Senator Housakos: I have looked at the Australian model. I find it is a lot more rigid than what we’re proposing over here. Again, I did not want to go outside of the realm of public office‑holders and public officials in this particular instance. I’m very cognizant of the fact that I don’t want to infringe upon the private life of corporations and other entities in Canada. There’s always a fine line. Is it something that we can look at? Do we want to strengthen it up to the point where we hold people accountable once they leave public office? I’m not averse to those kinds of suggestions, amendments and changes as we go along.

Clearly, we have a problem — based on the reports we’ve seen from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and our intelligence services — and we are being infiltrated at the highest levels in our institutions right now. This would be the first step, and as we go along we need to continue to be vigilant. As we also know, it doesn’t address cyber and social web influence, which is very powerful.

I think this is very concrete and specific. It deals with entities that are affiliated with these totalitarian regimes that are very often trying to influence our public institutions and our public Crown corporations in various other sectors.