- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Bloc Québécois
- Trois-Rivières
- Quebec
- Voting Attendance: 63%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $100,349.98
- Government Page
moved:
That the House:
(a) take note of the Special Report on Foreign Interference in Canada's Democratic Processes and Institutions of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians;
(b) express concern that certain elected officials may be wittingly or unwittingly working in the interests of foreign powers; and
(c) request the terms of reference of the foreign interference commission (the Hogue Commission) to be expanded to allow it to investigate Canada's federal democratic institutions, including members of the House of Commons elected in the 43rd and 44th Parliaments as well as Senators.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to rise today to give the opening speech for today's Bloc Québécois opposition day, which is about foreign interference. I would like to take this opportunity to say hello to my constituents in Trois-Rivières. I often discuss this subject with them because they find it interesting. People are curious, and today we are going to try to satisfy that curiosity.
Here is the motion:
That the House:
(a) take note of the Special Report on Foreign Interference in Canada's Democratic Processes and Institutions of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians;
(b) express concern that certain elected officials may be wittingly or unwittingly working in the interests of foreign powers; and
(c) request the terms of reference of the foreign interference commission (the Hogue Commission) to be expanded to allow it to investigate Canada's federal democratic institutions, including members of the House of Commons elected in the 43rd and 44th Parliaments as well as Senators.
One week ago today, Canada, the Parliament of Canada and, undoubtedly, many of Canada's national security and intelligence allies lost their innocence. Despite the Liberal government's repeated denials, despite the ill-advised optimism of the so-called independent special rapporteur, despite the report by the ineffectual Rosenberg commission, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, or NSICOP, published a devastating report on June 5. The report is not devastating in its tone. It is devastating because of what it contains, which was unknown to most although suspected by many.
Despite the redaction that comes with this type of report, it is obvious that there is a problem, that we are at risk. Throughout its 178 paragraphs, the report describes the concept of foreign interference. Incidentally, I would like to point out that the concept of foreign interference is not defined in Canadian law, nor is it included in Bill C‑70, which we are currently studying. The report also describes the identity of the rogue states, their tactics, their use of cybertools and the absence of a coordinated response to these threats by the Canadian government.
Paragraph 50 and the paragraphs that follow are the ones that make the reader's hair stand on end.
First, we learn that some parliamentarians have communicated “frequently with foreign missions before or during a political campaign to obtain support from community groups or businesses which the diplomatic missions promise to quietly mobilize in a candidate's favour”.
Second, we learn that some parliamentarians have accepted “knowingly or through willful blindness funds or benefits from foreign missions or their proxies which have been layered or otherwise disguised to conceal their source”.
Third, we learn that some parliamentarians have provided “foreign diplomatic officials with privileged information on the work or opinions of fellow Parliamentarians, knowing that such information will be used by those officials to inappropriately pressure Parliamentarians to change their positions”.
Fourth, we learn that some parliamentarians have responded “to the requests or direction of foreign officials to improperly influence Parliamentary colleagues or Parliamentary business to the advantage of a foreign state”.
Fifth, we learn that some parliamentarians have provided “information learned in confidence from the government to a known intelligence officer of a foreign state.”
These are five devastating findings. This report confirms that, right now, there are members of the House who have, in one way or another, colluded with rogue states against our national interest. It is right there in black and white. If that is not foreign interference, then what is?
We cannot and must not remain indifferent in light of such a revelation. I promise that we will not remain indifferent. Of course, the government did warn us. I will give three examples of what it said. The government told us that intelligence is not truth. That answer has merit. Intelligence is not necessarily the truth. The government also told us that sometimes we have to look at the whole picture to understand the meaning, the direction and the path and to know where we are going.
That is not wrong. It is an interesting point. The report also states that the information was top secret and could not be revealed upon penalty of life imprisonment, which is also true. These three points are factual. We can agree on that.
I would like to hear and understand the justifications or answers but, in the end, the report is clear. There is currently interference in our Parliament. Instead of trying to reassure us with empty rhetoric, what did they do? What are they doing? What are we going to do? These questions remain unanswered.
After hearing the lame justifications concerning the Trudeau Foundation given before the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, after reading the complacent report of the so-called independent special rapporteur and the damning report of the committee of parliamentarians, what are they doing? What will it take for them to do something?
Currently, the situation is tense. There is a sense of distrust. That is no good for anyone, for any party. Then, to add insult to injury, the committee of parliamentarians mentioned something very interesting in its 2023 report. The committee said that the government submitted only four of the thousand documents requested. That is four out of one thousand. That has to be read to be believed. In all fairness, I would say that some of the 996 missing documents were submitted in redacted form. Okay, but still, it is a curiously small sample.
Once the parliamentarians read the report of the Special Committee on the Canada–People's Republic of China Relationship on the Winnipeg laboratory, there were all sorts of debates in the House, and approximately 600 pages of the report were redacted, including the footnotes and page numbers.
A special committee was struck to analyze the situation alongside arbitrators, who used to serve as Federal Court judges. The arbitrators found that the redaction was excessive. It may have been preventive, but it was excessive. We saw that the report's redactions were nearly eliminated. They were not entirely eliminated because there was sensitive information in the report, but all in all, most of the redactions were done away with. We often come up against over-classification, which is to say that information is classified in too high a category. It goes from “confidential” to “secret”, from “secret” to “top secret”, and so on. It is done for preventive reasons, but perhaps not very accurately.
I would just echo the remarks of the Information Commissioner, who told us at a meeting of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, that this government clearly prefers darkness to light.
It is in that spirit that the Bloc Québécois is moving its motion today. The situation is worse than we could have possibly imagined to date. The report tells us not only that foreign states are interfering in our democratic process, but that parliamentarians are colluding with these states. These elected representatives are not publicly named, and the members who serve on the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, or NSICOP, are bound to secrecy forever, as I was saying earlier, under penalty of imprisonment.
In other words, the names of the individuals working for foreign interests may not be revealed by the NSICOP, but they can be through other avenues, such as a broader inquiry by the Hogue commission. The commission could dig deeper and obtain new testimony as part of a broader investigation.
The Liberal government must understand that its duty is to protect us, not protect itself. It must cease its strategy of dodging serious questions and remove its rose-coloured glasses, because the year is no longer 2015. The government must also stop trivializing the situation, as the parliamentary secretary and member for Pickering—Uxbridge did last week. Before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, she replied, “Boo hoo, get over it” to a parliamentarian who was querying the Minister of Public Safety, Democratic Institutions and Intergovernmental Affairs about the foreign interference.
This trivialization is unacceptable and will not be tolerated any longer. The Liberal government must also understand that not everyone is nice, that not everyone is telling the truth and that the interference is real. To get to the bottom of things, some explanations are in order. It is a given that the “top secret” security classification binds parliamentarians to secrecy for life. This is a real thing.
There is also something called cabinet confidence. Its purpose is codified in the Westminster Parliament, and that is not a bad thing in and of itself. It allows participants to perhaps be more honest with each other, with no filters and without the risk of being smeared or whatnot.
Secrecy is not a bad thing in and of itself. Cabinet confidence is not a bad thing in and of itself either. The problem lies in cabinet confidence being abused, in a way that could be described as unethical, in this instance. To make sense of it, we have to be able to distinguish between secrecy and concealment, which are very different notions. Without going into the origin of the word, secrecy is that which must not be shared. It is in a different category. Concealment is simply deception to conceal what could be shared. Concealment is a form of manipulation, a type of lying that implies a certain superiority over others, based on the fact that one knows and believes the other does not need to know. It is not very egalitarian. However, lying is mostly making people believe something and do what they would not have done had they known. That is fundamental in an election.
All lies are secret, but not all secrets are lies. This is an important distinction, and I encourage my friends across the aisle to think about it. Concealment and lies are the enemies of trust, which, I would remind members, consists in putting one's future in someone else's hands. In an election, citizens put their future in the hands of their elected candidates and they have the right to expect those candidates to earn that trust. Citizens expect that the government will protect their interests, not those of a foreign power or, worse yet, partisan interests.
However, as it stands, when one looks at everything the Liberal government has done to address foreign interference, one can only be surprised by its casual approach and its elevation of concealment as a way of life. That is why we must push harder to do away with concealment and lies and restore the trust that Canadians deserve from elected officials.
After the failure of the so-called independent special rapporteur, the Bloc Québécois placed its trust in the Hogue commission. The Hogue commission was established by the four main parties, who worked together and unanimously agreed on the commissioner and the scope and nature of the commission's terms of reference.
For the benefit of those who may not know, I will list a few elements of those terms of reference. The commission will “examine and assess the interference by China, Russia and other foreign states or non-state actors, including any potential impacts, in order to confirm the integrity of, and any impacts on, the 43rd and 44th general elections”. It will also “examine and assess the flow of information to senior decision-makers, including elected officials”. Thirdly, it will “examine and assess the capacity of relevant federal departments, agencies, institutional structures and governance processes to permit the Government of Canada to detect, deter and counter any form of foreign interference directly or indirectly targeting Canada's democratic processes.”
That is an extraordinary mission, and as they say, extraordinary problems require extraordinary remedies. The Hogue commission has extraordinary powers: It can adopt any procedures or methods it sees fit to effectively conduct the public inquiry, and it can receive and examine all pertinent documents, classified or not. That is the problem, because the commissioner admitted that she had not received certain documents or that she received redacted documents when they should not have been redacted, which brings me back to the issue of over-classification. We need to stop being afraid of being afraid. The four parties unanimously appointed a commissioner and gave her a mandate. The commissioner should be able to obtain these documents.
Foreign interference has no political stripe. Foreign interference affects every parliamentarian here in the House, every political party and every citizen. Tens of billions of dollars are stolen every year. Members of many diasporas are threatened on Canadian soil every year. The threats are real, now, here in the House. Doing nothing is not an option anymore. We must stop looking the other way and believing that the danger will go away on its own.
That is why the Bloc Québécois “request[s] the terms of reference of the foreign interference commission…to be expanded to allow it to investigate Canada's federal democratic institutions, including members of the House of Commons elected in the 43rd and 44th Parliaments as well as Senators.”
We must choose to make history rather than endure it. Great danger calls for great courage. The Bloc Québécois is moving this motion so that trust can be restored. I ask all my colleagues to have courage.
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- Jun/14/23 2:41:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, foreign interference continues while the government is still waffling, wondering what to do about the special rapporteur fiasco. It still cannot take the first step, which is to announce whether it intends to launch a public and independent commission of inquiry.
I am reminded of those profound words, full of wisdom, from Talleyrand, a French diplomat, who said something to the effect that there is only one way to say yes, and that is yes, and all the others mean no.
So is that a yes on an independent public inquiry?
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- May/12/23 11:38:11 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am not sure that the member for Wellington—Halton Hills is reassured.
The Liberals are once again asking us to not only believe that they knew nothing about the threats against the member for Wellington—Halton Hills in 2021, but also that they were not aware of the diplomat's other reprehensible actions, which were known about since 2020. We are even supposed to believe that the Liberals were not aware that CSIS had had the diplomat under close surveillance since 2019.
To be blunt, the Liberals have been exposed. They obviously do not want to shed light on or take action against Chinese interference. When will they launch an independent public commission of inquiry?
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- May/12/23 11:36:55 a.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister claims that he was unaware of the threats against the member for Wellington—Halton Hills in 2021. No one believes that, but let us say that it is true.
This morning, The Globe and Mail reported that CSIS had a file as thick as a brick against the expelled Chinese diplomat: taking of photographs, tracking dissidents for the Chinese regime, interfering with the staff of Liberal ministers to distance them from pro-Taiwan movements.
According to the paper, Global Affairs Canada and the Prime Minister's Office knew all that since 2020. Why did they wait until Monday to expel this diplomat?
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- May/9/23 2:57:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, yesterday the government finally expelled the Chinese diplomat involved in intimidating the member for Wellington—Halton Hills and his family. The government did that yesterday, not in 2021, when it found out what was going on.
In other words, the Chinese diplomat was not expelled for threatening the member in 2021. He was expelled because his threats have been making headlines for the past week. The Liberals' main concern is not that an MP was threatened; it is that the public knows they did nothing. That is one more reason they cannot be trusted to shed light on Chinese interference.
When will there be an independent public inquiry?
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- May/8/23 4:07:57 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are at the point where we have to request a special decision from the House to recognize that a sitting member of the House has been intimidated. That is something. We are talking about a direct attack on democracy. That is where we are.
When did this start? The friends I meet on the street in Trois-Rivières on the weekend often tell me that we have been talking about this for weeks. It has not been weeks. The Liberal government has been totally oblivious to what is going on in foreign affairs since 2015.
The government is not particularly interested in foreign affairs, and has no clear idea of the direction it should take. The government has had four ministers of foreign affairs in seven or eight years, which is not a sign of strong diplomacy, as diplomacy requires continuity. One of my colleagues is telling me that there have been five. Five ministers in seven years is not continuity. It suggests that the government is not concerned about diplomacy. What is diplomacy? It is a form of dialogue between nations intended to ensure peace.
Right now, there is no dialogue between Canada and China. China tells us what to do and we do it. That is unacceptable. The Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, of which I am a member, has been working on the issue of Chinese interference for months now.
It does not stop there. Universities, research centres and the business community often fear that if they look too closely into interference they will lose funding or market shares. Losing our democracy is worse than that, however. This makes no sense. A line has been crossed that I did not even think it possible to approach in the House.
Let us talk about academia. In 2017, the French government conducted a survey that showed that the Chinese regime was courting former politicians to obtain information and derive benefits. That is called elite capture. They can be former politicians who are now sitting on boards of directors, or former faculty deans who hold other chairs in China or who receive various research grants. That is elite capture, and it is a phenomenon that we do not talk about here.
We are hearing a lot of talk these days about the Volkswagen factory that will be opening in Ontario. That company also has a factory in China. Does anyone think that Volkswagen really owns that factory? Volkswagen does whatever the Chinese government tells it to do. The company cannot pull out of China, and it does not control the prices of its cars.
The Chinese regime is philosophically and ideologically diametrically opposed to what we stand for here. It does not recognize the value of democracy and would prefer to do without it.
China has always tried to sow chaos among its trade partners. What is chaos? Obviously, it is when things go off in different directions, but let us look at what has been going on in the House over the past three months or so. Every day during question period, we ask the government whether it is going to do something about what we are seeing and whether it will continue to justify the unjustifiable for much longer. It is chaos here. Meanwhile, Beijing is jumping for joy.
The same cannot be said of our government. This is terrible. The Chinese regime is bent on destroying all other social systems. We are not on the same page.
I think that the government would be better off learning to play Go rather than trying to play Risk because, right now, it is not working. We need to think in terms of generations.
I will give an example. Around 2013, when Xi Jinping came to power, I was in Paris with the then ambassador of China. One of my colleagues asked the ambassador why the President of China is appointed rather than elected in free and fair elections like in this country. The ambassador carefully explained that, in China, all the children are screened at a very young age, and the ones with potential are singled out to be educated in the best schools, evaluated again and sent to study abroad. Eventually, based on the challenges of the day, the best person is chosen to achieve a given goal. It was very difficult for me to hear, but he told me that what we do basically amounts to a beauty contest. We were approaching 2015 at the time. I could not really argue with him. While we hold beauty contests, people make sure they have the means to achieve their ends.
I think that we are being taught an important lesson in foreign affairs as a result of our lack of interest in recent years, and it hurts.
Today's expulsion of the Chinese diplomat sends the message that we are not the only ones who will be facing consequences. The Chinese government will also have to face certain consequences.
There was an obvious lack of courage in everything leading up to that decision, which was the right decision. It was about time, but the government made the decision with a gun to its head. The government did not really make a decision, it simply no longer had any choice. Its credibility with its partners was at stake. However, this decision sends the message that we are prepared to face the consequences of our choice, because yours was unacceptable.
I do not think we should tolerate the intolerable. We need to stand up, appreciate the value of our system and our democracy and protect it.
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- Mar/23/23 2:42:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in summary, CSIS is openly talking about Chinese interference with cities and it is openly talking about Chinese interference with provinces, but we are to believe that CSIS is not talking about it with the federal government? Apparently the Prime Minister had to find out from the news that one or more of his MPs had diplomatic ties to Beijing. Either CSIS is keeping the Prime Minister abreast of everything that is happening at every level, except in his own backyard, or CSIS is talking to everyone but the federal government. What are we to believe? When will there be a public, independent inquiry?
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- Oct/18/22 11:20:42 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.
He raises an important point. There is a difference between communicating, that is, transmitting a message, and the language. The language helps add meaning to the story.
I think there has been a lot of superficial diplomacy, just for show. Most countries do this, not just Canada. We need to engage in meaningful action and determine which direction we want to take so we can put it into words that actually mean something.
Things are a bit blurry right now. The messages are often contradictory and incomplete. I feel that our diplomatic efforts are purely superficial and have no real impact. That is my opinion.
I would therefore like us to distinguish between the communication tools we use every day and the language that would enable us to settle an impasse.
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- Oct/18/22 11:17:29 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his very interesting point. I was not aware of Ms. Smith's comments, so I cannot speak to them.
However, not every situation can be viewed through the same lens. There are two sides to every coin, and there are 360 degrees to consider in every situation. I think this situation must be examined as a whole.
In a situation like this, there is probably no one who has not done something wrong once. It is more complex than that, and that is why I advocate for seasoned diplomats to take a hand, because they will be able to unravel this knotty problem.
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- Oct/18/22 11:15:40 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his very relevant question.
He mentioned immigration. I will not say any more about that, because the committee discussed it at length and made some very useful recommendations.
However, I would like to talk about the fact that it was said that the Canadian embassy in Ukraine was being opened. It was opened, and the diplomatic staff were taken out. I think the first thing we must do is open an embassy.
What we need is genuine, meaningful diplomatic dialogue, not superficial diplomatic dialogue or diplomacy conducted via images and tweets. I think seasoned diplomats are needed to establish dialogue between the parties. We are not mediators, but we must have a presence in Ukraine and Russia. There has been quite a bit of talk about closing the embassies in Russia, but that is not a good idea. The dialogue must continue.
A long-term diplomatic solution must be seriously considered. Superficial diplomacy is simply not an option. It must be seriously considered.
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