Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to echo my colleagues in thanking our witnesses for helping guide us through.
I consider myself an optimist, but it's certainly hard not to be pessimistic when you look at the challenges that we're facing from this very real problem in our democratic space and in how our politics operate. In the nine years I've been an elected official, I have certainly seen the trend line getting much worse.
Mr. Scott, I'd like to start with you because I know your organization is trying to find a way “to support a realignment of digital media markets with democratic values.”
In your opening statement, when you were talking about the number of impressions that were made, the subscriber base and the 1.1 billion video views of Tenet Media, I was thinking of this concept of the public square and how that has transitioned over time. We have to be very careful as policy-makers because we don't want to give the Canadian public the perception that we're stepping in in a hard way. One thing we have to remember is that social media platforms, which have become today's public square, are in fact not public. They are owned by a handful of billionaires and they are designed for one purpose only, which is to return a massive profit to those billionaires. They wield an incredible amount of power.
Mr. Scott, this is a probably a very big question. How do we as policy-makers rein that power back in, so that a handful of billionaires are not controlling our public discourse, but do so in a way that tries to protect freedom of speech?
It seems like a monumental task. This is not the first time this committee has been confronted with such a massive question. We looked at this issue two years ago when we were looking at Canada's security posture vis-à-vis Russia and I'm not sure we've arrived at any answers yet.
I would love to have some of your feedback to help guide us through this particular study because, ultimately, we want to make some solid recommendations to the Government of Canada.