Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, MP Brassard, for the question. I think that if we look at the previous surveys and studies, we see a very clear decline in trust in mainstream media. There are many reasons for that, including the failings of some reporting about events around the world. Of course, we had social media emerging about a decade ago and prompting people to consume more news from there, and people got used to that.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you. I'm very sorry to hear about this. I actually wrote two peer-reviewed research studies mentioning you. I believe that social media is to blame partly, but also people's ideological beliefs that would prompt them to do so. Unfortunately, this is the case. There is a lot of polarization happening, and some political parties use what I call disruptive identity politics, so they work on that issue in order to mobilize some segments of the communities to probably win votes or create tighter communities, unfortunately.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't think that's possible. I agree with Professor Loewen on this. It might infringe on freedom of expression. You are free to say whatever you want, but of course, there should be some kind of repercussions if you are telling lies. To address your question, what I suggest is that there needs to be more transparency from the MPs about what they are claiming to say and also—

Information & Ethics committee  I'm not sure what to say here, but I believe the fact-checking initiative could be very useful because—

Information & Ethics committee  That's correct.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much for the question. From my somewhat limited experience working with AI tools—even the new ones—I can be certain saying we haven't reached that stage yet. We still need humans to qualitatively assess pieces of information. There are cues that could be easily detected with AI tools—for example, if an image is created by AI technology—we call them deepfakes—or a video is being deepfaked.

Information & Ethics committee  I think this is a collective effort. I don't want to say that parliamentarians should do all the work alone. Everyone should be involved. I know that some NGOs were invited to this committee. I think they should also be involved in this work. We need to fact-check each other, actually, including myself.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am very sorry, MP, for your decision, and I understand that this is a problem we are facing in Canada. In the research I have conducted with my team about the Canadian public's interactions with Canadian politicians, we've seen a lot of these examples. Whatever happens in Parliament will be directly echoed on social media and other sites.

Information & Ethics committee  These are just a few examples for the committee to look at.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much. Dear honourable MPs and committee members, thank you for the invitation to address the committee and talk about the impact of disinformation on the work of parliamentarians. I will rely here on my previous academic research on the topic. I think there are different internal and external challenges.