44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 1, 2022 10:00AM
- Dec/1/22 10:16:24 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the next petition I am tabling deals with the case of the ongoing arbitrary detention in China of Huseyin Celil, a Canadian citizen of Uighur origin. Mr. Celil is a Canadian Uighur rights activist. He was originally detained in Uzbekistan for supporting the political and religious rights of Uighurs and was then illegally rendered to China. The Chinese government continues to deny his Canadian citizenship.
The petitioners note that they were pleased to see the release of the two Michaels, and they want to see the government as actively engaged on the case for Huseyin Celil as it was on those two previous cases.
The petitioners ask the Government of Canada to demand that the Chinese government recognize Mr. Celil's Canadian citizenship and provide him with consular and legal services in accordance with international law; to formally state that the release of Mr. Celil from Chinese detainment and his return to Canada is a priority of equal concern as the release of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor from unjust detention; to appoint a special envoy to work on securing Mr. Celil's release; and to seek the assistance of the Biden administration and other allies around the world in obtaining Mr. Celil's release, as done with the two Michaels.
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- Dec/1/22 10:16:24 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the next petition deals with a proposal in the Liberals' 2021 election platform to politicize charitable status and make charitable status determinations not on the basis of the work that organizations do but on the basis of what their convictions happen to be with respect to the pro-life question. The proposal to exclude organizations with pro-life convictions from accessing charitable status could put at risk the charitable status of worthy organizations such as hospitals, houses of worship, schools, homeless shelters and other charitable organizations that happen not to agree with the Liberals on that particular issue.
The petitioners note that the imposition of a values test associated with charitable status, similar to the one imposed on the Canada summer jobs program, would effectively involve meting out charitable status on the basis of the political or private religious convictions of different organizations, which goes against the core principles of the Charter of Rights.
The petitioners therefore call on the House of Commons to protect and preserve the application of charitable status rules on a politically and ideologically neutral basis, without discrimination on the basis of those opinions and without the imposition of another values test. They also ask us to affirm the right of all Canadians to freedom of expression.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to table a petition in support of Bill S-223, a bill that would make it a criminal offence for a person to go abroad and receive an organ taken without consent. This bill also has a provision whereby someone could be deemed inadmissible to Canada if they are involved in forced organ harvesting and trafficking.
This bill has been before Parliament in various forms for the last 15 years, and the petitioners call on the Parliament of Canada to move quickly on this proposed legislation to support it. They are hopeful that this Parliament will be the one that finally gets it passed into law.
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Mr. Speaker, the next petition is about Bill C-11, a bill currently before the Senate. The government has now admitted that it is seeking to give itself the power to regulate social media algorithms. The petitioners are opposed to that bill. They call on the Government of Canada to respect Canadians' fundamental right to freedom of expression and call on the government to prevent Internet censorship in Canada.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today. I have a number of petitions to present to the House.
The first petition comes from Canadians living with disabilities who have a number of asks regarding policies within the ambit of the federal government and Parliament that relate to Canadians with disabilities.
The petitioners note that inflation has increased the cost of living and is having the greatest impact on Canadians with fixed incomes, including Canadians living with disabilities. They note disturbing reports of people accessing euthanasia in Canada due to a lack of access to care and support. They also note that Canada's leading disability advocacy organizations had warned that Bill C-7 would threaten the lives and security of Canadians living with disabilities and that a choice to access euthanasia can never be truly free if those who suffer do not have access to the support they require.
The petitioners urge the House of Commons to pass Bill C-22, ensuring that the new Canada disability benefit is accessible to all Canadians who live with disabilities and does not take away existing benefits. They also ask for us to repeal Bill C-7 so that Canadians who live with disabilities are not coerced into accepting euthanasia because they do not have access to adequate support.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak in the House today to a very serious subject, cybersecurity and the security of our country in general.
I will say, on a lighter note, that my friend from Peace River—Westlock spoke about snowmobiling companies and cyber-attacks. I have some personal experience with snowmobiling at his house, and I would say that the government's approach to security is the equivalent of driving a snowmobile over a four-foot retaining wall, which may or may not have happened the last time I tried to drive one of those machines.
The situation of security in this country is very much worth the House taking note of. For much of the time that I have been engaging with and following politics, the primary area of security we would talk about would be concerns about our readiness for and our response to the threat of terrorism. However, it is important to take stock of how things have changed and the fact that, while there are still concerns about terrorism and how we respond to potential acts of terrorism, the primary security threat we face as a country, and indeed that the western world faces, is the threat of foreign state-backed and directed interference in our national affairs. Our abiding concern should be the reality that various foreign states are trying to shape and interfere with our democratic life to try to bend not only our government institutions, but also our civil society institutions, toward their desired objective.
Members of the government have said that the purpose of this interference is to cause total chaos and confusion. We should acknowledge that there are some cases of foreign interference that are aimed at causing chaos, but very often it is about simply trying to subvert and control the direction of institutions toward the will and the interests of that particular foreign power. We have discussed how the Chinese Communist Party is the biggest player when it comes to foreign state-backed interference, but it is far from the only player.
We have seen reports about Chinese government interference in our elections. There have also been recent reports about death threats from the Iranian regime targeting individuals in Canada. There are various other countries that CSIS and other organizations have identified as being involved in this activity of trying to interfere with, subvert and direct Canadian institutions, government really at all levels, as well as civil society organizations, universities and the like, toward their objective.
This kind of invisible, or sometimes a little more visible but often hard to detect, interference in the direction of our national life toward objectives that are not consistent with the objectives Canadians have established is a great threat to our security and our sovereignty. It is something that we should all be seized with and working to respond to.
Part of the context as well is that we are in what some analysts have described as a second cold war. Of course, there are many features of the current conflict between democratic and authoritarian values that are different from the last Cold War, but we have this reality of intensifying global competition between two different value systems that are represented by different countries at different times, and we have countries that are in the middle that are being pulled in different directions.
I tend to think that kind of cold war frame is a reasonably useful way of understanding the current tensions we face in the world. In the context of those tensions, we see how powers with political values that are fundamentally different from ours, where governments are trying to protect their own position, are trying to project their influence around the world. Again, this requires vigilance. It requires a strong response from Canada.
I have been struck by some of the recent comments from the Prime Minister on these matters. I think he has been showing a real lack of transparency around acknowledging what he knew when, and refusing to answer direct questions from the opposition about foreign interference, but he has also stated quite openly the reality that we have a serious problem with foreign interference. This is a reality that opposition members, in particular in the Conservative Party, have been raising for years. We have been asking the government to do more. We have been calling for strong legislative frameworks to respond to the problem of foreign state-backed interference.
We have also sought to elevate the voices of victims of foreign interference, people who have faced threats and intimidation from foreign state actors to try to silence their advocacy, which those foreign state actors see as contrary to their interests. It has been widely reported some of these victims really struggle to actually get proper support. They often get the runaround.
They go to their local police force, which does not necessarily have the capacity to handle a foreign state-backed organized campaign of threats and intimidation. Do they go to Global Affairs? Do they go to CSIS? Do they go to the RCMP? There can be a bit of confusion and passing of the buck concerning support for these victims of foreign state-backed interference.
We have a lot of work to do in legislation and policy, and our preparedness in general and our understanding of these issues. It is critical that we step up to strengthen our understanding of and response to the threats facing our country.
One thing we need to see more from the Prime Minister and the government is transparency because being transparent about this reality can help to counter the impact of that foreign interference. If we know it is happening, if we know what it is directed toward, then we can respond more effectively.
This is not only a responsibility of the federal government to respond to. Provincial and municipal governments need to be aware of the issues of foreign interference. Our universities need to step up as well. Private companies need to be aware of the risks around interference, theft of technology and the ways in which certain things may have a dual military use. There needs to be a broader awareness of this threat to the national interest, a threat to our values across all sectors of society, and a broader response to it.
The government has an important role to play in leading the response and making changes at the national level. We have been far behind, as far the national government goes, in responding to these threats. The Conservative opposition has been calling for a response to foreign interference for years. Now we are seeing the government start to talk about it a bit more.
I noted in some of the language in the Indo-Pacific strategy, for example, the government is starting, or trying, to sound a bit more like Conservatives in the way it talks about some of the challenges confronting us and the steps we need to take in the Indo-Pacific region. While the government is adopting some of that language, it is failing to substantively adjust its approach.
We have a bill in front of us today that deals with one avenue where we need to be engaged with and responding to the problem of foreign state-backed interference, and that is the issue of cybersecurity. I will be supporting this legislation at this stage to see it go to committee, mainly because we clearly need a new cybersecurity bill. We clearly need a new framework. The committee study will identify some of the significant gaps we see in the legislation right now, the ways the legislation needs to be improved and possibly the many additional steps required. I will just note that it is far past due that we have some kind of proposal for a framework on cybersecurity that, in a way, gives the committee the opportunity to add to and build on what the government has initially put forward.
This is really the first time we see any kind of legislation proposed by the government that substantively touches on this emergent problem of foreign state-backed interference. We need a much broader range of responses from the government. We need so much more to be done to counter this major security threat.
This is about preserving our country. It is about preserving the integrity of our institutions. It is about defending the principle that the direction of our democracy and the direction of our society should be shaped through the open deliberation of Canadians, not by foreign powers who have particular interests that may be contrary to our interests who are trying to push and pull that discussion in their preferred direction.
Having this framework that opens the door for the committee to discuss further, fill in some of the gaps and try to push the government to have greater specificity in the framework around what they are going to do provides us with the opportunity to do that. This is late, lacking in detail and really a small piece of the much broader picture that is required.
The government has been so delayed. I mentioned the decision around Huawei. We were way behind all of our allies in making the decision. It is important now, finally, at this late stage where the government is starting to mention the problem, that we actually see concrete action. Conservatives will be pushing the government to act in line with some of the words it has been saying.
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Madam Speaker, the member is correct that this is not a new issue. That is precisely why I think the government is very late in coming to the table. The issue of foreign interference, which is part of the context of the cyber-threats we face, is also not a new issue. Again, we have been calling for action from the government, but we have not seen other action from it. The member says that the Liberals have done all these other things, such as maybe giving some money over here or over there, but he evidently could not articulate specific measures that the government had taken.
We are behind when it comes to defending our security. We are behind what we should have known much earlier. We are behind our allies. We were the last of the Five Eyes and very late to step up on recognizing the risks associated with Huawei.
When it comes to foreign interference, I will challenge the government on one point: Why has the government not expelled foreign diplomats involved in interference and intimidation in Canada? That would be a simple step and the government has not taken it.
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Madam Speaker, the member asked what we would do if we were in government. We would make the right decision on every one of those.
With respect to the particulars the member raises with respect to what powers the federal government would have in intervening with provinces, this is an important issue for the committee to look at. I am supporting this legislation because we need to have a cybersecurity framework in Canada. It is important that this goes through to the committee and that those issues be looked at there.
I did not have time to go into it, but there are a significant number of problems in the legislation that do have to be worked out by the committee. No doubt there has to be a role for federal leadership around security, but it has to be a constructive, collaborative relationship, because there are steps for other levels of government. We see foreign interference at the very granular local level, so that collaboration across levels of government is really important.
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Madam Speaker, that is an excellent point. I did not have a chance in my remarks to talk specifically about the transparency issues. Again, we need to support this bill through the second reading stage out of agreement with the general principle that we need to do more on cybersecurity, recognizing how far behind the government has been.
However, there are significant issues with respect to ensuring transparency. There are significant issues on whether the bill is clear and specific enough about the steps that are required, instead of just leaving it, as we see often with the government and legislation, and giving an open-ended blank cheque to the government.
There are definitely issues. This requires a detailed committee study. I hope Conservative proposals will be adopted and we will be able to strengthen the bill as a result.
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- Dec/1/22 2:53:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I invite that hon. member to read the NSICOP report that was tabled by a member of her own government, which was, in fact, scathing about the government's failure to respond to the persistent problem of foreign interference.
We know that the Prime Minister's secrecy and refusal to answer basic questions about foreign interference is putting this debate on its back foot. He is putting his personal interest ahead of the national interest by not listening to CSIS on the benefits of sunlight and giving us the information.
Will the Prime Minister answer the question. Has he received briefings or memos on this subject since he last denied it, yes or no?
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