Canada-China Relations committee  TikTok is meant, first and foremost, as an information operation platform, meaning that it can influence and it will introduce some information between small videos. If it controls the platform, it can can control the message. Once the program is installed in a phone, a tablet or whatever technology, they can remotely activate anything they want, because they control it.

Canada-China Relations committee  Thank you.

Canada-China Relations committee  Mr. Bergeron, I accept your invitation to have a coffee. It would be nice to meet with you at any time. I haven't seen Mr. Austin's assessment points. I don't know how he figured out where China stood and where Canada stood. However, I can tell you that a key element is the power of each country.

Canada-China Relations committee  I'll add that China has an airtight network that's very difficult to penetrate. It's also very difficult for Chinese people to get out. China controls the information in every respect, which gives the country another advantage. Canada, on the other hand, is quite democratic. People can get on and off the Internet at will.

Canada-China Relations committee  I concur with what Mr. Juneau-Katsuya said, to the effect that, over the past few years, until very recently, as you say, there has been a lack of awareness and, more specifically, of ties between educational institutions and the government. For example, there is a way to produce material, to declassify it in a particular way, to provide enough information to make very interesting products available to people who receive them.

Canada-China Relations committee  Concerning the IP you are talking about, is it the protocol or another way to communicate? What comes to mind is a way to communicate. IP version 6, which was developed some 15 years ago, should take more space. It is based on the quantity of available IP addresses. It is another way to communicate.

Canada-China Relations committee  Mr. Paul-Hus, the irony in this is that the FBI, in the United States, had to get involved to address the threat in some companies that were still infected. Several months after having been told that their system had been infiltrated, a number of companies had still not done anything.

Canada-China Relations committee  More recently, there was the Cloud Hopper operation, which tried to attack what we refer to as managed service providers. Those are companies that provide user support services in businesses. CGI, a Canadian company, was one of that operation's victims. It was infiltrated and, through that third party, China had access to very important clients the company was doing business with through that contracting.

Canada-China Relations committee  Aside from stealing patents and intellectual property, they want to gather a lot of information on anything. As Mr. Juneau-Katsuya said earlier, they get anything they can and then they sort through it. When it comes to the collection of personal information, I can cite the Office of Personnel Management, in the United States, which had anything that constituted Americans' personal information stolen, including security clearances.

Canada-China Relations committee  We have a very big problem, as, once again, everyone is working in a silo. That leads to information compartmentalization. It's even worse in Quebec because the province thinks it can do everything itself and rarely turns to the federal government. Over the past two years, Quebec has requested assistance and information in order to make the right decisions concerning cyber threats.

Canada-China Relations committee  The current cybersecurity policy is based on what has been seen over the past 20 years. It must now be changed because the threat has adapted. The way to respond to the threat and, more importantly, the laws and regulations have not been updated, and that is why we are currently at a disadvantage.

Canada-China Relations committee  All right, Mr. Chair. The most striking example for Canadians is no doubt the theft of manufacturing patents, strategic plans and other intellectual property from Nortel between 2000 and 2009. The strategic information was passed from the MSS to engineers at Huawei, as Nortel executives in Canada ignored RCMP and CSIS warnings.

Canada-China Relations committee  Yes, Mr. Chair?

Canada-China Relations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to be here to share my views on certain concerns I—and my fellow Canadians—have regarding the security of personal information and modern online business practices vis-à-vis the presence of Chinese companies in our society.