Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here today. It's greatly appreciated.
Look, no one around this table is a stranger to misinformation and disinformation. I wish I could show you what comes into my email inbox on a daily basis. Honestly, I think that if you look at a number of conspiracy theories...there are multiple Venn diagrams that could be constructed out of what we're talking about here today.
From my perspective, this is partially a frustrating thing. This committee and the topic of foreign interference have been pretty top of mind for the last couple of years. In fact, this committee conducted a study in 2022. The report was tabled in the House of Commons in March 2023. It was looking at Canada's security posture vis-à-vis Russia. We were looking at all kinds of areas of Russian involvement in cybersecurity espionage and in misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and we made a series of recommendations in that report. That's about a year and a half ago now.
Maybe I'll turn to the Russian Canadian Democratic Alliance with this question, because in your opening statement you wanted us to address this as a “national security threat”. You wanted to see one institution responsible. We made a recommendation to the government about examining the full extent of Russian disinformation targeting Canada: the actors, the methods, the messages and the platforms involved.
In response, the government said that in budget 2022 they had committed to providing $13.4 million over five years to renew and expand the G7 rapid response mechanism. I'm just wondering if you can comment on that, because if we've made a recommendation and they've provided a response, I'd like to have your feedback on how well that's working, so that maybe we can update our recommendation in this report.