Thank you, sir. It's a good question, and I would approach it in this way.
When a foreign country, an authoritarian state like China, Russia and increasingly India, engages in foreign interference, they do so by attempting to understand their target on two different levels. On a political level, how well can they operate politically in that country in terms of engaging with target audiences within that country? What is the state of their diaspora in that country? To what extent can they encourage them to form and to hold opinions that are favourable to their official policy? There's that political level.
There's a different level in terms of foreign states like those countries trying to understand what kind of resistance they are going to meet from security and intelligence agencies in those foreign countries that they're targeting. They may be able to come to a picture of that political environment that they're operating in.
I would suggest to you, sir, that one of the challenges for many authoritarian states, no matter what the size of their intelligence arms might be, is really understanding the operating environment abroad. What are they going to hit when they try to conduct operations in Canada, in the U.S., in the U.K., in Europe and so on? They will often engage in those operations with a degree of ignorance about their opposition and about what they're going to face, and with a degree of overconfidence about what they can achieve.
It's because we're in the secret world now and knowing how to understand the success of foreign interference operations.... I think one of the blind spots of many authoritarian states is that they come at foreign interference with a picture of the politics of a foreign target that may not be very accurate. They often come at intelligence and security operations related to foreign interference without a full understanding of what they're going to meet in terms of security push-back.
I appreciate that this has been a contested issue, including throughout the public inquiry into foreign interference. On the view that Canada should be seen as some kind of playground for foreign interference, my own view, personally, is that it's an exaggerated position. Again, I would separate it into what foreign states think about Canada as a playground politically and what they think about Canada as a playground in terms of security and intelligence capabilities. I think there are two different calculations there. We're perhaps an easier target politically, but we're a harder target in terms of operations on the ground.