Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you very much for the question. Madam Chair, in response, I would certainly say that I absolutely agree with the Chief Electoral Officer in terms of that assessment. The cyber centre has worked very closely with Elections Canada for many years, in terms of hardening systems and being able to detect and defend in that space.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you for the question, Madam Chair. Again, I'll answer that in a general way. What I would say is that our adversaries are opportunistic. They look for issues that are divisive domestically and they exploit them. Certainly that is a theoretical possibility, and foreign adversaries could take advantage of that domestically.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Adam, do you want to have a crack at that first?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Perhaps I can just offer that it's a space we continue to look at to try to understand. Again, it may veer a little bit outside of what the SITE focus is, but in terms of understanding the nexus between the various components of the Russian regime—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'm sorry, Adam, but I may pick on you for that one.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you for your questions. Once again, I'm going to answer in English. That's a lot of questions. I would just maybe underline, in terms of the authorities and tools we have to do our jobs, that, as Mr. Fisher has already stated, the service might require some updates to legislation, given the age of that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you for your question. I'm going to switch to English, so I can provide a clearer answer. Thank you very much. I should clarify something there. When I listed the countries that I did, they're from the national cyber-threat assessment, which speaks to the strategic cyber-threats to Canada from nation-states, rather than specifically those countries being engaged in social media-related activities targeting us in a political sense during that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you. I'll make a brief comment and perhaps open it up to my colleague from the service as well. Again, I have to underline that I obviously can't get into the specifics of some of the things that we understand of the behaviours and activities of these states, but it's easy enough to point out, I think, from open-source intelligence and what you see in the press, to be quite frank, as to how things unfold.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you for the question. To be quite frank, I don't think I would be qualified to necessarily comment on some of those big things you've asked for, sir. I think I would underline—keeping it in a SITE perspective and the particular roles and mandates of our organization as part of SITE—that we need to continue to make sure we have an open dialogue with social media companies.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, I will attempt to answer a bit of that question. I would say that we are in an environment that is increasingly online. We talked about this, and I'll refer back to the national cyber-threat assessment for this piece. Canada has a pretty significant digital economy.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you for the clarification. My response is that it's an ever-changing environment. We always have to be evolving ourselves and our methodologies to address the threats. Can we ever be 100% sure that we are able to deal with everything? I think the answer is no. I think the point here is pushing the bar and the message around resilience.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I will open it up to see if any of my colleagues want to have a say first.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you. I don't really have much more to add, other than to say that there are obviously a number of tools that can assist us in attempting to identify aspects of foreign interference. While I wouldn't want to comment specifically on a foreign registry, I would just say that could be another of those tools that could be implemented, among the others.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you very much for the question, Madam Chair. Maybe I will have a go at answering this. I think it's a fantastic question. It's one that we've talked about a fair bit as a SITE group in terms of wanting to make sure that information is relevant and available to the public as well, so I would say that when it comes to constituents, it's about education and information sharing at the end of the day.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I will attempt to answer that. Thank you for your question. I will simply note that this is a decision that is in the sole purview of the panel of five, as we would refer to them, the panel of five senior civil servants. The SITE task force does not have insight as to how and when they make those decisions.