Procedure and House Affairs committee  The suggestion of having a guarantee of transparency and independence by creating a body like that is a good one. It will have to be determined whether it needs to be completely independent and separate from Elections Canada. We should not be multiplying the number of voices that are giving answers to a worried public.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The agencies that handle how elections are managed are independent. They have access to a lot of information, which they are able to obtain from the technical authority in place, or from intelligence agencies. However, they disseminate very little information, overall. So it is very difficult to counter-check the information and assess whether it is truthful or not, or determine whether there has been improvement or not.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There is no way, because it can also be an agent operating from their country of birth, but who pretends that they are in Canada or the United States. This could make it very difficult to geoblock the source of the information if it is in an allied country but the message is fake.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  To verify that the use of cloud computing complies with Government of Canada standards, regardless of the company hired, Elections Canada had to do a threat and risk assessment, with the assistance of the Communications Security Establishment, which is Canada's technical authority in the area of information security.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The risk is higher, yes. Remember the good old days when people received voters' lists in their mailbox. Not much could be done to control what they did with that information, at the time. Today, a lot of crime, even fraud, can be committed with that information, which is easier to access.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The foreign states that certain applications come from and that own them can use them in several ways as vectors of influence, particularly by using messages for their own benefit that they send to all kinds of people, going as far as to target very specific diasporas. For example, TikTok and Douyin in China generate educational information intended for North America and the west in general, and for the rest of the world.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you for the question, and I would say that the threat has been amplified. I refer to the strategies taken from a book published in China in 1999 whose English title is Unrestricted Warfare. That book emphasized how China should position itself, given that it was less well equipped, technologically and militarily, than the Americans or the influential western countries.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The use of artificial intelligence is certainly going to have a multiplier effect, but at this stage, the technology is in the embryonic stage. The use of that technology will raise the danger of fake messages being generated, but with such verbal and visual authenticity that it will be very difficult to distinguish the real from the fake.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's a great question the member put. I have to put in, as Ms. Grondin-Robillard said, that, yes, it is a team effort. The message has to be formatted at the top and then pushed down through the educational system. I'm one who believes firmly—education is a provincial responsibility, and we all know that—in a program that will then be prepared at the federal level for the citizenship of everyone.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In the population in general, I would say that people tend to use technology intuitively. There is no formal teaching about how the new model of iPod or Android phone works, for example. People learn by using them intuitively, or by osmosis, with contacts. We might think that new young voters are more susceptible to disinformation because they may be more exposed and consume information from social media rather than the traditional media, which they very rarely look at.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In light of managing the information that goes to the public, yes, it's very hard to pinpoint the origin of the sources, as obfuscation is omnipresent whatever information is produced from anywhere in the world. It could be from here inside Canada, as well as from other countries across the planet.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is Steve Waterhouse and I am a lecturer in the master's level microprogram in information security, prevention component, at the Université de Sherbrooke. I am a former information security officer at the Department of National Defence. I am also a former assistant deputy minister of information security and cyber security at Quebec's ministère de la Cybersécurité et du Numérique, and an expert witness in cyber security.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Okay. Do I need to start over?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Okay. So I was defining cognitive warfare. It is the way to use knowledge in order to create conflict. In its broadest sense, cognitive warfare is not limited to the military or institutional worlds. With the use of this tactic of warfare, the various threat actors in cyberspace have evolved significantly since the advent of mass influence applications of all sorts, including Facebook, TikTok, WeChat and many others.

Canada-China Relations committee  First, you must acknowledge that this issue affects all departments and all areas of society and that there must be an active, not passive, education program. Right now, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security is providing some great information. The information is available on a website, but it isn't actively being shared in the field.