant disinformation that we're seeing.
It can be done. The key part—which is not set out in the bill—is that we need to make the enforcers of this entirely independent from all political parties and all politicians. It cannot be seen, or even appear to be seen, that anyone connected to any party or government is deciding what is false and sanctioning and removing posts from social media, but this needs to be done; otherwise, rampant disinformation that misleads voters will continue to undermine elections.
Everyone should realize that elections are usually decided by a vote margin of only 5% to 10%, so disinformation has to fool only 2.5% to 5% of voters to have an effect on the election. A very small percentage of voters being fooled and changing their votes because of disinformation can affect the result of an election, which is why this needs to be dealt with.
If it's not dealt with in Bill C-25, we need another bill very soon—before the next election.