Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to welcome the witnesses and thank them for being here. Their presence here is important.
I would also like to welcome Ms. Begum and Mr. Ntumba to the committee.
Ms. Begum, congratulations on your decisive election win.
I thank my colleague Mr. Garon for helping me out during the first few minutes of this committee meeting.
My first question is for you, Ms. Blais.
The rest of my questions will be for the Canadian Telecommunications Workers Alliance.
When the Telus representative was here for our study on AI, he explained to us that data sovereignty involves three things. First, Canada's data protection laws must apply. Second, no foreign laws should apply to this data, especially not laws that would require the data to be shared with the government. Third, no foreign kill switch should be able to interfere with data management.
People talk a lot about data storage, but they don't talk as much about data transmission. Recently, Rogers relocated its Internet network operations to India. However, Indian law requires that all data be made available to the Indian government. Keep in mind that there have been tensions between Canada and India recently.
Should telecommunications networks be protected from offshoring that could expose us to potential foreign interference?