Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It is a pleasure to be appearing before you today. My testimony will focus on how we should think of the role of different kinds of online platforms in facilitating IMVE and what we should do about it.
To begin, I'd like to start with an analogy as to how we can think about online platforms. The analogy, since I'm travelling internationally, is to an airport. An airport is sort of a real-world platform that allows passengers like me to connect to airplanes going to many different places around the world. We can think about online platforms in a similar way. Online platforms are points of connection that connect people to different kinds of organizations or other individuals around the world for different purposes.
Until now, the focus of legislative efforts in Canada has been around regulating platforms for expression, such as YouTube, Twitter and the like. These are platforms that curate and distribute user-generated content. I'm very honoured to be on an expert panel, appointed by Minister Rodriguez, to think about the regulation of these kinds of platforms and the harms they cause. Platforms come in many different stripes. As we've seen with the Ottawa convoy protests, there is now a focus on crowdfunding, but this is not the only kind of online platform that is in need of regulation. There are many others that impact our daily lives as Canadians. We think about platforms for transportation, Uber and the like, and platforms that enable the sharing economy, Airbnb and so forth. There are many different kinds of these.
It seems to me that a useful approach for this committee and for Parliament to consider in dealing with the kinds of harms that can be facilitated by platforms is to move beyond a focus on platforms that facilitate expression to those that facilitate various kinds of real-world impacts. Certainly, expression can have a tangible impact in the real world. It can incite violence among other things. It can cause harm to people's dignity. Of course, the challenge in regulating platforms for expression is the constitutional protection of free expression in Canada under the charter. By contrast, it is far easier for governments to regulate conduct on other kinds of platforms precisely because of the nature of the activity they facilitate—economic exchange, the movement of goods, the sale of goods and the accommodation of other services.
The previous witness spoke about root causes. Certainly, online platforms that permit the sharing of extremist content have an important role to play in reducing the flow of extremist ideas that lead to recruitment and the like. There's an important role for governments working in international partnerships. As the previous witness mentioned, this is a transnational problem. There is certainly an important role there, and an important interest to reconcile, but I would suggest that we also need to deal with the problem in public policy that we've provided other kinds of online platforms with a sort of digital exceptionalism from regulation.
This is now being corrected with regard to crowdfunding through the extension of generally applicable rules that apply to other financial intermediaries that facilitate transactions in the bricks and mortar world to crowdfunding sites. This is a welcome development. I would suggest that it would be a useful approach for Parliament to consider to extend regulation that applies in the bricks and mortar physical world to activities online, especially those that could be used to facilitate and incite online violence or violence in the real world.
Thank you very much.