44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 4, 2023 10:00AM
- May/4/23 11:00:19 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, in the remaining time I have, I would just like to say a couple of things. CSIS has been reporting on the challenges to our democracy and foreign interference since 2013. That was a time when many of the members opposite were part of the government, and the prime minister of the day chose not to act. The minister for democratic reform, who is now the Leader of the Opposition, chose not to be involved. When he was asked why, he said it was because he did not feel the Chinese government was helping his party get elected, so it was not worth getting involved.
If all of us in this House believe that a threat to one of us is a threat to all of us, which I know we believe on this side of the House, then it is up to all of us to hold to account those who chose not to act when they had the opportunity. It is also incumbent upon all of us to act when we do have the opportunity, which is what our government has done since we took office. The processes that have been put in place, the tables that have been created and the committees that are doing the hard work, all of that work is going to help strengthen our democracy in the face of threats that evolve every single day.
I know that Canadians can look with confidence at this side of the House, at this government and at the actions we are taking, because they know we are doing it not to preserve our own interests, but to preserve the democracy that we cherish. It is to ensure that every single Canadian, regardless of their background, their faith, the colour of their skin or their sexual orientation, can feel proud to participate in our democratic process. That is something that comes by respecting the diversity of this country. It comes by working with communities to ensure that foreign actors do not have the opportunity to permeate and succeed.
That is the work we are doing. It is the work we will continue to do with our law enforcement agencies, with communities and with all Canadians who chose to be part of this conversation.
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- May/4/23 11:05:06 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, every single member in this House belongs to what I consider to be a parliamentary family. We may not agree on politics. We may not agree on policy. However, one thing that is important to me, as a Canadian and as somebody whose family left very difficult circumstances to come to this country because of the democracy we hold dear, is that I take threats to any member of this House very seriously. To me, it is very important that any member of this House feels safe in doing this job and that their families are not under threat. Every single member of this House has an opportunity and obligation to work together so we can find solutions to the problems that we want none of our families to face.
I think it has been very clear, by the actions the Prime Minister has taken since he found out about this on Monday, that we will engage with any members affected by this in a productive and thoughtful manner.
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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/4/23 1:52:23 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, some of the points I was going to make in my speech were just covered by the member from Kamloops.
With respect to the debate we just had, the point is that during the debate this morning the member for Kingston and the Islands, the member for Vancouver Granville and the member for Winnipeg North all alluded to the fact that it was the member for Wellington—Halton Hills who knew and did nothing. That is a form of victim abuse. That is not acceptable for this House and it pains me to see members of the government, parliamentary secretaries, building a narrative to discredit an hon. member of this chamber. It has to stop and they need to apologize today.
The government is defensive. It is defensive for a very good reason. It goes back to the 2020 report of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians covering their actions in 2019. Of particular interest is chapter 2 of this report, the government's response to foreign interference, which notes, I will add, that Canada's allies have identified interference as a significant threat and initiated various countermeasures. It reads,“foreign interference in Canada has received minimal media and academic coverage, and is not part of wider public discourse.”
Things have changed since 2020. In their review of foreign interference activities, this non-partisan committee, which only issues reports if every member of the said committee agrees to them, had a number of findings. They read:
F8. Some foreign states conduct sophisticated and pervasive foreign interference activities against Canada. Those activities pose a significant risk to national security, principally by undermining Canada's fundamental institutions and eroding the rights and freedoms of Canadians. (Paragraphs 136-175)
F9. CSIS has consistently conducted investigations and provided advice to government on foreign interference. (Paragraphs 195-201)
F10. Throughout the period under review, the interdepartmental coordination and collaboration on foreign interference was case-specific and ad hoc. Canada's ability to address foreign interference is limited by the absence of a holistic approach to consider relevant risks, appropriate tools and possible implications of responses to state behaviours. (Paragraphs 219-227 and 280-285)
F11. Foreign interference has received historically less attention in Canada than other national security threats. This is beginning to change with the government's nascent focus on "hostile state activities." Nonetheless, the security and intelligence community's approach to addressing the threat is still marked by a number of conditions:
There are significant differences in how individual security and intelligence organizations interpret the gravity and prevalence of the threat, and prioritize their resources. (Paragraphs 276-279)
In determining the measures the government may use to address instances of foreign interference, responses address specific activities and not patterns of behaviour.
F12. Government engagement on foreign interference has been limited.
With the exception of CSIS outreach activities, the government's interaction with subnational levels of government and civil society on foreign interference is minimal. (Paragraphs 256-267)
Engagement is limited in part by the lack of security-cleared individuals at the subnational level. (Paragraph 261)
There is no public foreign interference strategy or public report similar to those developed for terrorism or cyber security. (Paragraphs 289-291)
I could go on but my time is limited today. The committee made a number of recommendations on actions that the government could take to combat foreign interference, and yet none of those have been taken today. We have still not seen a foreign registry tabled in this Parliament and we have still not seen real action by the government. The only reason we are seeing any action today is because of Robert Fife in The Globe and Mail.
Recommendation five in the committee's report reads:
R5. The Government of Canada develop a comprehensive strategy to counter foreign interference and build institutional and public resiliency. Drawing from the Committee's review and findings, such a strategy should:
a. identify the short- and long-term risks and harms to Canadian institutions and rights and freedoms posed by the threat of foreign interference;
b. examine and address the full range of institutional vulnerabilities targeted by hostile foreign states, including areas expressly omitted in the Committee's review;
c. assess the adequacy of existing legislation that deals with foreign interference, such as the Security of Information Act or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, and make proposals for changes if required;
d. develop practical, whole-of-government operational and policy mechanisms to identify and respond to the activities of hostile states;
e. establish regular mechanisms to work with sub-national levels of government...
f. include an approach for ministers and senior officials to engage with fundamental institutions and the public; and
g. guide cooperation with allies on foreign interference.
The next point is that the Government of Canada “support this comprehensive strategy through sustained central leadership” and review of legislation.
To conclude, the government has done nothing outlined in the 2020 report. The only reason we are here today and the only reason the Conservative Party has brought this motion forward is to establish a foreign agent registry, to establish a national public inquiry, and to close down the People's Republic of China's police offices in Canada.
What is happening to our sovereignty? I will state this emotional appeal.
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- May/4/23 2:20:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, members of the government said, earlier today in the House, that I had known for two years about the specific threat that a PRC diplomat in Toronto was gathering information to target my family. That is false. I will categorically state again for the record that the briefing of two years ago, in June 2021, was general in nature. It did not contain any information about the specific threat that a PRC diplomat in Toronto, Mr. Wei Zhao, was targeting my family.
Will the Prime Minister correct the record to stop the spread of this misinformation?
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- May/4/23 2:44:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have to rise in my place because I think it is important for us to take a step back to recognize that, as Russia and China target this House and all democratic places everywhere, there is absolutely no question that the government, and any government in the history of Canada, would see a threat against any parliamentarian as anything other than a threat against every single person in the House. The assertion that anything else is the case is ridiculous.
All of us stand firm and resolute against the threat to democracy. It is absolutely a threat against us all, and we will rise to the hour every time.
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- May/4/23 5:00:29 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the hon. member's question, which is a good one: Why are we here?
The larger answer is that we as a nation, we as parliamentarians and even we as a government are flummoxed by how to deal with the way in which China intervenes routinely, regularly and massively in the fabric of our society. We have never, ever in the history of our nation faced such a threat. That is why we are here. I want to stress how important this motion is and it is symptomatic of our somewhat chaotic response to the threat to our democracy.
Again, I thank the hon. member for his question. I have asked myself “why?” a few times myself.
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- May/4/23 5:03:55 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I am rising today in my role as the shadow minister for national defence for the official opposition. I agree with my colleague who just spoke that this is an issue that all members in this House should be engaged with. It is an issue that is definitely impacting each and everyone of us and our ability to represent our constituents without the fear of a foreign entity trying to intimidate us by threatening our families abroad.
As everyone knows, I have been an incredibly outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation. I was in the original tranche of 13 members of Parliament and parliamentary Canadians who were sanctioned by Russia back in 2013. We are now witnessing a situation where one of our fellow colleagues, my friend, the member of Parliament for Wellington—Halton Hills, has been targeted by the Communist regime in Beijing and its foreign agents here in Canada, threatening him and his family back in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, what we see from the government is just dithering and delaying in the typical Liberal way when it comes down to doing things that are important to each and every Canadian.
National security and national defence responsibilities are paramount to the Government of Canada, yet we see a government that has not taken this issue seriously. It knew for two years that there was a legitimate threat made against the family of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills. We knew that the Communist regime in Beijing did not like the way he brought forward a motion to call out its activities against the Uyghur population in China as genocide, for which it decided to intimidate and sanction his family in Hong Kong.
The motion we have before us today lays out a path for our House and the government to finally act. It would create a foreign agent registry, similar to what we see in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. I would say, with respect to all the comments coming from the other side during the debate earlier today claiming that as Conservatives we did not do anything, that it only became an issue toward the end of our time in government, and that our platform for the 2015 election campaign called for the need to establish a foreign agent registry.
The second part of the motion calls for the establishment of a national public independent inquiry on the matter of foreign election interference, which we have been dealing with here now for several months once we found out that the Prime Minister had been briefed that seven MPs and their ridings had been targeted for foreign interference by the Communist regime in Beijing. Instead of having that independent public inquiry that the majority of members in this House have been asking for, the government went with a Liberal insider, someone who is a family friend of the Prime Minister's, with direct ties to the Trudeau Foundation, who is the former governor general David Johnston. Everyone is questioning the independent advice that will come from that process. That is why we need to move forward with a public inquiry to establish public confidence.
The motion also calls for the government to shut down all of the People's Republic of China's police stations that are operating in Canada. We know there are a couple in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal that are still open to this day. They may be observed by the RCMP, but we know for a fact that operatives of the Communist Party of China are using their diplomatic immunity in those stations to intimidate Chinese Canadians. That has to stop now.
Yesterday, the Falun Dafa, who are Falun Gong practitioners, were on the Hill standing for their rights and liberties that are being denied to them in mainland China, to stop the genocide against Falun Gong practitioners, and the illicit harvesting and trafficking of organs across the planet. Of course, the source of those organs are persecuted, executed and butchered Falun Gong practitioners.
Why have they been targeted by the regime in Beijing? It is because they had the right to assembly, which was denied them. They had their faith, which was denied them. They could not even come together to practise a faith that promotes tolerance, truthfulness and compassion, which are the founding principles of the Falun Gong doctrine.
The fourth and final part of this motion calls for the expulsion of all diplomats from the PRC who are responsible for the affront to all Canadians, including the member of Wellington—Halton Hills, for their attack on democracy and foreign interference right here Canada. Again, the government has made the argument that it cannot do it.
However, I can tell members for a fact that, under Stephen Harper when the Conservatives were in government, we had a similar situation with the Iranian regime here in Canada where it was using its diplomats to target and intimidate the Iranian diaspora right here in Canada. What did we do? We expelled every single diplomat. They were declared persona non grata. We shut down its embassy here in Ottawa. We shut down its consulates in Toronto and Vancouver. Now we have its properties that we will hopefully be able to use to actually compensate the Iranian families here in Canada who lost loved ones on the Ukrainian International Airline Flight PS752, which was shot down as a terrorist act by the Iranian regime. Of course, we continue to fight in here on having the government honour the motion that was passed in 2018 to call the IRGC a terrorist organization and that this entity should not be allowed to operate in any way, shape or form in Canada.
What we are living through right now is an affront to our democracy. It is an attack not just on the member for Wellington—Halton Hills but an attack on every single minister, every single member of Parliament and every single Canadian. If we are going to protect our democratic institutions, then we have to act now. Enough is enough. Yet, we have not seen a single diplomat from Beijing expelled by this government. We have not seen the government carry through on its promise to shut down the police stations that the PRC has opened across Canada. The government has not taken a single step forward in establishing a foreign agent registry.
What we saw earlier today was disgusting when the member for Winnipeg North played the victim blame game and tried to blame the member for Wellington—Halton Hills for not doing anything on information that he never received two years ago. We know that this government received information from CSIS, and we know that the government did not act upon that intelligence. CSIS said that the family of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills was being threatened through information that it had gathered through signals intelligence, and yet the member for Winnipeg North stooped to a new low by trying to say that it was the fault of the member for Wellington—Halton Hills. That is ridiculous.
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