I'll focus specifically on Russia right now.
We know that over the past two years during the pandemic the Russian government has focused its disinformation efforts on exploiting the pandemic and COVID. We were warned already in March of 2020 by the European Union that the Russian government would in fact be doing this. They would try to amplify the effects of COVID and use it to divide us and erode the trust within society, and this is something that we've been tracking all along.
Later that summer, in August 2020, we saw massive anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown protests in Berlin that were covered live by Russian television and certainly promoted by them. The effect of this is that these protests are then legitimized.
Again, these protests may be legitimate. People feel these emotions. They have the fear. There is confusion about COVID. A lot of them are coming out with the best intentions. The fact is that Russia is exploiting those fears and those emotions and is promoting, quite frankly, anti-government narratives within them. This is something that we've seen come out over the past number of weeks in Ottawa. I don't believe that Russia has had a hand in directing what we've seen in Ottawa, but it certainly adds fuel to the extremist elements who are involved there. This is one of the ways they try to undermine our democracy and erode Canadian trust in media, in our elected government and certainly eventually in each other.