- Member of Parliament
- Member of the Joint Interparliamentary Council
- Conservative
- St. Albert—Edmonton
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $119,185.60
- Government Page
- May/8/24 11:09:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise to participate in the debate arising from your ruling earlier this evening of a prima facie breach of privilege involving 18 members in the House who were targeted by the Beijing-based Communist regime as part of a hacking operation, a progressive reconnaissance attack, due to their affiliation with the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, or IPAC.
This attack occurred in early 2021, and for three years, these members were kept in the dark, which is completely unacceptable, so I welcome your ruling, Mr. Speaker, because here we go again one year later.
One year ago, we were having a very similar debate in the House based upon the ruling of your predecessor, Mr. Speaker, of a prima facie breach of privilege concerning the member for Wellington—Halton Hills. That was referred to the procedure and House affairs committee through which a report was recently tabled in the House finding that indeed the privileges of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills were violated, and for the very same reason that those of the 18 members of Parliament who were subject to the matter of your ruling were, which is that the member for Wellington—Halton Hills was kept in the dark that he was being targeted by Beijing and that his family in Hong Kong was being targeted by the Beijing-based regime.
This hacking attack did occur in 2021. It was reported by the U.S., by the FBI, to the Communications Security Establishment, to this government, in 2022. However, like the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, many of the 18 members first learned that they were being targeted by Beijing not through a briefing but through a report in The Globe and Mail. It raises serious questions as to why it is that this came to light because of The Globe and Mail reporting on it, and not based upon information from this government but from the U.S. government.
Indeed it was an unsealed indictment of the justice department earlier this year that resulted in the IPAC secretariat becoming aware that members of IPAC were targeted, and not only Canadian members of Parliament but parliamentarians from around the world who were part of IPAC. That, in turn, led IPAC to ask questions of the Department of Justice in the U.S. as well as the FBI as to why members were not informed.
The FBI, in effect, said that due to jurisdictional issues, it could not communicate directly to them and could not directly brief them, but it did, as soon as possible, provide that information to the Government of Canada, more specifically to the Communications Security Establishment. From there, that information went into a black hole, just as it did with respect to the targeting of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills.
What is also disturbing is that, once again, the excuse being offered by the government is that it is not its fault; it is someone else's fault.
When The Globe and Mail reported that the member for Wellington—Halton Hills was being targeted by the Beijing-based regime, the Prime Minister first claimed that he learned about it in The Globe and Mail. Then, he said that it was the fault of CSIS. He said to the media at the time, “CSIS made the determination that it wasn't...needed [to] be raised to a higher level because it wasn't a significant enough concern”.
Then, it was revealed that what the Prime Minister said was not true, that the information had in fact been passed on to the Prime Minister's department, the PCO, to the Prime Minister's national security and intelligence adviser and that the information was not acted upon and was not shared with the member for Wellington—Halton Hills. Nothing was done.
Again, the Prime Minister was very quick to blame someone else, to blame CSIS. The same is true of the Minister of Public Safety. It was learned at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, during the study we undertook on the question of privilege, that in fact CSIS had sent an IMU to the Minister of Public Safety, to the deputy minister of public safety and to the Minister of Public Safety's chief of staff, alerting them about the fact that the member for Wellington—Halton Hills and his family were being targeted by Beijing.
When the Minister of Public Safety came to committee, he, just like the Prime Minister, said that it was not his fault, that it was the fault of CSIS and that somehow CSIS had made an operational decision not to inform him. He said that repeatedly and unequivocally. It was not a misstatement. Those were carefully selected words by the Minister of Public Safety that were patently not true. How could CSIS have made an operational decision not to inform the Minister of Public Safety when it sent to him an IMU, addressed to him, his deputy minister and his chief of staff? It is patently absurd.
When the director of CSIS came before the procedure and House affairs committee, I asked him what the significance of an IMU was. He said that it was a matter of high importance. It was not just any memo that was sent, it was sent specifically to get the Minister of Public Safety's attention. Not only did the minister not act upon the intelligence concerning the member for Wellington—Halton Hills, not only does he bear responsibility, along with the Prime Minister and the government, for keeping that member in the dark, which led to a breach of that member's privilege, but also the minister may not have been entirely forthcoming with all the facts, in a desperate and pathetic effort to blame someone else.
The Liberals and the Prime Minister are not responsible, and that is true. They are not a responsible government. However, when it comes to taking responsibility, it is always someone else's fault. Here we go again with another instance. This time, 18 members of Parliament were kept in the dark for two years. It was three years from the time of the attack, but two years from the time that the government was informed by the FBI. What is the excuse offered by the Liberals? It was a decision of House of Commons administration. Somehow it was the House of Commons administration's fault, not the government's fault.
I say that is completely unacceptable in terms of an excuse for keeping members of Parliament in the dark about something as serious as a progressive attack against them. It was an attack that, yes, began at a low level, but it was an attack aimed at gathering information about them, information that could have impeded their ability to do their work as members of Parliament and that could have threatened their safety and security and that of those with whom they meet, including members of the diaspora communities that are targeted by the Beijing-based Communist regime.
For the Liberals to simply pass the buck to the House of Commons administration on something like this is a complete abdication of responsibility. At the end of the day, the ultimate responsibility lies with the government and, in that regard, the government completely failed. I would submit that it was more than just a failure; for the Liberals, the information that had been passed on to them by the FBI was inconvenient.
The Liberals did not want to pass the information on to members because it could have resulted in members' putting pressure on the Liberals to actually do something, to take action in response to the Beijing-based regime, which, I will remind members, the Prime Minister said was a dictatorship he admired. He admired its basic dictatorship. The Prime Minister extended his hand, time and again, to the Beijing-based regime and who turned a blind eye to Beijing's interference in our democracy because, as he saw it, it was benefiting the Liberal Party.
Therefore we need to get to the bottom of what happened, who learned what, where the information went and why members were left in the dark. Why was it information from the U.S. Department of Justice, in an unsealed indictment, that led to IPAC's raising questions that in turn resulted in members of Parliament being informed in some cases by IPAC and in other instances through the report in The Globe and Mail?
Let me observe it more broadly. When it comes to foreign interference, and specifically interference by the Beijing-based regime, which is the largest threat when it comes to interfering in Canada, targeting diaspora communities and interfering in our democracy and our sovereignty and impacting the safety of Canadians, the current government's record is an abysmal one. It simply cannot be trusted to stand up to the Beijing-based regime.
The current government is a government that turned a blind eye to Beijing's interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections, notwithstanding the fact that the Prime Minister had been repeatedly briefed about that interference. He covered it up when Global News and The Globe and Mail first reported on it in the fall of 2022 and early 2023. He tried to downplay it. He is not able to downplay it now that the first report of Madam Justice Hogue was issued last week, which is a damning indictment on the Prime Minister in many respects.
Under the government's watch, police stations have been operating in communities across Canada, targeting Chinese Canadians. At least two of those stations remain open. The government was actually funding some of the organizations that were operating the police stations.
There was a major national security breach at the Winnipeg lab, Canada's highest-security lab, in which agents of the Beijing regime transferred sensitive materials to PRC institutions, including the transfer of two of the most deadly pathogens, Ebola and Henipah, at the direction of one of those scientists. That happened even after PHAC's fact-finding report indicated that the scientist had breached multiple security and intellectual property policies of PHAC and that the individual had collaborated with Beijing on an unauthorized basis. Nonetheless, under the government's watch, Henipah and Ebola were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
At the Winnipeg lab, a military scientist had access to the lab, someone who was working with Beijing's foremost expert in bioterrorism and biodefence. The list goes on and on.
It is pretty incredible. It is what happens after nine years under a Prime Minister who is not serious, does not take foreign interference seriously and does not take these threats seriously. The Prime Minister's chief of staff said at committee that the Prime Minister reads everything put on his desk and that he is frequently briefed. Then we learn, when the Prime Minister appears at the foreign interference inquiry, that he actually does not really read anything at all. We have a Prime Minister who, at best, is asleep at the switch and, at worst, has turned a blind eye, at times, and even been willing to go along with Beijing's interference if it benefits the electoral interests of the Liberal Party.
In closing, the facts underlying this prima facie question of privilege that the Speaker has ruled on are a matter that should never have happened. The government can point blame at everyone else all it wants, but a directive was finally issued in 2023 to inform members of Parliament. It should not have taken until 2023, but it was issued then. Still no action was taken and the members were kept in the dark. Why were they not informed, at the very least, after that directive was issued? These are among the questions that need to be answered.
There needs to be accountability for this very serious breach. I believe that it was not just a prima facie breach but that the privileges of those 18 members were violated.
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- Apr/10/24 5:49:46 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am rising on a question of privilege from the 63rd report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, which was tabled earlier today. While the main thrust of the report concerned the prima facie contempt, which the House referred to the committee last year related to foreign interference directed toward the hon. member for Wellington—Halton Hills and other colleagues, it is my view that the report lays out grounds for finding a new prima facie contempt. Namely, that the Minister of National Defence provided misleading evidence to the committee and misleading comments in the House.
I should first offer some context. After the House agreed, on May 10, 2023, to refer to the committee that question of privilege, which was sparked by a report in The Globe and Mail based on a July 2021 intelligence assessment, it came to light, through special rapporteur David Johnston's subsequently published report that:
In addition to the memorandum in question, CSIS sent an issues management note (IMU) to the then Minister of Public Safety, his Chief of Staff, and his Deputy Minister in May 2021, noting that there was intelligence that the PRC intended to target [the member for Wellington—Halton Hills], another MP, and their family in China (if any).
As the Speaker will recall, having been a member of the procedure and House affairs committee at the time, this led to new areas of important questions for our witnesses and especially for the public safety minister.
In the portion of the 63rd report summarizing the minister's appearances before the committee, we may read that the minister “understands that CSIS authorized the IMU to be shown to him, but he never received it.” The associated footnote in the committee's report points to the minister's statement responding to one of my questions, which is found at page 22 of the committee evidence for June 1, 2023. It reads:
It was authorized by CSIS to be shown to me, but they determined.... The director determined that this was not information the minister needed to know, so I was never notified of the existence of that intelligence, nor was it ever shared with me.
On the following page, one may read his further statements. When pressed about ministerial responsibility, he said:
This is a situation where it's an operational decision of CSIS as to what information needs to be passed along to government. In this case, they made an operational decision that this was not required. Two years later, when it was leaked to the press, that information was subsequently shared with me.
At the time, I had no knowledge that it existed. I had no knowledge that it was not being shared with me, because I wasn't aware that the information was available. CSIS, quite appropriately, made a determination that they didn't believe it was necessary to pass that information along.
The minister's version of events was soon contradicted. Elsewhere in the 63rd report, in the portion summarizing the testimony of CSIS director David Vigneault, we read that he:
...told the Committee that in May 2021 an IMU was sent from CSIS to the Minister of Public Safety...warning that [the member for Wellington—Halton Hills] and his family were being targeted by the PRC. The IMU included a specific directive that it be forwarded to the Minister. The purpose of the IMU was to highlight the information and bring it to the Minister’s attention. When asked whether the information contained in the May 2021 IMU was information that [the minister] did not need to know, Mr. Vigneault stated that “the fact that we did an issue management note speaks to the notion that we wanted to highlight the information” to [the minister].
The associated footnote directs the reader to the following comments by Mr. Vigneault, at page 4 of the evidence from the committee's evening meeting for June 13, 2023, in response to my questions:
It's also important that when we see we have something of high importance...we have instituted this process called an “information management note”. That would be shared to bring attention to something more specifically. That was the purpose of this note. It was to bring it to the attention of the people to whom it was destined to go.
Another footnote points to the following answer, at page 7 of the evidence, in response to a question from the hon. member for Mégantic—L'Érable: “As I mentioned a little earlier, CSIS and I conveyed the information to the Department of Public Safety along with the very specific directive to forward it to the minister... it's important for the committee to understand that we shared the intelligence and the briefing note.”
In spite of this, the minister doubled down on his position. During question period on June 14, 2023, the day following Mr. Vigneault's committee appearance, in response to a question from his coalition partner, the hon. member for Burnaby South, the minister said, at page 15981 of the Debates, “Mr. Vigneault did not send his note to me”.
Suffice to say there was no “operational decision” that was “appropriately made”, or otherwise, by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to keep the minister of public safety in the dark about a serious matter of national security, namely the threats from a foreign government directed toward a senior, long-serving member of the House of Commons.
However, this analysis does not rely exclusively on the evidence of Mr. Vigneault. According to the 63rd report, the minister's then deputy minister, Rob Stewart, did not recall an operational decision not to inform the minister about the IMU. More pointedly, the IMU in question has been released by CSIS under the Access to Information Act and was subsequently tabled by Conservatives at the procedure and House affairs committee. The committee has made reference to its possession of the IMU in the following comment at footnote 98 of the 63rd report: “The Committee notes that, in documents that it received, the May 2021 CSIS IMU was sent to [the minister], his Chief of Staff, and his Deputy Minister”.
A copy of the publicly released version of the IMU has, for good measure, been annexed to the Conservatives' supplemental opinions in the 63rd report, so that the House is seized with a copy of it. While the document is heavily redacted, it is still plain to see on its face, in two separate locations: “Distribution...confined exclusively to: DM Public Safety, Minister Public Safety, MIN PS CoS, NSIA.”
Recall that the minister said here on the floor of the House that the note was not sent to him. The facts are clear: The Minister of National Defence misled the procedure and House affairs committee, and he misled the House.
Page 82 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, notes among established grounds of contempt, “deliberately attempting to mislead the House or a committee (by way of statement, evidence, or petition)”. Similar comments can be found on pages 153 and 1,081, for example.
As explained in numerous Speaker's rulings, to establish a prima facie contempt in respect of deliberately misleading statements three, elements must be made out. First, it must be proven that the statement in question was misleading. Second, it must be established that the person making the statement knew at the time that it was misleading. Third, in making the statement, it must be established that the statement was offered with the intention to mislead. It is clear from the evidence I have cited that the statement was misleading.
As for the other two elements of that test, the correct analysis is the following one. On its face, the minister's testimony is, frankly, absurd. Why would CSIS issue an IMU to the minister on intelligence about which an operational decision had been made to not share it with him? This defies common sense and lacks all credibility. After the minister was caught out on this deception, he appeared before the committee a second time, on October 24, 2023, and offered this weak explanation: “I assumed that if the director did not share information with me, then he didn't require that I see it.”
Without more, we are not satisfied with the minister's explanation. Not only was the minister's assumption incorrect. It was, I would submit, a faulty one, too. Certainly, the minister was in no place to speak so authoritatively or with such conviction that CSIS had “made an operational decision” to keep him in the dark. The minister used very specific words. He was unequivocal in his words. Moreover, the minister made the claim repeatedly. Taken together, it is evident his choice of clear, convincing and unequivocal wording was deliberate. He showed no hesitation, and he did not shade his words with doubt or otherwise represent that he was speaking on the basis of an assumption. Put simply, he did not misspeak. He actively misled the procedure and House affairs committee, and he actively misled this House.
Speaker Milliken stated, on February 1, 2002, at page 8581 of the Debates:
The authorities are consistent about the need for clarity in our proceedings and about the need to ensure the integrity of the information provided by the government to the House.
The integrity of information here, too, is in doubt. To this, it is worth adding the words of one of your predecessors, Mr. Speaker, from a ruling delivered March 3, 2014, at page 3430 of the Debates:
This incident highlights the primordial importance of accuracy and truthfulness in our deliberations. All members bear a responsibility, individually and collectively, to select the words they use very carefully and to be ever mindful of the serious consequences that can result when this responsibility is forgotten.
What is serious here is that these exchanges at committee appear to have been meant to deflect from the shocking fact that the minister of public safety, as he was, through his own inaction and omission, was unaware of intelligence concerning the targeting of a senior long-serving member of Parliament by a hostile foreign state, intelligence that CSIS had specifically sent to him as a matter of high importance.
This constituted a serious breakdown in the flow of information and intelligence under the minister's watch. As the minister, he bore responsibility for this breakdown. Instead of accepting responsibility, the minister deflected blame to the director of CSIS for a supposed “operational decision” that had been made to keep him in the dark.
The minister had to have known that no such “operational decision” had been made, yet he said so anyway. The minister had a duty to be truthful in his testimony to the committee. He was not truthful. He misled the committee in a self-serving attempt to evade accountability for a massive failure that occurred under his watch as minister of public safety.
Misleading a parliamentary committee is a serious matter. Indeed, it can be a contempt of Parliament. That it was a minister of the Crown who did so makes this even more grave. It simply cannot be overlooked. Indeed, as Speaker Milliken ruled, on November 6, 2003, at page 9229 of the Debates:
However tempting the invitation, the Speaker cannot presume to articulate the expectations that committees have of the witnesses who come before them. Suffice it to say that I believe all hon. members will agree with me when I say simply that committees of the House and, by extension, the House of Commons itself, must be able to depend on the testimony they receive, whether from public officials or private citizens. This testimony must be truthful and complete. When this proves not to be the case, a grave situation results, a situation that cannot be treated lightly.
On February 1, 2002, after concerns about the statements of another Liberal minister of national defence, Speaker Milliken found a prima facie case of privilege, commenting, at page 8582 of the Debates:
...I have concluded that the situation before us where the House is left with two versions of events is one that merits further consideration by an appropriate committee, if only to clear the air.
Similarly, your predecessor ruled, on March 3, 2014, at page 3431 of the Debates, that a prima facie case of privilege existed:
...the fact remains that the House continues to be seized of completely contradictory statements. This is a difficult position in which to leave members, who must be able to depend on the integrity of the information with which they are provided to perform their parliamentary duties.
Accordingly, in keeping with the precedent cited earlier in which Speaker Milliken indicated that the matter merited “...further consideration by an appropriate committee, if only to clear the air”, I am prepared in this case for the same reason to allow the matter to be put to the House.
In the present case, the House, again, is possessed of two versions of events by virtue of the 63rd report. Before concluding, I should note that while the statements of concern were made last spring, the matter is actually being raised in the House at the earliest opportunity. I would refer the Chair, in that regard, to Speaker Milliken's February 10, 2011, ruling on page 8030 of the Debates:
The parliamentary secretary to the government House leader was not mistaken in his assertion that any and all statements made in committee, even when those have been repeated verbatim in the House, remain the business of the committee until such time as it elects to report them officially to the House. This is a long-standing practice....
Furthermore, while a copy of an internal CIDA document obtained through an access to information request was provided to me, it was not tabled in the House and, thus, is not officially before it....
Speaker Milliken continued:
It may sound overly technical but the reality is that when adjudicating cases of this kind, the Chair is obliged to reference material fully and properly before the House. With regard to statements made by the minister, this material is limited to a few answers to oral questions and one answer to a written question, not to any comments in committee.
A week following that ruling, the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade presented its sixth report, which referred to the committee testimony in question as well as provided a copy of the document obtained through the access to information process. On the strength of this information with which the House had become seized, Mr. Speaker Milliken found a prima facie case of privilege on March 9, 2011, at page 8842 of the Debates.
The same circumstances prevail here with the 63rd report now placing properly before the House the necessary evidence to make out the relevant tests for the question of privilege I am raising.
Should the Speaker agree with me that the air again needs to be cleared because the current Minister of National Defence appears to have committed a contempt by deliberately misleading the procedure and house affairs committee, I am prepared to move the appropriate motion to task that committee with assessing this specific problem and reporting its views back to the House.
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