44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 20, 2023 11:00AM
- Mar/20/23 12:22:35 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, first, I associate myself with the comments by the member for Edmonton Strathcona regarding the horrific killing of two great Edmonton police constables, constables Jordan and Ryan. My thoughts and prayers are with their families and the entire Edmonton Police Service. It illustrates how the men and women in law enforcement put their lives on the line every single day. Constables Ryan and Jordan did just that, and they will always be remembered for their service to protect our community in Edmonton.
I acknowledge that foreign interference from Russia, Iran and other countries, other bad actors, is a real problem. However, we have very specific reports of very specific interference in two very specific federal elections, and we need to get to the bottom of these issues. The way to do that is to have a focused study at a parliamentary committee that can call witnesses to get the answers Canadians deserve That includes a full and independent public inquiry, not the smokescreen the Prime Minister has offered to cover up the truth.
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- Mar/20/23 12:38:33 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, before I ask my question, I would like to extend my condolences to the people of Amqui and to the family of the police officers who were killed in Edmonton.
You talked about the integrity of elections. We know that there was a foreign interference campaign. The Prime Minister did nothing. He completely ignored the warnings from CSIS.
What do you think about the government's inaction, and what would you do if you were in government?
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- Mar/20/23 12:39:56 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, New Democrats have been clear from the beginning of this issue that nothing less than a thorough public, transparent and independent inquiry would suffice to give Canadians confidence in our democracy and make sure future elections are free of foreign interference. In fact, we were the first party in the House to call for that.
I happen to sit on the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, or NSICOP, and although, of course, there is much I cannot say, what I can do is point all members of the House to a report that was issued on foreign interference several years ago. It is clear in that report, to anybody who wants to read it, including my hon. colleague, that there are numerous countries alleged to be involved in foreign interference in this country.
Will the motion tabled, which he is supporting today in the House, be broad enough, in his view, to encompass foreign interference by any country in Canadian democratic processes, or does he intend his motion to be restricted only to the government of China?
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- Mar/20/23 1:02:26 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, Canadians find these allegations of foreign interference in our elections extremely troubling, and seven in 10 Canadians want to see a public inquiry. In fact, the Prime Minister's own former principal secretary believes a public inquiry into this matter is needed. We have an established process in Canada for getting to the bottom of questions like this, and I think most people are quite confused that the Liberals have, instead, chosen such a convoluted path to get to uncovering the truth.
Could the minister shed some light on why the Liberals continue to drag their feet instead of getting the transparency that Canadians deserve on our elections and the potential for foreign interference?
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- Mar/20/23 2:44:44 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we agree that foreign interference should never be a partisan issue. That is why we appointed someone who is independent, has an impeccable background and will be able to review everything available when it comes to foreign interference in our elections and make recommendations.
We value that independence. We know that David Johnston will be an outstanding individual to carry out this work and make recommendations to the government, which may include a public inquiry. Whatever the recommendations are, we will accept them.
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- Mar/20/23 2:46:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Bloc is obviously trying to make us believe that it is serious about protecting our institutions, but let us take a look at its record.
When measures were put in place to protect our elections, the Bloc voted against them. When we took steps to prevent foreign money from influencing our elections, the Bloc voted against them. When it came to strengthening the integrity of our voter lists, the Bloc voted against that too.
We take the job of protecting our democratic institutions very seriously. We will continue to do whatever it takes to strengthen and protect them, and we would appreciate the Bloc's help, for once.
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- Mar/20/23 3:39:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to say that I agree with the need to take foreign interference very seriously, and I want to ask the member whether he agrees that we should look at not just the 2019 and 2020 elections, but at the others as well.
I know that the NDP thinks that we need to examine interference from other parts of the world, but could we also not examine more elections because we need more information to protect our democratic systems?
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- Mar/20/23 3:49:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my apologies.
Were the Prime Minister and his advisors briefed that China was working to defeat Conservative candidates in 2021 so that a Liberal minority government would be elected? Five, did they know that the former Chinese consulate general in Vancouver bragged in 2021 about helping to defeat two Conservative candidates?
The heart of this scandal is not that there has been electoral interference, it is that the Liberals allegedly knew there was electoral interference but did nothing because it was to their benefit. CSIS leaked a quote from a Chinese consulate official who said, “The Liberal Party of Canada is becoming the only party that the People's Republic of China can support.”
The best guarantee of good government is still vigilance of an effective parliamentary opposition. It does not matter to Liberals that the opposition has not actually suggested that the outcomes of the previous two elections are in question. Liberals are at best misguided in seeking to demonize the opposition using the very partisanship and rhetoric they denounce.
The Prime Minister seeks to wedge the issue out of legitimate opposition concerns for the safety and integrity of Canadian elections. He does a grave injustice to our system of democracy by doing so. The role of opposition is to hold the government’s feet to the fire, not so that they can get warm and toasty, but so they can feel the heat of parliamentary scrutiny.
It seems like the Liberals are playing all the cards when it comes to burying the story. Number one, the Prime Minister used the Trump card when he said that giving reasons to mistrust elections is not good for society and is something that we have seen from other elections, echoing a senior Liberal who more openly accused the opposition of Trump-style tactics.
Number two is the “nothing to see here” card, which he played when he said, “Canadians can have...confidence in the integrity of our elections.” Number three is the partisanship card. The Prime Minister accused the opposition of sowing confusion and mistrust by even raising the allegation.
Number four is the “it is all lies” card from when he said, “We are very concerned with the [Global News] leaks, particularly because there are so many inaccuracies in those leaks.” Number five, and the most disturbing, is the racism card. The Prime Minister referred to a rise in anti-Asian rhetoric to deflect a question on the subject.
The Liberal MPs have been successful in blocking a vote for far too long. Canadians must know that Katie Telford has the information that she received from CSIS, but she has either made the decision to keep the Prime Minister in the dark, as she did during the scandal of sexual misconduct in the military, which is disturbing on its own, or maybe she did notify the Prime Minister and he kept quiet about it. Either way, people need to know what is going on in this country.
Lastly, I turn to the leader of the third party, the leader of the NDP and his caucus.
Through you, Mr. Speaker, you have got an extremely important choice. When you were elected, you were elected to represent all of your constituents, not just those constituents who voted for you. It is time for you to make a decision. Will you support this country, get to the heart of this matter and deal with this appropriately, or will you continue to prop up the government?
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- Mar/20/23 4:16:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Yukon today.
I would like to start today by speaking directly to the seriousness of these allegations, the seriousness of foreign interference generally and what the government has been doing.
I would say to the member who spoke just before me that the claim that we have done nothing is absolutely ludicrous. I would remind the member that on December 18, 2020, the then minister of public safety mailed a copy of a public report regarding election interference specifically as it relates to China to every single member in this House of Commons. I am sure that she received and reviewed it, as did all Conservative MPs, yet they have the gall to stand up in this House and suggest that we are being secretive or that information is not being shared with them.
In addition to that, what has this government done? We created NSICOP, which specifically allows parliamentarians and senators to review highly classified information. We passed the Election Modernization Act to help tackle foreign interference, Bill C-76, which Conservatives voted against. We created a panel of experts to monitor in real time what was going on with respect to foreign interference during an election and gave them the ability and the power to act on it.
We put in tighter controls on advertising and online platforms. We closed fundraising loopholes to keep foreign money out of elections. We enhanced the integrity of the voters list.
Foreign election interference has been going on for about 10 years. Now, as a result of the real concerns that Canadians have, and rightly so, it is at least being talked about a lot more in the mainstream, as we have seen in other countries.
The Prime Minister and indeed this side of the House are seized with what is going on. We take this very seriously. That is why the Prime Minister empowered NSICOP and NSIRA to specifically look into the issue of foreign interference and why he has appointed an incredible Canadian, David Johnston, to look at the issue and recommend to the Prime Minister the best course of action to move forward, which very well might be a public inquiry. This government has already said, in advance of knowing what any of those recommendations might be, that we will accept and implement them.
Therefore, for the member for Thornhill to come in here and suggest that this government has done absolutely nothing about foreign interference and has been secretive is just completely untrue.
I find it very interesting that we are getting this lecture from the member for Carleton, the Leader of the Opposition, and his MPs about sending staff to committee. It was the member for Carleton who, in 2010, said this to the CBC. I will read it out again because I think it is just so telling, and the video is widely available for anybody to go back and review.
He said:
...ministers answer questions on behalf of the government and not staff. We are not going to be changing 300 years of history all of a sudden at the behest of the coalition parties. We are not going to have the staff members appear in question period to answer on behalf of the government. We are going to do it the old-fashioned way, the way it has always been done right up until the last several months. We are going to keep ministers, the guys in charge, responsible for their duties.
I always get a kick out of the use of that terminology, “the guys in charge”. Of course the member for Carleton would phrase it like that.
That was the member for Carleton when he was in government. He was answering a question as to whether staff, in particular, Dimitri Soudas, the then prime minister's director of communications, would go to committee.
I think the hypocrisy here is literally oozing out of that side of the House and dribbling down towards the aisle here when I listen to what is coming from over there.
At the time, the NDP, I believe with other political parties, were able to get through a motion to require Mr. Soudas to appear before committee, yet he never did. Do members know who appeared? Stephen Harper sent John Baird, one of his ministers at the time, to deal with the situation.
In response to Mr. Easter asking why he was there and not the person who was called to the committee, Mr. Baird said, “the government believes the opposition is playing politics with parliamentary committees and is not respecting due process and fair play.”
Does that sound familiar? “They are conducting random interrogations without due process or any rules of fairness. That might be how things work in the United States Congress, but it's not the Canadian tradition. In Canada the constitutional principle is ministerial responsibility.” That is what John Baird said when Stephen Harper defied the request of Parliament for Dimitri Soudas, the director of communications in the Prime Minister's Office, to appear before committee.
This new-found approach from the Conservatives is to suddenly be so incredibly hypocritical. I will not even hold it against the new members who have come along since 2015. However, in particular, the member for Carleton was not just an MP who happened to be around the House at the time, but he was actually leading the file. Is he suddenly standing here saying it is completely appropriate now?
I asked the member for Thornhill, just before my speech, why it is okay now, and she was totally unable to give an answer. Her answer basically was that the chiefs of staff have already come forward from the government. What she is basically saying is that we should never have set the precedent, because now Conservatives are running rampant all over it, using every possible opportunity. Where does it end from here? That is the question.
Every time Conservatives want to drum up a fake scandal, they are going to run in here and use the same language they are using now. No one is doing China's work better for them than the Conservative MPs right now, who are sowing the seeds of distrust in our democratic institutions. That is what is happening right now, and it is Conservative MPs' responsibility for all of it.
This comes down to politics, and I am not the only one saying this is politically motivated. Push aside all the people who are Liberal, NDP and non-partisan. Push them aside for a second and let us just talk about Conservatives who are calling out this rhetoric. Fred DeLorey, the campaign manager from a year and a half ago, is on nightly. It is like he is lining up to get on every talk show or every panel he can on CTV and CBC. He is everywhere right now, basically saying that the Conservatives are just trying to score political points.
Vern White, a former Conservative senator, has referred to what is going on as “BS”. That is what he actually said. He is a former Conservative senator because at some point he came to the realization that this political party is way further to the right than where it had been when he was appointed a senator, if we can believe that. Former senator Hugh Segal, who represented my area and whom I have an incredible amount of respect for, has also—
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- Mar/20/23 4:27:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we can see the politics of it right there. When he was trying to define what the Prime Minister was saying, he put it in quotes. He said, “We need to get re-elected”. The Prime Minister never said that.
He cannot provide me with a single time the Prime Minister actually said that. The member is just making assumptions and trying to put it in quotes as though it is something that actually happened.
He talked about a track record. He is absolutely right that we have a track record. We have a track record when it comes to dealing with foreign interference.
We have actually made election security a priority. We have put in an oversight process over elections. We have tasked NSICOP with ensuring it has oversight from a parliamentarian perspective. We have tightened up fundraising loopholes. We have cracked down on the wild west advertising schemes that used to exist. We have ensured the integrity of the voters list and we have appointed a special independent expert to specifically look at this issue that we are seized with today, foreign interference.
Yes, we have a track record when it comes to that.
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- Mar/20/23 5:20:02 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Kings—Hants.
I would like to start off by indicating something very clearly. When one thinks of foreign interference into elections, it is really important that we understand and appreciate that this is not something new. It is something that has been taking place for many years now. In fact, to try to give a false impression that the Government of Canada has not been taking actions on this particular issue is just wrong. There have been a number of actions this government has taken on this issue for years now.
If one were to contrast that to the Conservative Party, one would find that even today's leader of the Conservative Party of Canada chose to do nothing when he was the minister of democratic reform and at that time there was foreign interference into elections.
It is interesting listening to the member who spoke just prior to me, who talked about wanting Katie Telford before committee. Today's leader of the Conservative Party of Canada argued, a number of years ago, that it is about ministerial accountability and that the chief of staff, or the political people the member today called for to come before committee, should not be coming before committee; it should be the ministers. That is exactly what the current leader of the Conservative Party was arguing just a few years back while he was the minister.
As a government, to be crystal clear, we have been very much active on the issue of foreign interference into elections. I want to start off my comments by reading a quote, as others have done. This comes from a CTV News article, which reads:
The U.S. Ambassador to Canada says the question of whether or not foreign election interference is happening is less important than whether it’s been successful, and he hasn’t seen any proof that alleged interference attempts by China in Canada’s elections have managed to affect the results.
David Cohen told CTV...in an interview airing Sunday, his many years of political experience have led to his developing a “certain level of skepticism and thick skin,” and an “assumption” that both [and I want to emphasize this] China and Russia have been interfering in the elections of several countries [not just Canada] for years.
“I almost think it's not even worth asking the question about whether there's interference,” he said. “I think the better question is: what is the interference targeting? Has it had any impact? Has it had any effect?
“I've seen nothing that anyone's reported or that anyone has said that’s been able to disclose any impact from any alleged interference by the Chinese in the last couple of Canadian elections.... I think the Chinese and the Russians have been at this for a long time,” he also said.
People will ask why I am citing the American ambassador. Let us look at the type of accountability we have witnessed here in Canada on this very issue. Canadians and parliamentarians have already heard on this matter from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Communications Security Establishment, the national security and intelligence adviser to the Prime Minister and the security and intelligence threats to elections task force, not to mention Elections Canada itself.
All the organizations I just listed off have testified that our elections were safe and that Canadians and Canadians alone determined their outcomes.
The Conservatives will cite certain things and are very selective in not including the many professionals, apolitical individuals, who have been clear that the outcome of the election was not impacted by foreign interference. The Conservatives know this, but they intentionally disregard it because they would rather ratchet up the rhetoric.
We have seen the rhetoric coming from the Conservatives. I would argue that they do it because this is an issue where they are more interested in raising money for their own coffers and using it as a fundraising tool. They do not have any solid ground for what they are arguing today. They say they want Katie Telford to come forward, but where was that argument when they were in government? Then, they argued for ministerial accountability, meaning that if we have something we want to question within a department, we can go to the minister. We have had a number of ministers appear as requested, and like the professional civil servants, they provided the necessary assurances to give a high level of comfort to Canadians, but that is not good enough.
It is interesting how the Conservatives like to mock the New Democrats. However, we can look at how the Conservatives have conned the Bloc, which has bought into what the Conservatives have been saying. In fact, they have even doubled down on the special rapporteur, who was appointed by Stephen Harper. He is an individual with impeccable credentials who fully understands what is at stake here. As members know, at least on the government side, and I would suggest and hope others, there is zero tolerance for foreign interference in elections. In investigating this matter, the special rapporteur can come back and say that there should be a public inquiry, and we will respect that.
The government has gone out of its way to accommodate our best interests in protecting elections from foreign interference. As I pointed out, we have seen this in many measures the government has taken over the years. We witnessed professional civil servants, who are apolitical, come and make it very clear that there was no impact on the outcome of the election.
We should be looking at our electoral system as one of those sacred pillars of Canadian society. The politicization we have witnessed coming from the Conservatives on this issue, for the sake of being able to raise funds, I find disrespectful. Our democracy is worth more than a fundraising letter.
I see my time has expired. Hopefully, I will get a question to expand on that.
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- Mar/20/23 5:32:42 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I have a tremendous amount of respect for our civil service, which is why I listed off the many agencies and groups that are there to ensure Canadians can have confidence. They can have confidence because it is very clear that nothing ultimately impacted the outcome of the elections.
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