Madam Speaker, there are two parts to what the member said. On the government's assertion that House of Commons officials were informed, what I can say is that there were 18 members of Parliament who were targeted by a foreign hacking attempt, which the Government of Canada knew about, and at no point, until the last few weeks, did the members of Parliament who were targeted find out about it.
The government's defence is to say that it told some other people. That is great, but it did not tell the people who were affected. We had a right to know that we were being targeted by a foreign state, and it is not the responsibility of the House of Commons' IT department to be informing us about these security threats. It is the responsibility, I believe, of the government. What I can say for certain is that the government did not inform us, did not insist that we were informed and provided no assurance that we would get the information. That is fundamentally unacceptable.
If I become aware of something that is very significant to the life of the member for Winnipeg North, and I do not tell him about it, but I go tell the member for Northumberland—Peterborough South about it, and then later it comes out that I did not provide this vital information, so I say, okay, I did not tell the person affected, but I told somebody else about it, I think we would all understand that this would be ridiculous.
What was crucial here is that the 18 members of Parliament who were targeted by a foreign state did not receive information that the government had about threats to us. We could have used that information to protect ourselves and to challenge our system on further steps that needed to be taken to protect our—