Hon. Yuen Pau Woo: Barely two hours ago, 20 of our colleagues were at 1 Wellington to receive a technical briefing on Bill C-70. That’s less than a quarter of our complement of senators. I’m now standing before you, rushed to make a speech after receiving this briefing on short notice, with inadequate preparation, but, nevertheless, I would like to put some things on the record.

The first thing, which should be obvious from my preamble, is that we are rushing this bill. There is no question that we are pushing this through with a kind of haste that is not becoming of the upper chamber. I think it is correct to say that at the technical briefing there were many questions that were not asked because of a lack of time, and there were many answers given that were, to some of us, unsatisfactory.

Colleagues, the purpose of second reading, typically, is to talk about the principle of the bill. Let me say, first off, that I support the principle of the bill, but the idea of discussing the principle is in anticipation of the bill being sent to a committee where the details of the bill can be studied carefully and possible flaws in that bill can be scrutinized and possibly fixed. What we have instead, as you all know, is a pre-study that took place last week, also rushed, and when the National Security and Defence Committee meets tomorrow — starting 8 a.m., by the way, for those of you who are interested — it will go directly into clause-by-clause consideration. We are essentially skipping — leapfrogging — from second reading to clause by clause, and then, presumably, a third reading vote by Thursday.

Colleagues, we are taking less time to review this consequential bill than we did with anti-terrorism bills in the last three decades — in 2001, 2012, 2015 and 2019 — all of which were passed quickly enough in the heat of the moment and were flawed. Some of them had to be fixed a few years later.

You may remember, for example, the 2019 amendments to what was previously Bill C-51, the anti-terrorism bill.

The likelihood of Bill C-70 is that it will go through to a third reading vote and pass before we rise for the summer — flaws and all. And perhaps we will have a chance down the years to fix some of those flaws, but in the meantime, the price to be paid by the flaws in the bill will be the individuals and organizations who will be trapped or caught by what I think is an overly wide and overly sticky spider’s web that is Bill C-70.

Before I get to just a very small number of the flaws that I see in this bill, allow me to demonstrate my bona fides in this area. Almost from the time that I joined the Senate in late 2016, I have been working on countering foreign interference in Canada and on Parliament Hill.

In 2018, well before the hullabaloo, well before the media leaks, well before the febrile discussion about foreign interference being widespread, I organized in Centre Block a workshop for parliamentarians to talk about Chinese foreign interference in Canada. I did that because I could see — even back then — that this was going to be a very difficult topic, one that was already being weaponized, first of all, in the United States, where we saw a lot of anti-foreign interference activities directed at China and Chinese people in the United States that was stigmatizing, discriminatory and justified by the imperatives of national security.

I hoped at the time that we could have a grown-up conversation about foreign interference so that we can avoid the excesses that I think we’re beginning to enter into. I failed because today we are in a fevered environment where there is, it would seem, overwhelming support — indeed, unanimous approval — for a bill on countering foreign interference that has manifest flaws in it that have been raised to all of us through a variety of sources in civil society, academia and from ordinary Canadians.

I’ve also, as some of you know, participated in the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference. I am a formal intervener, and I had the opportunity to witness and partake of the information that was made available. I also participated in the public consultation that led to Bill C-70 on developing a foreign interference transparency registry, which we have now in this bill, and I’ve made formal submissions to the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference, expressing my concern about the quality of intelligence and about the failure to consider the consequences of foreign interference zealotry, which is causing harm to the freedom of expression of diaspora communities including during an election.

Let me now get to a number of the flaws that I see in the bill that I hope others will pick up and that we can perhaps put some thought into ameliorating. These are only a few examples.

The first has to do with the Security of Information Act where there’s a new offence related to political interference. I agree with the need to stop political interference from foreign principals, but there’s a special provision where there is an offence of preparing the act of political interference. It says that this offence is when someone does anything that is directed towards or done in preparation of the commission of the offence, “the offence” being political interference.

In this provision, we are copying from the Australian example, where they also have a provision against the preparation and planning of an act of foreign interference, and they had their first conviction last year. Let me tell you that story.

A Vietnamese Australian has been sentenced to two years in jail for the act of preparing or planning an act of foreign interference. What was that act? He organized a fundraiser during COVID, raising money from Vietnamese and Indo-Chinese-Australian communities to buy personal protective equipment and other medical supplies, and he donated that money to a hospital. At the ceremony where the donation was made, he invited a politician — I think he was a sitting minister at the time — to stand with him on the stage holding one of these fake cheques for $25,000 Australian. That was used as evidence that this Vietnamese Australian person was cultivating the minister for a future act of foreign interference.

Just think about that. The Australian system is the Australian system, and they have the right to conduct themselves in the way that they want to. But are we going down the road where someone who develops a relationship with a politician or a public official who may have the potential to rise up the ladder sometime in the near or distant future, that that act in itself is a crime of planning or preparing an act of foreign interference? It drives shivers down the spine.

Let me move now to Part 4 of the bill, which is the proposed “Foreign Influence Transparency Accountability Act.” Let me start by telling you what I like about the bill. I commented during the consultation phase and participated vigorously in the public debate. There are many things I like about it. In fact, some of the suggestions that I and many others offered were taken up.

The first is that it’s country agnostic — it does not require a gazetting or a focus on one country or another.

Secondly, it doesn’t try to use the registry to deal with the very real problem of transnational repression. In the private member’s versions of the bill of a foreign influence registry that we have seen previously in the House of Commons and in this chamber, the notion is that a registry can somehow stop bad acts of foreign interference — particularly the most vile kinds of acts, which is the repression of Canadians by foreign governments through threats and intimidation.

This bill doesn’t try to do that. Instead, it creates a separate new category of criminal offences that have to do with the actual commission of repression and intimidation. I have concerns about the word “intimidation,” but I think that is the correct way to deal with criminal acts rather than to use the registry as a proxy.

I also like this registry in that it doesn’t use the concept of related entity, which is such a broad and vague term that it can capture just about anyone who is associated with an organization that is in some way connected to a foreign power. Instead, it uses the term “arrangements.” I recommended the idea of using the word “arrangements,” but I would have preferred that it focus on material arrangements because that’s concrete — a contract, a quid pro quo, a trip to Taiwan, for example, to Israel, to China or to Mexico. That’s a material arrangement. Instead, what we have is “. . . arrangements . . .” or “. . . in association with . . .” Here, I have grave concerns. What does “. . . in association with . . .” mean? The best clue is found in the consultation paper that was issued by Public Safety in preparation for this bill, which gave us a case study of what I think they mean. Here is the case study.

An academic has a meeting with a foreign principal. It could be a diplomat; it is somebody who represents another government. They have a conversation or maybe multiple conversations. Shortly after, the academic writes an op-ed that is in favour of that country’s position on a given issue. Maybe the academic also gives some lectures on campus in favour of or aligned — shall we say — with that government’s position. That example is described in the consultation paper as an act of malign foreign interference, and it is my interpretation that the intent of this bill and the use of the term “. . . in association with . . .” would capture the acts of that academic.

But, colleagues, if an academic has a meeting with a foreign official and that academic later expresses a view which is closely aligned with the foreign government, how do we know that the foreign official —

Your Honour, may I have another five minutes?

Hon. Yuen Pau Woo: Thank you. I am keen for this bill to go to committee, and would support a vote right after.

I wonder if Senator Dalphond has a view on the American action to freeze the foreign reserves, essentially the assets of the Afghanistan government.

It appears now that they’ve made a decision to use half of those proceeds for humanitarian assistance but to take the other half — we’re talking about billions of dollars — to compensate the victims of the tragic 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attack.

What is your view on this kind of freezing and repurposing of foreign assets?

Senator Woo: No, except that I am sure all of us will want to think through the American example when the matter goes to the committee.