Hon. Andrew Cardozo: Thank you for your speech, Senator Manning. I found it most interesting. My sense is, as I’m listening to your criticism, I feel that your complete faith in the purity of the online world is kind of enchanting, but it’s five or seven years out of date, sir. I do share your interest in hearing from a lot of viewpoints in committee.

I want to read two lines from a report yesterday. There was a report that was issued, and some MPs from the other place hosted this session that a number of senators attended. MP James Bezan was among the people who spoke in favour of this report. I want to quote two quick lines:

Russian disinformation targeting Canadians received engagement from over 200,000 accounts on Twitter. These networks were among Canada’s most prolific and influential political communities online.

So these Russian-controlled communities are more influential than all of the newspapers in Canada that you can think of. That’s where we’re going, and that’s where things are.

My concern is that your view that government-appointed officials are non-legitimate is very troubling. Because if we were to fire all government-appointed officials, that would include all of us in this place, but it would also include every judge, regulator, police chief, fire chief. We would not have law and order. We have a system where the democratically elected governments appoint various officials and we’ve placed trust in them.

My question is this: Do you share my concern that we should perhaps have faith in at least some of our government-appointed officials or do you feel they should all be removed because they’re not legitimate?