- Member of Parliament
- Member of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
- Conservative
- Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $91,173.06
- Government Page
moved that Bill C-377, An Act to amend the Parliament of Canada Act (need to know), be read the second time and referred to a committee.
He said: Mr. Speaker, before I get into my speech, I want to take a moment to recognize the passing of some important people who we have lost in the last week and a half.
On April 4, we lost Bob Mitchell, father of Corporal Mitchell who was killed in action on October 3, 2006, in Afghanistan, and father of Mark who passed from cancer just a few months after that in 2006. He was the husband of Carol and papa of Cameron, Ryan and Jaelyn. There have been no bigger supporters of our veterans than Bob and his wife Carol. My heart goes out to Carol in particular for the continued sorrow she faces, but I know she will still be there for our members of the Canadian Armed Forces.
As well, on April 7, we lost Shawn "Lenny" MacDonald suddenly, father of Brandon and Kaitlin, and son of Kaye. He was a well-connected and important member of our community who we unfortunately lost way too soon.
April 8 was the 17th anniversary of the loss of 22B, my six soldiers in Afghanistan who were killed by an IED: Donnie Lucas, Aaron Williams, Brent Poland, Christopher Stannix, Kevin Kennedy and David Greenslade. I will never forget them.
On April 8 of this year, the father of one of my best friends, Ben Miedema, of Kingston by-way of Cloyne, passed away. He was the husband of Carla and father of Denise, Emily, Felicia, Geoff and Ian. Both his sons Geoff and Ian are still serving members of our Canadian Armed Forces.
I offer my deepest condolences and sympathies to all of their families and friends. May they rest in peace.
We are here today to speak to my first private member's bill, Bill C-377, an act to amend the Parliament of Canada Act, need to know.
I will cover what this bill would do, what it is not and, most important, the why, not only to address the threats to our democracy but to minimize the politicization around national security in our country.
I have been dealing with classified information for over 25 years, specifically highly classified information since 2007, my first tour in Afghanistan, dealing with the incredible electronic warfare capabilities and signals intelligence capabilities we possess within the military. For the last couple of years I have had the pleasure to sit on the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, but this issue was apparent to me for years before I was elected.
What is this bill? The crux of it, and literally the bill itself is one sentence, is:
A member of the Senate or the House of Commons who applies for a secret security clearance from the Government of Canada is, for the purposes of the consideration of their application, deemed to need access to the information in respect of which the application is made.
What does this mean? It means that for the purposes of applying for a security clearance, one has a need to know. However, it does not mean that one will have access to classified information. I will get into that later.
Why is it so important to pass the bill? To improve transparency and accountability, as well as education not only with respect to the ever-changing threats to Canada and our democratic institutions and processes, but for Canadians and parliamentarians to ultimately rebuild trust in our democratic processes and institutions.
I will try to explain this in the rest of my speech through the lengthy preamble, which is much longer than the actual bill itself.
The first paragraph in the preamble states:
Whereas members of the Senate and the House of Commons play a key role in holding the Government of Canada to account and, in order to be able to fulfil that role, they must have sufficient access to critical information, including the facts and rationale underlying key government decisions;
Let us look at the testimony we have heard at PROC in recent weeks.
We had Vincent Rigby, who served as the national security and intelligence adviser from January 2020 to June of 2021. He stated that transparency needed to be increased by producing annual public threat assessments, responding to NSICOP reports, publishing intelligence priorities and, most important, sharing “more intelligence...with members of Parliament.”
Wesley Wark gave testimony at the same committee. In his view, Canadians lacked literacy about national security, a deficiency which could be improved by holding public hearings on national security, as these could increase public understanding and education about his aspect of governance.
I would argue that this is bigger than just the Canadian population. This is about Parliament too, and as the representatives of Canada, both elected in the House and those appointed in the other place. I will get more into how Parliament and the government have handled highly publicized issues a bit later in my speech.
The next paragraph of the preamble of the bill states:
Whereas the Government of Canada typically restricts access to classified information to individuals who pass a personnel security screening process and who need access to the information in order to perform their official duties (the “need-to-know” principle);
What is “need to know”, and how does it work? How do we protect classified information? First, people need to have a job and a reason to do it. Ultimately, that is why I am bringing this forward, to have that debate and make the case that Parliament has a need to know, not all the time and not to everything. However, we as parliamentarians have a need to know, but just because we have that need to know, we have to demonstrate that we are trustworthy, and that is done through the security clearance process.
When people apply for that security clearance process, again, depending upon the level, it is actually a very arduous process, or it can be. In fact, I could give a multi-hour speech on how we need to improve the process of security clearances. Ultimately, people applying for it are basically opening up their whole life to the national security apparatuses to vet them and to ensure they are trustworthy to have access to classified or sensitive information.
I will give a bit of a sample, so listeners can understand how many security clearances have been processed since 2016. I put an OPQ in that I got a response to last May. Here are the key departments that applied: DND, over 65,000 applications for secret level security clearances and, in that time frame, two were denied; ESCD, 8,916 applications and 14 were denied; Bank of Canada, 2,400 applications and one was denied; and NRCan, 8,900 applications and six were denied. Overall, just shy of a quarter of a million officials, bureaucrats, people within the government, applied for security clearances from 2016 to 2023, and only 23 were denied.
That gives us a scope of just how many people have access to this information and how many need to know within the bureaucracy.
As I mentioned earlier, just because people have that security clearance does not mean they get access. A good example is that during the convoy protests that were occurring in Ottawa, I still had my top secret security clearance. I maintained that when I released from the Canadian Armed Forces. I made the case in the House that if the government was lacking that trust with the general public and there were concerns over what the threats were, etc., why would the government not share that information with privy councillors, former privy councillors, who had already been vetted, or a number of the members of Parliament who had a security clearance of some sort.
I am going to skip to the last paragraph of the preamble, because it fits better in my speech. It states:
And whereas Parliament considers that a member of the Senate or the House of Commons must be able to apply for a secret security clearance and, if the member passes the personnel security screening process, to be granted that security clearance;
I want to ensure that this is clear. It means people can apply, but it does not mean they will pass. In fact, I would argue that there are potentially individuals within both our chamber and the other place who may not pass. Who knows why? I do not have access to that information and, frankly, it is none of my business. Most of the time, in my past experience, where people fail to get security clearances, it is because they do not really want it or they are not honest when they are doing the process. The question is this: Is there something out there that a foreign state or somebody could hold over them and basically blackmail them, which questions their trustworthiness to have access to that information?
My bill, if it passes, will not guarantee that everybody in this chamber and the other place will get access to classified, sensitive information. That is not what this does. It is the first step in allowing, and I will get into it, important debate and discussions around issues that are highly sensitive or important.
One other note I would like make is that privy councillors, government members, do not have security clearances. In fact, one of the least vetted people, and it is not a shot on the current Prime Minister who has been vetted, is the current Prime Minister, because he had the privilege of becoming the leader of his party and ultimately the Prime Minister without being a former privy councillor.
When someone is a privy councillor, being appointed by the prime minister to sit as a cabinet member, the system vets him or her. We would hope that when the current Prime Minister was going through that process, he was being vetted and that if there were a flag that the apparatus would have flagged it to the prime minister of the day, Mr. Harper, if there had been any issues. My point is that privy councillors do not have a security clearance in the traditional sense of those of us who served in law enforcement or in the military and went through the whole process, or somebody who has had the privilege of sitting on NSICOP, for example.
What are the real risks to my bill? Really, there are no risks other than the political risk to someone who applies and is denied if that information were to ever become public. However, again, that is not something that would be released; it is privacy information and not information that is tied to having access.
Why is this so important? The next portion of my preamble gets into it. It states:
...in the face of threats to world peace and security posed by nefarious state and non-state actors, the Government of Canada needs to make challenging decisions relating to national security, which it must do in a manner that is consistent with its constitutional duty to be accountable to Parliament and that respects the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights;
I am not going to focus on all the threats. So many committees and even the latest government defence plan update and the NSICOP report cover the threats. I do not think I need to really explain that, but I want to focus on the accountability and transparency side.
I am going to read a few quotes from the conclusion part of Top Secret Canada: Understanding the Canadian Intelligence and National Security Community, edited by Stephanie Carvin, Thomas Juneau and Craig Forcese, in which states that the Canadian “national security community” as a whole “has traditionally not been very transparent.” It further states, “In a democracy, first, transparency is—or should be—an end in itself.” It also states:
There is also a strong pragmatic and utilitarian case in favour of greater transparency.... Law enforcement and intelligence agencies need the buy-in of the society they seek to protect: when they have the trust of the population, it is far easier to gather information, to build and maintain collaborative ties with key communities, and, ultimately, to do their jobs. Yet when security agencies [the government] are closed and perform poorly in terms of transparency, it is more difficult for citizens to trust them, and it opens space for erroneous information, misperceptions, and conspiracy theories to circulate. This reinforces a dynamic of mistrust and suspicion.
The final paragraph of the book states, “ a challenge for government”, and I would say for Parliament, “remains to deepen the public’s understanding of the workings of the national security sector.” It goes on:
Canadians (and indeed, their political leaders) must have context to avoid swinging wildly from indifference to panic when security events occur. Likewise, transparency and national security literacy help citizens tease apart real scandals from the noise. More generally, Canadians shall need to develop a renewed understanding of the hard dilemmas that frequently arise in securing a free and democratic state.
I will not read the last couple of points in the preamble, but they really focus on allowing that access. That is what this speech will do. Again, it talks about two examples, under the current government and in the previous government. We had the Winnipeg lab scandal and the Afghan detainee files issue under the previous Harper government. How did Parliament address those issues? They formed ad hoc committees at the last minute and created a lot of undue politicization of that whole process. Whereas, if we had members already cleared, we could speed up that process and help downplay the politicization. We have seen this most recently, even with the foreign interference issue.
In conclusion, I want to get to what PROC passed unanimously last week in its recommendation 3. It states:
That the government work with recognized parties’ whips to facilitate security clearances, at Secret level or higher, of caucus members who are not Privy Councillors...who shall be taken as satisfying requirements for a “need to know,” to ensure that they may be adequately briefed about important national security matters, including foreign intelligence threat activity directed toward Parliament, or their party or its caucus members.
Considering that PROC has already unanimously passed what my bill is basically calling for, I could seek unanimous consent to have my bill pass at all stages. I will not, because the importance of my debating this is that it is to improve the education of Parliament and Canadians.
I look forward to any questions my hon. colleagues may have.
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- May/2/22 2:17:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, early Friday morning, four cadets at the Royal Military College died in a tragic accident when the vehicle they were in entered the water off Point Frederick. Fourth-year officer cadets Jack Hogarth, Andrei Honciu, Broden Murphy and Andrés Salek all voluntarily joined the Canadian Armed Forces understanding that they may be required to make the ultimate sacrifice in service to Canada.
Losing a member of the Canadian Armed Forces is never easy to accept for family and friends, but losing someone in an accident just a few short weeks before graduation is that much harder. I do not know the personal details of all the families, although Officer Cadet Broden Murphy was the son of a fellow class of 1997 classmate of mine, Major Dave Murphy, and his wife, Stephanie. I cannot imagine the pain and loss they and all the families are currently feeling.
On behalf of all members of the House, I offer Dave, Stephanie, and all the families and friends of Jack, Andrei, Broden and Andrés, my deepest condolences and sympathy. I ask all members and all Canadians to keep them all in their thoughts and prayers.
“Truth. Duty. Valour.” Lest we forget.
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