Senator Housakos: You are going to lecture us about respecting this institution — someone the Constitution calls upon to serve as a government leader and does not want to call himself what the Constitution demands him to be in this chamber? You are going to lecture us about respect for the institution? Please.

Senator Housakos: I know you just did, but you should look in the mirror long and hard. Start answering some of our questions and stop calling into question our respect for this institution. That will be a starting point on behalf of this government.

Second, do you know the kind of respect you have for this institution, where we have information from CSIS itself that a member of Parliament and his family were targeted by an authoritarian regime two years ago, and he just sat down yesterday with CSIS to get that information, once we know that information was shared with the Prime Minister’s Office? And the only thing that we can understand are two possibilities: blatant partisanship — “We’ll just ignore it” — or incompetence on the part of this Prime Minister. It is high time that he takes some responsibility for his incompetence.

I will ask the question again: When will you call a public inquiry? When will you put into place a foreign registry, for which our party has been calling for three years? Even by your speed, you should be able to get that done in three years. Only then can you start lecturing us about respect of Parliament and this institution.

The question still stands: When will you take action? Enough rhetoric.

Hon. Leo Housakos: Government leader, while some members even in this chamber might feel uncomfortable when we ask questions about illegal police stations in Canada and foreign interference and intimidation of Canadians of Chinese descent — not because it is actually happening on our very soil; they are uncomfortable because we are even asking the question — the Trudeau government is doing absolutely nothing to combat foreign interference and to defend Canadians of Chinese descent from intimidation. On the contrary, we have members of this very institution, every time we ask a question, throwing up the accusation of racism, running interference for those very authoritarian regimes. We are not going to stop asking those questions. It does not matter if you are a member of Parliament or an ordinary Canadian citizen of whatever diaspora community; you deserve to feel safe in this country.

My series of questions are simple, and I will be clear. When will your government finally shut down the police stations in this country that are being run by the Beijing regime? When will your government expel the diplomats who are running this operation? When will your government put into place a foreign registry to combat foreign interference? When will your government call a public inquiry to deal with all of these allegations that are coming out on a weekly basis? When?