- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $170,231.20
- Government Page
- May/8/24 11:36:48 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I did not want to interrupt my colleague, but in the middle of it, the member opposite shouted across “Where is the tin hat?” Aside from the fact that I think he meant “tinfoil hat”, the point is that I think that is unparliamentary. We are trying to have a serious conversation about foreign interference, and he is dismissing real facts, real experience and history about this.
Frankly, it is typical of the Liberals that they try to claim it is a conspiracy when we are pointing out real—
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- May/8/24 9:01:46 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, what message does it send? These events suggest, yet again, that when people are victims of foreign interference, the government does not have their backs. Sadly, this is something that I have heard time and again from talking to Canadians who are impacted by foreign interference outside of this place.
We had a vote today on listing the IRGC as a terrorist organization. I can recall a press conference we hosted on Parliament Hill with a young man whose wife was murdered when flight PS752 was shot down. He faced threats from the IRGC when he started to speak out about these events. I have spoken to many others who have been affected by foreign interference who have been frustrated by trying to report what they have experienced and being passed back and forth between different agencies, given the runaround and not given the information they need. This is a case where people who have the privilege of being members of Parliament were not told about threats to themselves, so I think they should be informed about threats.
I also think we should be, whenever possible, unless there is some compelling security reason not to, seeking to inform anybody about foreign interference threats against them or the institutions they are involved in so they can take appropriate steps to protect themselves. We need to have their backs, whether they are members of Parliament, student leaders or everyday citizens who are afraid of going to a protest. We need to have the backs of our citizens who are worried about foreign interference so that they know they can speak and advocate based on their own convictions, regardless of what a foreign state thinks about it.
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- May/8/24 8:33:24 p.m.
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He said: Mr. Speaker, I am always grateful for the opportunity to address the House. This is indeed a very grave matter. It is grave for me personally, for the members affected and, obviously, in terms of its substance.
We are living through a time when there is a proliferation of foreign threats in a context that can only be described as a new cold war. There is intensifying competition between the free, democratic world, of which we are a part, and the authoritarian, revisionist world, which threatens our democratic values and seeks to overturn the established international rules-based order. The core tactic used by our strategic adversaries in this new cold war is foreign interference. It is an old tactic, but one that has particular relevance and can be done with much greater ease in the modern world.
Speaking of foreign interference, I wanted to start with perhaps one of the oldest texts on the subject. This is from The Art of War by Sun Tzu, which states:
In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not good. So, too, it is better to recapture any army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment, or a company entire than to destroy them.
Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
It later states:
Therefore the skilful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their city without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.
With his forces intact, he will dispute the mastery of the Empire and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete.
This is the method of attack by stratagem.
It is a very old text, but it underlines what foreign interference is all about. It is the attempt to take control of other societies and other countries without fighting, but nonetheless to take away their sovereignty, their independence, their freedom and to be able to direct their affairs.
Sun Tzu points out, of course, that for a country that wishes to take over or occupy another place, it is preferable to be able to do that without fighting. I think we have seen, throughout the history of warfare or conflict among nations, the attempt to swallow nations whole without having to fight. Of course, this avoids the carnage of war, but it is nonetheless destructive to the freedoms of the people who lose their sovereignty as a result.
Threats to our country manifest themselves not only in terms of violence and carnage but also in the attempts of foreign powers to take away our freedom and our sovereignty without fighting, and to paraphrase Sun Tzu, to swallow us whole. This is what foreign interference is all about, to gradually take control and shape the directions of decisions in our businesses, our academic institutions, our schools, and at the municipal, provincial, territorial and national levels. We see this time and again. This has been the subject of much discussion, in this place and beyond, with interference in elections, as well as attacks and intimidations against diaspora communities. They have come here seeking freedom but continue to face threats from authoritarian governments beyond our shores that are trying to take over our country through the indirect, subtle means of gradually taking control of the direction of our institutions.
This is why we have to take foreign interference fundamentally seriously to preserve our sovereignty and security for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren. Sadly, for some politicians, the temptation has been to see this through a partisan lens instead of as a vital threat to our national interest. I think we have seen this over the years from the government. The perception has been, and rightly so, that particular foreign governments prefer Liberals to Conservatives. As a result, the Liberals have been reluctant to take action, particularly on interference by the PRC. That interference manifested itself in the last election in particular as trying to prevent Conservative candidates from getting elected.
We know that Liberals chose not to share vital information with members of Parliament. They chose to fail to act on critical issues around foreign interference because they saw this issue through a partisan lens.
Former Liberal minister John McCallum effectively invited foreign interference. He admitted that he told leaders associated with the Communist regime in Beijing that they should modify their approach in a certain way. If the approach they were taking hurt Liberals in the election, it would lead to Conservatives getting elected, which would not be in their interest as much. He effectively invited the government of a foreign state to prefer a certain outcome in our elections and therefore act in a way that was more likely to produce that outcome.
We know that foreign interference is a grave threat to our national security in the context of this cold war we are living in. Foreign interference is a primary weapon in this new cold war. We have seen, time and again, how Liberals have been reluctant to take this issue seriously. A big part of it has been the reality that the Liberals have benefited politically from foreign interference. However, I think we are now seeing an awakening in our country around this issue. This issue is not new for some, but it is for others.
When I was first elected, in some of the first conversations I had with members of different multicultural communities from various parts of the world, at the top of their list was concerns about foreign interference. When members of our Canadian family have family members who are overseas, or when they travel overseas for various reasons, they can feel these threats to their families, to them and to other aspects of their lives much more acutely than do people who do not have the same kind of connections in other places.
We were warned. I know that, if I was hearing those things, then members of other parties were hearing those concerns as well. Diaspora communities warned us about the grave, ongoing threat of foreign interference, yet the government has failed to act on it after nine years. This is the context that brings us to this important question of privilege.
The material facts are on the record. I will review them and comment on some further aspects of this particular case, because this is what brings us to this question of privilege that the Speaker has ruled on. I hope it will now go to the procedure and House affairs committee for further study.
I was targeted, along with 17 other Canadian parliamentarians, in 2021. I was targeted because of my involvement in an organization called the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China. This is a global network of legislators. It includes people from the left, from the right, from other places that are not on the spectrum and from everywhere in between. It includes legislators in most, if not all, of the world's continents.
We work collaboratively in the context of this new, global cold war to protect democratic values and the things that, despite our political and geographic differences, we share in common. It is a commitment to freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. It has been a great honour of my career to be a co-chair of IPAC. It is, in a way, an honour to the work being done by the IPAC that it has been marked out as a target by the PRC.
I can share a particular anecdote. I remember the first meeting I participated in at IPAC. We received a presentation with demographic data relating to what was happening in East Turkestan. This is a place where, we have now recognized, people face genocide; however, this was at a time when that recognition had not yet taken place. When I saw the data, it was clear to me that this had all the hallmarks of genocide.
Using the information I received from IPAC, I was able to work with colleagues to facilitate hearings that took place at the Subcommittee on International Human Rights, which led to the determination by that subcommittee that Uyghurs were subject to genocide. Subsequently, in response to a motion from the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, without the cabinet, parliamentarians voted unanimously to recognize that Uyghurs were and continue to be subject to a genocide.
Subsequent to that, again driven by these relationships among legislators that exist around the world through IPAC, different other countries and other legislators took up this call that had been started by the current Parliament and also recognized that Uyghurs have been subject to genocide. I believe that Uyghur genocide recognition played a crucial role in the international movement towards seeing the real threats associated with the PRC. We can see this in the response from the regime in Beijing.
The Beijing regime targeted IPAC legislators and those involved in pushing for the recognition of the Uyghur genocide, especially the member for Wellington—Halton Hills. While Uyghurs face horrific, systematic violence that is genocide, this reality truly exposes the evil of the CCP regime. Now that we have seen this, as Wilberforce said, we may choose to look away, but we may never again say we did not know. However, exposing that reality to the world, exposing the horror of CCP crimes, was something that the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China played a crucial role in.
As we would expect, and this is what happened, the CCP sought to interfere in other countries, to intimidate and threaten legislators who played a role in that process and to try to steer countries away from taking clear, principled stands in favour of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The CCP has no respect for national sovereignty at all. In the very early days of IPAC, a cyber-attack was launched against members of the network, which included 18 Canadian parliamentarians. That attack, in most cases, targeted parliamentary accounts. In my case, and I believe in the case of a number of other members, my personal email was attacked, and the Government of Canada knew about this. It knew that members of Parliament were being targeted. It was told by the FBI. The government has admitted that it knew. At first, government members said nothing, and then they admitted that they knew, but they said, “Well, we told House of Commons administration.” Why did they not pass on the information?
Anybody who knew should have told. If I am being targeted by a foreign state, especially when there are tools I could use to protect myself to a greater extent, I definitely should be told; the other 17 members of our Parliament should have been told. However, the responsibility primarily falls on the government. The government had a responsibility to inform us, and it did not.
Last year, as the Speaker's ruling mentioned, there was a ministerial directive about more information being shared with parliamentarians. However, members of the government continued to sit on this information about parliamentarians who were targeted. It would have been logical, at least once that ministerial directive was issued, for them to then choose to share information that went back a number of years but still had relevance to me as a continuing member of Parliament and a continuing co-chair for IPAC. However, they chose not to share that information.
Imagine the surprise I experienced, along with the member for Scarborough—Guildwood and others, upon finding out that we had been targeted, but not from our own government, not from Canadian security agencies. We found out through the IPAC Secretariat, which had been informed by the FBI. This is clearly not how the process should work. It is a grave problem that the government did not have our backs.
I can only see in this that the government has looked at these issues of foreign interference through a narrowly partisan lens, not wanting to share information with either members of the opposition or members of the government backbench, who may challenge the government on precisely these issues from time to time. The government did not want to share information that might lead to more political questions. It wanted to keep that information secret, and I think it also wanted to downplay concerns about foreign interference. Those questions about foreign interference inevitably come back to uncomfortable questions about the government, about things the government has done or tolerated, about relationships the government has allowed to persist and used in pursuit of its own political advantage.
We need to step back from this narrow partisan lens the government has brought to this issue and talk about the critical global fight we are in and the national interest. The national interest would be that we all work together to fight against foreign interference, that we take attempts to subvert our democracy very seriously and that we work together to combat them regardless of who that target is. If the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, a member of the government or a member of another party were to be targeted by foreign interference, we would nonetheless all stand together and use all of the tools available to protect our country, so whatever the outcome of a Canadian election, it would be Canadian people who are deciding.
Foreign governments and foreign ambassadors should not be stakeholders in Canadian domestic elections. Canadian domestic elections should be decided by Canadians. We know this is a problem. We know there is abiding concern in many cultural communities that the perspectives of ambassadors, consul generals and foreign governments have an effect on the outcome of elections here in Canada. We need to work together to firmly slam the door on that.
This is a question of privilege about members of Parliament, and as the term suggests, we do have privileges as members of Parliament. This is where I want to conclude. When my email is attacked, we have an opportunity, as we should, for a debate in the House. Part of that is because I have privileges as a member of Parliament.
However, I think about other cases. I think about the case of Chemi Lhamo, a Tibetan activist. She is a student leader who faced a barrage of horrific threats after she was elected to student government because she was a Tibetan leader who had spoken out about justice for Tibet. I think about other leaders. I think about a student group at McMaster, Muslims for Peace and Justice, which faced foreign interference threats because it wanted to have an event highlighting the violence the Uyghurs were facing.
I think about the many people whose names we will never know, our fellow Canadians, who are not able to speak out, whose voices are not heard, whose pain is not understood because of foreign interference threats that prevent them from speaking about political issues and participating in the political process. They worry about what will happen to their family members.
I am far more concerned about the impact on members of diaspora communities. I think about Mr. Nijjar and his family. I think about people from a variety of different communities who have faced violence and threats as a result of intimidation, violence and foreign interference.
We need, in this debate, to stand up for the privileges of Parliament, for the integrity of our democratic system and for the rights of every citizen in this country, regardless of where they were born and regardless of where their family lives. It has been nine years. I have been hearing concerns the entire time I have been a member of Parliament, and they are escalating concerns. Indeed, this problem has been escalating, and it has been getting worse.
We have seen brazen foreign interference in this country from foreign actors who increasingly know that we know and do not care because they do not think we will take it seriously. I hope we will finally take this seriously. I hope we will be able to come together and, if not, that we will have a new government that will take these threats seriously.
In the context of this new global cold war, the national interest, the building of a strong multicultural democracy, requires us to ensure that democratic decisions in Canada are made by Canadians and that legislators and everyday citizens are free from foreign interference.
I thank the Speaker for his ruling. I look forward to this debate, the issues it will raise and the work that will be done at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.
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- May/1/24 3:50:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, on Monday I rose on a question of privilege related to foreign interference. I have come across—
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- May/9/23 10:18:21 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, foreign interference impacts many different communities in Canada. I know the member has a very close relationship with the Muslim community in her riding, and I have had a chance to visit the mosque there. The Muslim community has been targeted with foreign interference by the Chinese government when people have been involved in advocacy around the Uyghur issue.
I know there is a student club at McMaster University, which is not quite in her riding but maybe there are students from London who go there. The club was hosting an event to discuss the Uyghur genocide, and there was attempted interference by the Chinese consulate in Toronto, which was asking people to monitor who was there, to see if any university officials were there and if any international students were there, in an attempt to undermine this event or discourage people from attending it.
I wonder if the member could share just a bit more about what she is hearing from people in her riding about how these efforts to suppress the voices of people who are involved in human rights advocacy are impacting people from a diversity of communities in her riding and in the region.
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- May/9/23 9:53:36 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it was a pleasure to work with the member on the special committee on Canada-China relations in the last Parliament. We got a lot of important work done. In particular, we began a study, which was interrupted by the election, highlighting the national security threats that were associated with Canada's relationship with the PRC. What struck me about some of the work we did at the time was how many everyday Canadians are impacted by these threats, these instances of foreign interference.
The member for Wellington—Halton Hills has recognized as well that, as he faces these threats, he has a position that allows him to bring attention to them, but many people have suffered in silence. There are many stories we have heard, but there are many stories we will never hear, of people who have been victims of foreign interference and have not been able to bring the attention to the situation that should have been brought to it.
I wonder if the member has thoughts and reflections, as we address this privilege issue involving members of Parliament, on how we can stand with everyday Canadians who face worse threats and do not have the same opportunities.
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- May/8/23 10:41:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on the issue of responding to interference by foreign diplomats. Of course, foreign interference does not always involve diplomats, but it often can and the government has been way behind on disciplining or expelling any diplomats, none up until today.
This is in a context where the member pointed out some of the anomalies, in terms of the numbers of diplomats here. She mentioned there are 176 from China and 81 accredited diplomats from Russia. Meanwhile, Poland has 26 accredited diplomats. Germany has 50 accredited diplomats, and the U.K. has 51 accredited diplomats. There are more Russian diplomats here in Canada than German and Polish diplomats combined. There are more than three times as many diplomats from China as there are from the United Kingdom.
This suggests that, when we have these large numbers of diplomats from countries that we do not actually have a particularly warm relationships with, without the same level of trade relationships, people-to-people exchanges and so forth, we should be concerned about what those diplomats might be up to, yet the government has allowed very high levels of accredited diplomats from states that have interests that are contrary to our own, and they have not been responding to clear instances of foreign interference.
It seems that one issue we should be looking at in responding to foreign interference is asking what the appropriate number of accredited diplomats is. Should it be, in some sense, proportionate to the number of Canadian diplomats in the other place? Should it be proportionate to other aspects of the relationship, and is this an indicator of something else? Further, do we need to be setting limits so that somehow they are proportionate to what the relationship actually is?
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- May/4/23 12:45:44 p.m.
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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/3/23 10:55:00 p.m.
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- Re: Bill S-6
Madam Speaker, I meant to say that when my kids misbehave, I play speeches from the member for Kingston and the Islands as a punishment. I did not mean to say his name in this place.
Mr. Mark Gerretsen: It sounds like a reward to me.
Mr. Garnett Genuis: Madam Speaker, we will see about that.
I want to return to one issue that has been in the news lately and is in another area where I would challenge the government to do more when it comes to modernizing processes. This is about how our institutions respond to the issue of foreign state-backed interference. Many Canadians are deeply concerned about foreign state-backed interference, as they should be.
We are dealing with an instance here in the House where, as we found out, a member of the House of Commons had his family threatened by a foreign government, and those threats involved the actions of an accredited diplomat here in Canada. That diplomat continues to be an accredited diplomat, and the government has not dealt with this. The government did not, for a number of years, inform the member about these threats to his family.
These are issues we are raising in question period and elsewhere. The Conservatives have been calling on the government to take action to expel diplomats involved in foreign interference in Canada, and to respond to a broad range of challenges associated with foreign interference, including to have a foreign agent registry and other such actions.
When it comes to government structures and processes, one of the challenges we see is that various institutions are charged with keeping Canadians safe in various ways. It is not always clear for Canadian victims of foreign interference, or for institutions that feel they face these kinds of threats, where to engage or how to get support. What I have heard in conversations with those who have been victims of this kind of foreign state-backed interference is that very often they feel they get the runaround. They might go to the RCMP, they might go to the local police, they might go to CSIS or they might go to Foreign Affairs, and then they might be directed between different institutions.
What we now have is a proposal from the government to create an office for foreign interference, or an office against foreign interference. In effect, the proposal from the government is to say it is going to put aside a few million dollars and create another office, which is ostensibly another institution dealing with a problem that has not been dealt with.
I do not really blame these other institutions. The problem has often been political will. I suspect that in many cases, things have been brought to the attention of the government and the government has not been willing to take the appropriate action. That has led to a great deal of frustration on the part of some of these institutions. Clearly, we see a lot of frustration on the part of CSIS.
On this point, the government needs to take a serious look not only at its own failures, but also at how to strengthen our institutions and strengthen our structures in terms of how we respond to these issues of foreign interference. It should make the kind of substantial legislative and other changes that are required to move us forward.
Overall, Bill S-6 is better than nothing. I will be voting for it, but needless to say, the country is still piled in red tape, there are still far too many gatekeepers and there is still much more work required.
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- Mar/9/23 6:34:31 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I wonder if the Liberals plan to make Gerry Butts the rapporteur. Their sense of independence seems to be off the charts.
In all seriousness, the member's response is absurd. He says his government has been in power for eight years, and he asks why the Conservatives did not see this problem coming and fix it beforehand. He said we are the ones responsible. He is saying the Liberals have been in power for eight years but that they cannot be blamed for what has happened since.
Clearly, foreign interference has existed in various forms for all of human history. However, we have CSIS telling multiple media outlets that the government was directly briefed on interference that was aimed at helping it politically, and the government, when it received that information and realized it was benefiting from foreign interference, did nothing to stop it. That is quite incredible. The level of frustration from our intelligence agencies is quite incredible.
NSICOP is not able to release information without the Prime Minister's prior approval. The government is doing nothing.
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- Mar/9/23 6:26:24 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister is under immense pressure on the issue of foreign interference, and it is no wonder, when he cannot answer very simple, basic questions and instead resorts to feigning outrage on every possible pretext. How dare the opposition ask these questions. How dare we insinuate that the people involved are failing to put the national interest first. How dare we suggest that ministers have not been sufficiently strong or definitive on this important issue.
My question is, how dare the government persist in trying to hide the truth. If it persists in obfuscating and hiding what happened, Canadians are going to legitimately wonder why. Why can the Liberals not come clean on the issue of election interference? Why will they not work with us to find out what happened and help root out foreign interference instead of flailing around and trying to blame everyone else? In all likelihood, it is because they already know things, and if the public found out, they would be very disappointed in the government's failure to stand up for national security.
It has been widely reported, based on information shared with the media by CSIS, that the communist regime in Beijing sought to interfere in Canadian elections. In many ways, this is not surprising to those who have been following the operations of the communist regime, but the details are particularly troubling. This regime wanted, as reports indicate, to re-elect Liberals and defeat Conservatives, especially to defeat certain Conservatives.
It is not surprising this would be the case, since former Liberal minister John McCallum directly invited this kind of interference right before it happened. He told the South China Morning Post, “Anything that is more negative against Canada will help the Conservatives, [who] are much less friendly to China than the Liberals. I hope and I don’t see any reason why things will get worse; it would be nice if things will get better between now and [the] election.”
The Liberals directly and publicly invited foreign interference, and they knew about that foreign interference. They were in fact briefed that one of their candidates was believed to have been complicit with the communist regime in getting illegal foreign support in a nomination race. The Liberals were briefed on this and they did nothing. The sad reality is that the Liberals are increasingly behaving as if foreign governments are stakeholders to woo for support in domestic elections. That is dead wrong, and it is a grave threat to our national security.
Clearly, many who are responsible for protecting our security have become frustrated with the approach of the government. They have increasingly spoken to the media directly. According to media reports, CSIS has begun an outreach program directly to MPs, and now we are seeing leaks from CSIS to multiple media outlets. The government should be listening to our security agencies and addressing their pressing concerns about foreign interference, rather than dismissing them and trying to distract from them with all manner of baseless excuses.
The Conservatives believe that Canada needs a public inquiry into what happened, an inquiry with the capacity to hold powerful people and, in particular, powerful members of the government accountable. The Liberals have tried to obfuscate by creating a new made-up position, a special rapporteur they would appoint and set the terms of, and they have said NSICOP should look further into this. We know NSICOP has been working on issues to do with foreign interference for a very long time, but this is a secret committee with no mandate to report anything publicly unless it has the permission of the Prime Minister to report it first.
Foreign state-backed interference has been the greatest threat to our national security for a long time. The Liberals like to say that the purpose of such interference is to cause chaos and confusion. That is sometimes but not always the case. Sometimes the purpose of foreign interference is simply for another country to advance its interests, steal information, elect more pliant politicians and punish critics. These are the kinds of things the Beijing regime is doing. It must stop, and we need a government that is actually prepared to put a stop to it.
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- Dec/1/22 2:53:49 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I invite that hon. member to read the NSICOP report that was tabled by a member of her own government, which was, in fact, scathing about the government's failure to respond to the persistent problem of foreign interference.
We know that the Prime Minister's secrecy and refusal to answer basic questions about foreign interference is putting this debate on its back foot. He is putting his personal interest ahead of the national interest by not listening to CSIS on the benefits of sunlight and giving us the information.
Will the Prime Minister answer the question. Has he received briefings or memos on this subject since he last denied it, yes or no?
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Madam Speaker, the member is correct that this is not a new issue. That is precisely why I think the government is very late in coming to the table. The issue of foreign interference, which is part of the context of the cyber-threats we face, is also not a new issue. Again, we have been calling for action from the government, but we have not seen other action from it. The member says that the Liberals have done all these other things, such as maybe giving some money over here or over there, but he evidently could not articulate specific measures that the government had taken.
We are behind when it comes to defending our security. We are behind what we should have known much earlier. We are behind our allies. We were the last of the Five Eyes and very late to step up on recognizing the risks associated with Huawei.
When it comes to foreign interference, I will challenge the government on one point: Why has the government not expelled foreign diplomats involved in interference and intimidation in Canada? That would be a simple step and the government has not taken it.
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