- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $140,796.07
- Government Page
- May/8/24 10:23:56 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the ruling that we need to look into this, and it needs to go to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs for a fulsome investigation. The privileges of members of Parliament here are really sacrosanct, and we need to make sure that we are protecting them. I am concerned that privilege has been violated.
I am one of the 18 Canadian parliamentarians targeted by APT31, a hacking group from the People's Republic of China working under the Ministry of State Security. The role of APT31 includes transnational repression, economic espionage and foreign interference operations on behalf of the People's Republic of China. That Communist regime, of course, has been interfering in our operations and elections here in Canada. It has been trying to quash members of Parliament who are speaking out against the Communist regime, the way that it has been violating human rights and interfering in geopolitics around the world.
The reason we know that Canadian parliamentarians were targeted is because the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment from the FBI on seven individuals from APT31 on March 25. It charged seven PRC nationals with espionage and foreign interference. The U.S. Department of Justice put sanctions on these individuals. The U.S. State Department is also offering rewards for more information about them. When reading through the indictment and some of the activities of APT31, we realize that they had conducted over 10,000 different cyber-hacks around the world, predominantly targeting legislators.
It specifies that the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, IPAC, was targeted in 2021. I am a member of IPAC, and all 18 members in Canada who were targeted are also members of IPAC. IPAC was quite shocked to see that this had happened when it realized this in April; it quickly notified all its members in Europe, Canada, the United States and Australia. Of course, the Americans already knew about it. The FBI had alerted their congressmen and senators. They were very concerned.
Let us go through the timeline. APT31 targeted me and my colleagues, the 18 of us, in a phishing cyber-hack into our emails. The FBI discovered this in 2021-22. It let U.S. legislators know and then followed the proper Five Eyes protocol and let CSE in Canada know. CSE then contacted House of Commons services through its IT branch, but nothing happened. There were crickets. None of the Canadian parliamentarians were notified by CSE, by the government of Canada or by the House of Commons protective services. It was all mute.
IPAC found out in 2024 that its membership around the world, including 18 members in Canada, were targeted; this was two years after the hacking event happened, two years after CSE and the House of Commons were notified that it happened. Nobody thought it important enough to contact the parliamentarians to tell us that our emails and online services were potentially compromised. At that time, in 2019 and 2021, we were already witnessing foreign interference taking place in our federal elections. The PRC was using operatives to intimidate members of Parliament and their families, as we saw with the member for Wellington—Halton Hills with his family back in Hong Kong. They were trying to intimidate him and all the people here in Canada.
We know that PRC police stations were set up across this country to interfere with and intimidate the Chinese nationals who call Canada home. We know the PRC was using foreign students to flood nomination meetings. Throughout all that time, the Liberal government turned a blind eye.
The Liberals have no problem with the PRC interfering in our election processes when it undermines people like the Conservative member for Wellington—Halton Hills or Kenny Chiu, our former Conservative member of Parliament from Vancouver who lost his riding. As long as the Liberals think they are benefiting, they are prepared not to do anything about it.
We know, through Justice Hogue and her commission on foreign interference, that there is sound evidence to show that foreign interference is undermining our democratic institutions. I have been very active, of course, on standing up for Ukraine and holding Russian oligarchs and corrupt foreign officials around the world to account. I am trolled all the time on social media by Russian trolls. I was even asked to appear as a witness at the Hogue commission because of the ongoing attacks that happened on my social media platforms.
I am also a patron of Hong Kong Watch Canada, again standing up for democracy and civil liberties in Hong Kong because of the Communist regime's activities there, quashing any individual rights and liberties, especially free and fair elections in Hong Kong.
Also, I am the shadow minister for national defence for the official opposition. Therefore, if one thinks about my email potentially getting hacked by operatives for the People's Liberation Army in China, one would think somebody would have called to let me know that I was being targeted. In 2021-22, somebody should have made that call.
I am also the vice-chair of the Standing Committee on National Defence. We often deal with information on national security, our Canadian Armed Forces and our operations in Europe under NATO. I am always advocating for supplying more weapons to Ukraine. Members would think that would be enough of a red flag to see the Liberal Government of Canada contact us and say that we need to take precautionary measures to protect the information that I have and I am sharing with my colleagues, including other members on the Standing Committee on National Defence.
However, I was never notified by the CSE. I was never notified by the Parliamentary Protective Service. I was not notified by CSIS or the RCMP. Nobody from the Government of Canada has ever reached out to me to inform me that I was at risk or my colleagues were at risk and that we were potentially being undermined.
Surprisingly, I am going to get a briefing this week, tomorrow actually, from the FBI. The FBI is going to inform us, as parliamentarians, those of us who were targeted by APT31, to get the information out. One would think that the RCMP, CSIS or the CSE would be stepping up, or at the very least somebody from the Liberal government, but, no, it is mute.
That comes down to the fact that we have a Liberal government that has not taken foreign interference seriously. We have a Prime Minister who has never made national security a priority. National security should always be a priority for the Prime Minister, but it is something that is an afterthought for him. He has always downplayed the seriousness of the threats from Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. He has never stood up for us as parliamentarians to protect our democratic institutions. He has never stood up to say that we are going to protect the diaspora communities here, whether Chinese, Ukrainian or Persian, who have run away from oppression, dictatorships and totalitarian regimes.
I can tell members this. Our leader of the official opposition, the leader of Canada's Conservatives, will always defend our freedom, our democracy and our national security. We will always put Canada first. We will always stand up for the democratic rights and privileges of those of us who serve in this elected chamber, this hallowed chamber. I know that things will be better under a prime minister who represents the Conservative Party of Canada.
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- Feb/29/24 2:33:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the health minister should actually read the CSIS document that describes all the breaches that were made and the espionage that was carried out.
At the Prime Minister's top public health lab in Canada, Beijing military scientist Dr. Yan was given unfettered access to all the labs and the computer systems at the Winnipeg lab, which were covertly shared by Dr. Qiu with Beijing. Instead of stopping this espionage, the Prime Minister decided to cover it up.
Why did the Prime Minister put his admiration for the basic dictatorship of the Communist Party in Beijing ahead of the public safety of Canadians?
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Madam Speaker, it was foreign interference. We are talking about national security and, of course, we know that we have had foreign interference in our democratic institutions right here. It all ties in together very well.
I will continue with how critical supply chains are. Although we may not be able to produce all things right here in Canada, we should be producing them at least within our Five Eyes, where we know there are the same security controls and concerns that we have here in Canada. Thus, we can ensure that we have control of things that are important for building defence infrastructure and national security infrastructure, as well as providing security and public safety for Canadians at large. Again, we fail to see that recognized to any great degree.
All we have to do is look at the recent record of the Liberal government when it comes to foreign companies owning businesses here that have engaged in espionage and continue to raise major security issues. We can also look at what is happening in our universities and what happened at the Winnipeg labs, where the government allowed and gave work visas to people who were doing research on behalf of the People's Liberation Army. That is the Communist Party of China's military organization. Scientists from the PLA were put into our universities and the Winnipeg labs; they got information on all sorts of intel and then were able to take that back to mainland China.
We have already talked about Sinclair Technologies, which provides a lot of the security screening equipment that we see at our embassies and that is used by the RCMP, the Canada Border Services Agency and our airports. That company was bought up by Hytera, but the government continued to award contracts to Sinclair Technologies, which was now under the control of Beijing.
No one can forget about Huawei and the way the Liberals dithered, delayed and dragged their feet, kicking and screaming, until they finally banned Huawei from our 5G network here in Canada. This was after the United States raised red flags and banned it from its 5G network, as well as after Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom did so. Our Five Eyes partners stepped up and said, “We are banning Huawei, why aren't you?” However, there was no good answer coming from the government. It took another 24 months before finally making the decision to ban Huawei, which had incredible switches and back doors linking intel right into the PRC at its headquarters in Beijing.
We could also talk about TikTok. It is an app that many of our young Canadians are familiar with, and it is used around the world. We banned it from all our devices here in Parliament and in the Government of Canada. However, I know that there is great concern being raised in the United States about this technology, which is still being used by our millennials and by generation X. We know that the PRC's socialist ideology has been instilled in and permeated through TikTok, and it has been promoted and used more and more. We have to take these things seriously, because these state-controlled enterprises are not so much worried about the consumer. They are definitely not worried about our democracy right here in Canada or our allies; they are doing everything they can to undermine it.
I now want to talk about something that is very important to us, which is our critical minerals. We have large deposits of lithium across this country. We have already talked about Neo Lithium, which is now owned by Zijin Mining out of Beijing, and it is hoping to develop those mineral resources here and take them back to China rather than developing them in Canada.
We have Sinomine here, which got access to three large lithium deposits in northwestern Ontario. I will give credit, because the government actually made it divest those resources and sell them back into Canadian control. However, the government still lets Sinomine operate in Canada. If the government is so concerned about Sinomine controlling those lithium deposits in Ontario, why was it not concerned about Sinomine, just in 2019, buying Tanco mines in Manitoba? It also has a mine just outside my riding, headquartered in my riding in Lac du Bonnet, that has lithium and 65% of the world's cesium. It also produces tantalum, which is used in electronics and warheads on nuclear missiles.
All of the ore that they are producing right now in Manitoba is not refined in Manitoba. They ship it out raw, back to mainland China, and none of it ever comes back to Canada. This is something very concerning. The government turned a blind eye in 2019. Rather than looking at lithium and the Tanco mine, which, at that point in time, was U.S.-owned, and saying it wanted to make sure those critical minerals stay within Canadian or at least North American ownership, it allowed a Chinese company to come in here, buy it up and take all those resources straight back to China.
That undermines our overall goal. The Government of Canada has a goal to produce more electric vehicle batteries, and the lithium being produced right now in Canada is actually all going to China, undermining our ability to sustain the critical supply line to the EV battery plants that are being built in Ontario.
I just want to say that we do have a lack of coordination with the government, between its foreign investment plan and its Special Economic Measures Act, SEMA, which sanctions those who are responsible for gross human rights violations and for destabilizing peace and security in the world. We have things that have happened here in Canada. I will use Roman Abramovich as an example. He owned Evraz, the steel mills in western Canada. Again, we have not seen those holdings liquidated and provided to support Ukraine's war effort against the Russian invaders. We know there are Russian hawks out there who own things like Buhler Industries, which also sells out of Russia. Konstantin Babkin, one of the top people there, has been out there supporting Russia and denouncing Ukraine, yet they are still allowed to benefit from Canada's economy and our strong manufacturing industry.
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