44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 29, 2024 11:00AM
- Apr/29/24 11:04:35 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, as I informed your office earlier this morning, I am rising today on a matter of privilege. I will briefly outline the material facts of the case and then proceed to lay out the procedural elements as to why I believe this is a matter of privilege. I will be as brief as possible.
The member for Scarborough—Guildwood and I serve as co-chairs in an organization called the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, or IPAC. IPAC is an international cross-party group of legislators working together toward reform on how democratic countries approach China, with co-chairs representing a cross-section of the world's major political parties, Republicans and Democrats in the United States, Liberal and Labor in Australia, politicians from the left and right in Europe and diverse political parties across Asia and Africa. I am very proud of the work of this organization.
IPAC involvement is an integral part of what I do as a member of Parliament. I am sure many other IPAC members would say the same. IPAC is an association of legislators. It aims at and it does inform our parliamentary work and collaboration on a day-to-day basis. It is not some extracurricular personal or volunteer engagement; IPAC involvement is very directly part of and is informing my parliamentary service in an ongoing way.
Notably, the very first IPAC event I attended was a briefing on the situation of Uyghurs. That briefing led me to the personal conclusion that Uyghurs were being subject to genocide. At that time, I was a member of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights and following the IPAC briefing, I worked with colleagues to convene that subcommittee for special hearings in the summer of 2020 on the situation of Uyghurs, which ultimately led to the subcommittee's determination and subsequently Parliament's determination that Uyghurs were and are subject to an ongoing genocide. There was a line between information IPAC gathered and shared about Uyghurs and our own groundbreaking determination on the matter.
In early 2022, when informal debates were happening about whether to restart the Special Committee on the Canada-People's Republic of China Relationship, members of the international legislators' network expressed support for the reinstatement of the committee as playing an important role in the global conversation around China policy. The committee was ultimately re-established.
These are two of many examples whereby the work of IPAC informed the work of our Parliament. Additionally, as our party's shadow minister for international development, I would highlight that the sessions I have attended through IPAC and the relationships I have formed with legislators from around the world through IPAC, including in the global south, have shaped my awareness and understanding of a broad range of issues.
Because of its good and effective work, IPAC has, unsurprisingly, become a target for the CCP. In fact, in the Jimmy Lai sham trial in Hong Kong, IPAC's executive director Luke de Pulford and IPAC's Japan director Shiori Kanno have been accused as co-conspirators. Mr. de Pulford recently testified before Canada's Subcommittee on International Human Rights regarding this matter. Because IPAC is creating an effective global coalition of democratic legislators to challenge CCP abuses, it has become a unique target of the CCP, particularly its secretariat but also its legislators.
Five days ago, the member for Scarborough—Guildwood and I were briefed by Mr. de Pulford and other IPAC staff members about a cyber-attack launched against us and 16 other Canadian parliamentarians in 2021. This attack was launched by the group known as APT31, Advanced Persistent Threat 31. It is a known PRC state-backed hacking outfit. This was part of a coordinated attack on IPAC-affiliated legislators throughout the world. IPAC learned about this attack in general through an unsealed indictment released by the U.S. Department of Justice on March 25 of this year. The indictment is also publicly available.
The fact that Canadians were targeted and the names of those targeted has been revealed through subsequent correspondence between IPAC and the U.S. government and covered in this morning's Globe and Mail. This morning's Globe and Mail story covers the matter in detail and lays out the chain of events.
Not all of the Canadian parliamentarians affected have confirmed that their names can be mentioned, and we have committed to not naming members without their agreement. Significant efforts have been made to ensure all are aware. I can confirm that the members affected include myself, the member for Scarborough—Guildwood, the member for Humber River—Black Creek, the member for Calgary Shepard, the member for Calgary Midnapore, the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman and Senator McPhedran from the other place.
This was identified as a progressive reconnaissance attack, an attack aimed at gathering basic but useful information to be used for subsequent escalating attacks against us.
As mentioned, the IPAC Secretariat found out about this attack quite recently through the unsealing of an indictment in the United States. The relevant section of the indictment reads as follows:
In addition to targeting U.S. government and political officials, the Conspirators also targeted other government officials around the world who expressed criticism of the PRC government. For example, in or about 2021, the Conspirators targeted the email accounts of various government individuals from across the world who were part of the InterParliamentary Alliance on China (“IPAC”), a group founded in 2020 on the anniversary of the1989 Tiananmen Square protests whose stated purpose was to counter the threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party to the international order and democratic principles. In or about January 2021, the Conspirators registered and used ten Conspirator-created accounts on an identified mass email and mail merge system to send more than 1,000 emails to more than 400 unique accounts of individuals associated with IPAC. Similar to the mailing tools utilized to target U.S. officials and politicians, the mailing tool used in this campaign allowed the Conspirators to track delivery metrics on emails and receive data from victims that opened the emails, including the victims’ IP addresses, browser types, and operating systems.
The IPAC Secretariat contacted the U.S. government to ask why this information had not been shared with IPAC-affiliated legislators earlier. This question is answered in an email sent by Mr. de Pulford to targeted legislators last week. Mr. de Pulford wrote, “The FBI made clear that they were prevented from informing legislators around the world directly by their own rules regarding sovereignty. For this reason, in 2022, when they learned about the attack, the FBI issued Foreign Dissemination Requests (FDRs) to every government with impacted legislators. To our knowledge, only 2 of those governments informed their legislators.” This information has all been confirmed in today's The Globe and Mail.
The FBI has confirmed that Canadian parliamentarians were targeted with a progressive cyber-attack by a foreign government. The FBI informed the Canadian government and information was not shared with Canadian legislators.
As the member for Scarborough—Guildwood and I have already said in a joint statement, it is unacceptable that we were not informed about this. Following another incident where a member of parliament was targeted by the PRC and not informed about it, assurances have been given that members would be informed going forward, but this still appears not to be happening. The government, in fact, issued a directive last May saying that members of Parliament should be informed in such cases, and yet members of Parliament were not informed.
It would have been particularly important for us to be informed because of the progressive nature of the attack. We could have worked with the appropriate authorities to take steps to protect ourselves and ensure the security and functioning of our parliamentary and personal email accounts, but we were not able to because we were not informed. This affected the security of our work as parliamentarians and potentially allowed a foreign entity to have greater awareness of and to seek to counter our efforts.
These are the substantive details of the issue, and now I will proceed to some procedural aspects and precedents.
The House recently dealt with a question of privilege raised by the member for Wellington—Halton Hills regarding threats made against his family by representatives of a foreign government, the same foreign government we are discussing today. These cases are different insofar as this case involves hacking, monitoring and potential disruption as opposed to personal threats. However, both involve cases of parliamentarians, identified based on their parliamentary activities, where a foreign government was seeking to interfere with their parliamentary work and where parliamentarians were not informed.
Based on that, the precedent set by the ruling from your predecessor, Mr. Speaker, on the question from the member for Wellington—Halton Hills clearly applies. When raising this question of privilege regarding foreign interference three days short of a year ago, the member for Wellington—Halton Hills cited House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, at pages 107 to 108, which states:
In order to fulfill their parliamentary duties, Members should be able to go about their parliamentary business undisturbed....Any form of intimidation of a Member with respect to the Member’s actions during a proceeding in Parliament could amount to contempt
In the previous case, the member was not informed of threats being made. The Speaker found that the existence of those threats, which the government knew about all along, constituted a prima facie instance of the breach of his parliamentary privilege, and the House subsequently agreed to put the matter to the procedure and House affairs committee.
In the present case, we know that 18 Canadian parliamentarians were the subject of the first stage of a progressive attack, the full scope or intentions of which remain unknown but which was clearly targeted at critics of a particular foreign government with the goal of impacting their work in some way. The extent to which that work was impacted, through the subsequent disruption of communications or through monitoring of our activities to facilitate the disruption in other areas, remains a relative unknown. However, we do know that our work as parliamentarians was under attack and that once again Canadian authorities responsible for protecting our democracy did not pass critical information along to parliamentarians, information that they had.
Should this matter be considered by a committee, one remedy we may want to consider is having Parliament ask foreign like-minded intelligence agencies to inform Parliament directly of threats against its members. However, for the time being, the appropriate step is a referral to committee for further study.
In the interest of time, I will not cite all of the procedural arguments used by the member for Wellington—Halton Hills or read from the ruling of the Speaker at that time. All that information is clearly accessible and highly relevant.
There is one other much older precedent that I would like to put before the House, where attempted electronic surveillance of Parliament was found to violate parliamentary privilege. The case is from 1973, when the NDP caucus room was bugged, as apparently discovered by Mr. Ed Broadbent and as reported to the House by Mr. David Lewis. The matter was of such urgency that Mr. Lewis was able to rise without having given the proper notice and without even having the relevant privilege motion in readiness. Mr. Lewis informed the House that a CTV employee had bugged, and apparently later admitted to bugging, the NDP caucus room. The planting of bugs was the 1973 version of modern digital hacking and surveillance.
A couple of things are notable about this case and the precedent it set.
First, interestingly, Mr. Lewis considered the intentions of the CTV employee to be fairly benign. He did not see in them an actual attempt to impact the proceedings of caucus or even to report on its deliberations. Apparently, the reporter simply wanted to demonstrate the ease with which a bug could be placed.
However, notwithstanding his general willingness to view the intentions of CTV in a charitable light, Mr. Lewis noted, “Whatever [the intentions], admirable or not, the people responsible for this in the CTV network may have had in mind, I suggest to you, Sir, that it is a violation of everything I can think of in connection with the privileges of parliament.” In this case, the intentions of the bugging were not even considered. The fact that the attempt at bugging had been made was sufficient to justify the quick determination that privilege had been violated.
The second notable feature of this case is that the matter was disposed of in a somewhat irregular way. Mr. Lewis raised the question of privilege without the proper notice and without a motion ready to move. In response, the Speaker immediately told the House, “it is obvious to the Chair that there is a prima facie case of breach of privilege.” The Speaker suggested that the matter be paused until Mr. Lewis could bring the appropriate motion. However, members agreed instead to propose and adopt a quick remedy to the question of privilege right away. A motion was adopted by unanimous consent to order CTV to surrender any tapes acquired through the bugging of the NDP caucus meeting.
In this case, the view of the House was that a simple remedy was appropriate. The case in question was much less complicated than the present case, because in 1973 the person responsible for the bugging had already confessed and the House felt confident that the associated tapes could be easily accessed.
Obviously, in the present case, the discussion of remedy is more complicated and would in my view require the usual process of a committee study.
However, regardless, the Speaker clearly indicated right away, without even needing to reflect on the circumstances, that the bugging of a caucus room, regardless of the intention of the person doing the bugging or the subsequent use of the tapes, constituted a clear prima facie case of breach of privilege. The attack on our email accounts by a foreign actor clearly much more dangerous than CTV demonstrably exceeds in seriousness the matter that a previous Speaker saw as an immediate and obvious breach of privilege. Although we do not have the benefit of a lengthy written ruling read by the Speaker, we have for the record the clear judgment of the Speaker and the subsequent unanimous judgment of the House.
In light of the facts and the precedents, I suppose it is evident that I feel this is a rather clear and obvious matter, and I expect that my colleagues and other parties will generally concur. I am ready at the earliest moment to move the appropriate motion.
Members of the House have had fine and important words to say and I believe, in many cases, to say sincerely about the need to combat foreign interference. The member for Scarborough—Guildwood and I have been able to speak with one voice on this matter. Still, despite the many professions, it seems that there is still a gap in terms of informing and protecting members of Parliament in the exercise of their parliamentary duties, and this is a matter which should be taken up as soon as possible.
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