National Defence committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman and esteemed members of this committee. I will focus my remarks today on primarily the information operations aspect of foreign cyberwarfare and the threat it poses to our information environment and our national security. I will talk about the direct imp

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for that very important question. You may not like this answer, but I think we need to send more weapons to the Ukrainians, certainly Harpoon missiles, to deter Russian attacks on vessels leaving Odessa with that grain, the grain that is so desperately needed in so many

Foreign Affairs committee  That information war would have simply continued. Now that we have returned that turbine, we see it continue. The Russian government has continuously made excuses to reduce the flow of gas through Nord Stream 1. Now that it's stopped that flow completely, it has continuously blam

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, yes, I think it demonstrates that Vladimir Putin is very much in a bit of a panic mode about the sanctions. Dr. Schmitt mentioned earlier that Russia is no longer able to repair any of its military equipment. It's using parts from household appliances to patch up various di

Foreign Affairs committee  Certainly. There are several thousand political prisoners in Russia today since the war began. In the first few months of the war, thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest this war. They were all brutally arrested. The entire Russian opposition, the ones who remained

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a very good question. I saw that same report. According to that report, by August 9 the RCMP had initially reported that $289-million worth of Russian assets had been frozen. They then revised that number to $122.3 million. I'm not sure what would account for that sort o

Foreign Affairs committee  I think there's a lot that Canada could be doing to make our own sanctions regime more effective. First and foremost is working with our allies to harmonize our policies and legislation with the United States, the EU and the U.K. We should be stepping up the enforcement of our s

Foreign Affairs committee  I completely agree that we have the worst of both worlds. We've arrived at a lose-lose situation. The fact that we have compromised on these sanctions opens the door to other allies doing the same. They can justify that action by pointing to our decision to provide that exemptio

Foreign Affairs committee  There certainly is demand in the Baltic states, and there has been, for quite some time, for the export of Canadian energy. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, Canada and Estonia have just recently signed an agreement to develop a program to build small-scale nuclear reactors i

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am simply Mr. Marcus Kolga, not Dr. Marcus Kolga. Thanks to you and the members of the committee for this opportunity to appear before you today. Over the past months, Russia has threatened to starve vulnerable nations around the world by blockading mil

Public Safety committee  Absolutely.

Public Safety committee  Thank you for that excellent question. I think the federal government needs to take, first and foremost, an inclusive, all-of-society and all-of-democracy approach to this. Of course, government needs to be part of that discussion to develop a strategy to combat this, but it als

Public Safety committee  I think we've seen exactly how far they can go. In the case of the United States and the 2016 presidential elections, we saw Russian efforts to destabilize that election that came very close to successfully doing so. We've seen, with regard to the invasion of Ukraine, the effecti

Public Safety committee  That's a great question. When we saw the emergence of the pandemic in March of 2020, a lot of us who have been keeping an eye on Russian disinformation, those tactical narratives that they use and the types of issues that they target, saw that COVID would provide a fertile ground

Public Safety committee  If I were in Europe, especially in the Baltic states, I'd be far more concerned about a Russian invasion than I would be in North America. I think that Russia's primary objective—Vladimir Putin's primary objective—is to expand the availability of resources. They have already be