- 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 8:33:24 p.m.
- Watch
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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