44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 4, 2023 10:00AM
- May/4/23 12:45:44 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this gravely serious issue today, the threats to our beloved country’s sovereignty and security presented by foreign, state-backed interference, especially such interference originating in Beijing. This is the primary defining security threat of our country in this time. Foreign state-backed interference seeks to undermine our sovereignty by co-opting and dominating our institutions through a variety of means, both carrots and sticks.
People of all ethnocultural backgrounds can be impacted by foreign interference, but members of diaspora communities are particularly vulnerable to threats from foreign powers if they have close friends or family members living in the state that is seeking to influence or intimidate these Canadians. We should stand together, stand with all victims of foreign interference and implement the effective measures required.
The government has been profoundly weak in its response to foreign interference. It has been worse than weak. In certain cases, members of the government have been complicit. I recall the time John McCallum spoke publicly to say that, in his view, the Liberal Party was better for relations with the PRC. Therefore, the PRC should take certain actions, or not take certain actions, that would be useful to the Liberal Party in a lead-up to the election. Those were explicit comments made by the former ambassador to China, the former immigration minister, speaking on the record. The reality is that many of those conversations, I am sure, happened behind closed doors. We have heard so much about the frustration within our intelligence agencies about the weak response from the government.
This is not a new issue. When I was first elected in 2015, I started engaging with members of different communities in different parts of the country, and foreign, state-backed interference was top of the list of concerns. This was not just from one community, but from many communities. They were very concerned about threats within their communities coming from foreign governments and how they undermined their security. They often involved threats to family members in other countries.
The problem of foreign interference requires us to change the way we think about national security threats. There are many ways of framing the new understanding we need to have, but at this point, it is both honest and illuminating to describe the challenges we face in the world today as something of a new cold war. Although different in many respects, our current reality has many of the same features as the Cold War. We greet this reality with no relish, but this new era of global tensions and conflict is one we must, with sadness, recognize.
The world has now two clear blocs of nations that are engaged in both strategic and ideological conflict, each in hopes of creating a world that is more inclined to its own kind of political system, and we have varying degrees of non-alignment within those blocs.
If I were to describe those blocs, on the one hand we have the community of free democracies that believe in, though perhaps do not always perfectly practise, the ideas of freedom, human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The largest of these countries is of course the United States, but Canada is a key part of this community of free democracies, and this community includes other nations on various continents and of varying income levels.
On the other hand, we have a community of revisionist neo-imperial powers. This community of nations does not have the same ideological clarity around its objectives as the free democratic world does, or even what the old Communist bloc did, but what unites this revisionist neo-imperial community is its collective rejection of the core ideas championed by free democracies. The revisionist bloc challenges the idea that freedom, human rights, democracy and the rule of law are essential for political communities. It especially rejects the international rule of law, the idea that states should not be able to acquire territory through the force of arms and without the consent of the people affected.
Beijing’s Communist Party is the primary player in this bloc, but it includes other players, most notably Moscow and Tehran. These other powers of course exercise individual agency and have distinct objectives, but they share a common antipathy to western democracy and oppose the idea of an international rule of law binding neo-imperial powers. They are also increasingly working together. Between these two blocs of nations, we see many of the dynamics of cold war competition have re-emerged.
While I want to focus on the issue of foreign interference, I want to parenthetically say that one key area of cold war-style competition is the area of international development and engagement with countries, more broadly, those in the global south. A sad reality of western engagement in Africa is that the memory of western colonization is still very fresh, and the claims of western nations to represent rule of law and respect for national sovereignty can sometimes sound very hollow in light of that reality.
This is one of the reasons Beijing and Moscow have had success building influence in Africa, but this is not the only reason. Many African nations face serious challenges that require immediate solutions. They desperately respond to the overtures of those who offer even short-term solutions in areas such as infrastructure and security.
In the long run, the neo-imperial powers have imperialist designs in the global south as well. They are, in fact, using the old imperial tool kit to establish their control, but those long-term considerations can end up taking a back seat to short-term needs, especially when elites in the global south are also subject to influence operations.
Western engagement with the global south needs to grow in this context, and it needs to emphasize collaboration on solutions to real-world problems that African nations and other nations in the global south identify with. Strengthening the hand of freedom and democracy in the world today requires us to win the hearts and minds of the in-between nations that are deciding whether to align with the community of free nations or to align with the revisionist neo-imperial ones.
Our efforts to win over the swing states of this new cold war must involve building substantial and mutually beneficial relationships based on mutual understanding. They must be based on a will to genuinely live out a commitment to freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. That policy will make us friends, if not with governments everywhere, then certainly with ordinary people everywhere.
On the issue of foreign interference here in Canada, though, ideological influence operations have always been a part of warfare, but they escalated during the Cold War and have escalated since. During the last Cold War, nations which sought to represent certain ideas would seek to convince people elsewhere to buy into those ideas and then be helpful in the advancement of those ideals.
Today, the ideological competition and influence operation dynamics are different because of the lack of ideological clarity within the revisionist neo-imperial block. They have become both more sophisticated and more crude. They are more sophisticated in the sense that they try to use a variety of different, and even contradictory, arguments to try to advance their strategic objectives. However, they are also more crude in the sense that, without a unifying ideology, neo-imperial revisionist powers often resort to effective bribery and threats much more than persuasion.
We see the reality in this new global context. The multiplication of foreign interference operations here in Canada through the designs of revisionist neo-authoritarian powers are not geographically limited. They are not just limited to their so-called mere periphery. Indeed, the comprehensiveness of influence operations here in Canada underlines that the threat to free democracies is direct and existential.
The bottom line for Canada then is that we cannot put our head in the sand to pretend that these realities do not exist. We need a comprehensive and principled response to this new reality that includes military spending, strengthened engagement in the global south and, most crucially, a comprehensive plan to combat foreign, state-backed interference right here on our own soil.
Our motion puts forward concrete tools for doing this, such as creating a foreign agent registry, similar to the United States and Australia; establishing a national public inquiry on the matter of foreign election interference operations; closing down the police stations run by the People's Republic of China that are operating in Canada; and expelling all foreign diplomats, particularly those from the PRC, responsible for and involved in these affronts to Canadian democracy.
This has been a long-running issue, but since it has arisen in public discussion, we have seen no action by the government in expelling foreign diplomats who are involved in these threats. We know the names. In the case of the threats against the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, we know the name of the person involved in that interference.
We had the Minister of Foreign Affairs before the foreign affairs committee today. She was asked why she has not expelled the diplomat. Essentially, she said that they are still studying and considering this issue. She went on to say that they have to consider possible retaliation. The implication of that is that the government is cautious or reluctant to hold accountable the foreign diplomats who are threatening Canadians because they are afraid there might be some kind of response. To think that, to say that and to be so behind the eight ball in its response projects such weakness and increases our vulnerability.
The government has failed to act. It has failed to inform people who are being victimized, not just the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, but others as well. It has failed to create the systems that allow victims to have the support they require. It has failed to expel diplomats. It has failed to establish the kinds of legal frameworks we need to protect the victims of this practice.
That leaves us wondering why. Why has the government failed to act? I think there are three possible explanations. One is naivety. It just does not know. Another is infiltration. The government is compromised, which prevents it from actually responding to a problem. The third is a philosophical weakness that makes it unwilling to confront the authoritarian threats we are facing in this emerging new cold war.
Naivety could have been an explanation for a lot of the lead-up time, but it is too late to plead naivety. It is too late to say it did not know. “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know”, as Wilberforce put it, because the facts are on the table now. The government was too naive for too long but it is too late for it to claim naivety. Now, it knows that it knew two years ago, in the case of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, and it failed to act.
We know there have been issues of infiltration, but there is also a profound philosophical weakness, an unwillingness to project the kind of strength that is required to stand up to the threats we face in the world today. It is a refusal to take action that it knows is necessary by standing up to the PRC, expelling diplomats, expelling those involved in foreign interference and undertaking the measures that are required. The government needs to act, or the government needs to change.
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- May/4/23 12:57:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, one of the critical tools we have in the fight against foreign interference is sunlight. When we expose the efforts of foreign powers to influence this country, not in every case but in many cases, it undermines the ability of those efforts and that interference to be effective. This is well established. In fact, many other countries intentionally choose to declassify swaths of information with the objective of undermining that foreign interference. The problem here in Canada is that, we not only see the use of sunlight in this strategic way, but we also see the government using national security as an excuse to not share information, when in reality that information would be about holding it accountable.
We have a major crisis of public confidence in this country around the issue of foreign interference. We had the foreign affairs minister telling the committee today that she only found out about threats against the member for Wellington—Halton Hills through the news. Apparently, Bob Fife and Steven Chase are getting better information about our national security from our intelligence agencies than our ministers.
We clearly have a problem. This is why, from time to time, as a nation we have used the tool of national inquiries to get to the bottom of serious crises in public confidence to allow us to get to the bottom of issues and propel forward the kinds of solutions we need.
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- May/4/23 12:59:29 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, that is a great question.
Clearly, in areas of national security, not everything can be shared publicly, but that should not be a carte blanche for the government to be able to call anything “national security” when it might not actually pose a risk, or to keep secret whatever information it, for its political interests, wants to keep secret.
Again, we clearly have a problem here of foreign interference and a lack of government action. Let us have a public inquiry where we have a leadership structure that all parties can agree on and a competent outside person investigating what the government is doing. It could make public what it could, of course, not making everything public, but that would provide an accountability function that the government wants to avoid right now. The government wants to keep the sharing of any of this information out of the public eye, not just because of national security, but also, I think, primarily because the motivation is that it does not want to be accountable.
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- May/4/23 1:01:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it will not surprise the member that I do not agree with her characterization of the Conservatives' role in this. We have been putting forward constructive solutions from the beginning. We have been proposing policy ideas that the government could take. Our motion is very clear in putting forward policy solutions. It does not contain any shots at the government in terms of the policy proposals that are being put forward. It proposes solutions. If the House could get behind these solutions, then I think we would have a clear road map for going forward. I am proud of the role we have played in holding the government accountable and also in being constructive in the approach we are taking.
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