Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee members for inviting me here today. My name is Ryan O'Connor. I'm the lawyer for and director of Ontario Proud, which is a registered third party political advertiser in the province of Ontario for the current provincial elect

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you for ceding the floor, Mr. Lavergne. I appreciate it. Just very briefly on that issue, I think there would be constitutional problems with preventing, for example, a trade union, which engages in political advocacy—frankly, all the time—on behalf of its members, from co

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We're concerned that the collusion provisions of the Election Finances Act in Ontario are not being upheld by Elections Ontario. I've personally identified several instances of collusion between unregistered third parties and political parties or simply with unregistered third pa

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The concern is that it needs to be enforceable. It's one thing to have an anti-collusion provision between a party and a third party or two third parties, etc., but it needs to be enforceable. We're seeing in Ontario right now unregistered third parties that are just not regist

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I don't have any specific examples. I think every country's experience with this is going to be different. What I would suggest, based on my reading of the draft legislation, is that a simple solution is to expand the prohibition on foreign financing of elections to all time per

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the committee for inviting me here today to speak to you about your committee's review of the Cambridge Analytica affair and the privacy implications of the use of digital information in Canadian political campaigns. As the chair said, my nam

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Canadians and this committee are rightly concerned about foreign involvement in our domestic electoral process in light of both the Cambridge Analytica affair and the prominent interference by foreign actors in the last American presidential election. Cana

Information & Ethics committee  We've indicated that Ontario Proud doesn't deliver commercial electronic messages, so it wouldn't fall under CASL in terms of the work that we have done previously.

Information & Ethics committee  No, I'm saying that provincial privacy legislation applies to Ontario Proud. We've done our very best to comply with those legal requirements.

Information & Ethics committee  Are you talking simply about email addresses, individuals who—

Information & Ethics committee  Well, you've listed the numbers, Mr. Erskine-Smith. So the individuals who—

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I'd be happy to.... There are approximately 100,000 email subscribers. Those are individuals who have consented to providing us with their email addresses so they could—

Information & Ethics committee  It's approximately 100,000, yes.

Information & Ethics committee  Sorry...?