—that could advise you on how to keep LGBT candidates safe. Here's why it matters.
We have 338 members of Parliament. There are five out members of Parliament. If you look at the United Kingdom's Parliament, with about 640-plus members of Parliament, there are over 45 out members, and two dozen in the House of Lords. We don't have a single out member of the Senate. We have a lot of work to do here in Canada, and we're not there yet, and we need platforms to let people know that, if they're going to do this, they're going to be safe.
Even in one of the meetings here this week, a colleague went on my Twitter feed and then went over to my Facebook feed, and said, "Oh, my God, you get a lot of hate". Just for being you in this role requires extra.... I know my skin has become thicker in the last three years. I can tell you, the happiest days of my life were when I hired a full-time communications person and got off Facebook and Twitter for a year. I'm not kidding you.
I've submitted that in a brief to this committee, that my mental health improved when I went off social media for a year. That is a sad state of affairs when a platform that I used to get elected I could no longer be on because.... I can tell you that one of my staff members was taken aback when she took nine pages of Facebook and Twitter hate to submit to this committee, which was just a sample of the thousands that I get every month. We have work to do.