Information & Ethics committee  Yes, Mr. Brassard. Our research group has a little paper on this, which I'll send to the committee, on what happened after the Facebook link ban. The one consequence to this is that people still feel like they're getting their news on Facebook when you ask them about this. They're not accessing news stories, but they are learning about politics from Facebook.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I would refer you to work by my colleague Eric Merkley at the University of Toronto, who studies affective polarization, which is how people feel about each other. While we don't have issue polarization in Canada—we still largely agree on most stuff, actually, when you get down to it—we are seeing increasing degrees of affective polarization, which means that people have bad feelings for other people because of what their political views are.

Information & Ethics committee  I'll say that's a very hard question to answer, Madam Khalid, about who is responsible for spreading a lie and for the downstream effects of it. That doesn't mean it's not serious, but I think it's probably a responsibility that's shared among people all the way down that chain.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you for the question. I appreciate the chance to clarify. I would say three things very rapidly. One is that when I look at the opinions of Canadians versus people in other countries, there's just less political room in terms of support from Canadians for government to regulate or try to regulate the online space.

Information & Ethics committee  Very quickly, Mr. Kurek, I think that example is a good one about the system working in some sense. Politicians frequently torque what their opponents have said. They'll take little turns of phrase. In that case, the Deputy Prime Minister was sort of caught out, in a sense, for having put out a video that I think probably unfairly pieced those words together.

Information & Ethics committee  I think you should consider whether you want to vigorously restrict the spreading of known falsehoods during elections. I don't have an opinion on that per se, but I know that there is some work.

Information & Ethics committee  It's kind of a political question in some sense, Mr. Green. That question does balance out the rights of free speech against other considerations, and where you strike that balance is a political question.

Information & Ethics committee  I think it's worth exploring whether political candidates should be banned from spreading falsehoods about other candidates' biographies, yes.

Information & Ethics committee  It depends on what problem we're trying to solve, Mr. Bains. AI and high-dimensional data tools are going to be very useful for figuring out the ecosystem and understanding how much misinformation and disinformation is spreading, but I think we have to recognize that at the core of this are human beings who want to spread disinformation.

Information & Ethics committee  I would say there are methods for doing this, and academics have spent a long time thinking about how to measure the effects of information. I wish I could tell you that it's easy to say definitively whether a message has worked or not, but really, to Justice Hogue's point in her report, it's hard to know precisely what effect a message has had because we're not running large-scale controlled experiments.

Information & Ethics committee  Part of what you're identifying is a huge credibility problem, which is that we don't know who's an expert anymore. We don't know who's credible anymore. I would just say very respectfully that members of Parliament don't help themselves in this process, because voters have come largely to the conclusion that they cannot believe what members of Parliament say.

Information & Ethics committee  I think there's an inherent challenge, Mr. Brock, in that there's a mechanism set up for very good public servants to have a finger on the alarm bell, so to speak, but the politicians to whom they report have conflicts of interest. In the heat of an election it's very hard for a party leader to say, “I want to tell everyone that my candidate has benefited from foreign interference.”

Information & Ethics committee  I would say, Mr. Green, we've decided in our country, through a lot of legal wrangling, to allow the limiting of speech during elections. We limit it to politicians largely and to parties, and we limit how much third parties can speak. That opens a legislative door for you to decide on what the arena will look like during elections.

Information & Ethics committee  It should be deeply so. No parliamentarian should have to wonder whether one of their colleagues was elected with the support of a foreign government.

Information & Ethics committee  I think it's a story as old as time. Politicians, even in Canada, have said things about what their opponents will do in office and what the consequences of their being in office will be that they either know to be untrue or could not know to be true.