Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think the foreign registry is one element in a broader strategy. We should not oversell it. I would go narrow. I would make sure that it forces people who represent China.... It should be modelled on the Lobbying Act. People who are representing interests of China—maybe they are law firms; maybe they are others—should have to report their contacts like they do under the Lobbying Act.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think there definitely need to be real deterrents, whether it's through criminalization or some other penalty that you have if you are involved in foreign interference. When I speak about 2017 and how deeply they were in foreign interference, there was a senator who had allegedly shared classified information with China.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, it has to be done at the same time, otherwise—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I fully agree. I believe we have to go beyond partisanship. There's a process to follow, and the parties are going to agree on it, but we need to fine-tune our instruments, and hence our statutes, like the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, sanctions for foreign interference, the registry, etc.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Certainly not; the answer to your last question is no. We work as a team, of course. It's a collective effort, but when we see—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  When it's a memorandum from the Privy Council Office and enough factors have come into play, making it essential for the Prime Minister to be informed or for recommendations to be made, then it's the national security and intelligence advisor's team that decides to write it. Someone from the political side of things may on occasion see an intelligence report and ask for more information about it.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll give you an example, Mr. Berthold. At the time, reports from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service often confused diplomatic relations, meaning things that Canadian diplomats do abroad, with things that actually involved foreign interference. I raised that with the director at the time, and he made an excellent suggestion.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The note is very clear that we have to be concerned about China and that there are growing concerns. It gives all kinds of examples. I'm not going to go into all the specifics. In this context, in the work that we're going to try to do to protect our elections—because efforts were under way with the minister of democratic institutions in terms of developing some of the mechanisms to follow—we should also make sure we have mechanisms to deal with analog threats such as the ones I described.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I don't think that this would be in the interest of what you are trying to do here. However, I would be glad to send you the suggestions I made to Mr. Johnston about how we might better prepare ourselves to curtail foreign interference. Just to be clear, when I answered that question earlier, I wanted to say that I was being asked to assess the overall report.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, it's an excellent question. To some extent, the shortcomings of the CSIS Act are at the heart of what you're reviewing right now. When the media first reported on the Chong affair, because of the job I've had, neighbours and people always asked me about it. My first reaction was that I've known Michael Chong for a number of years, and if he says that he hasn't been briefed, I have to tend to believe him because I think he's somebody of very high integrity.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The challenge is that if you go too far.... Right now, because of what's happened, everybody is kind of happy with the ministerial directive and wants to make sure that members of Parliament can be protected. The trouble is that if you go too far with a ministerial directive in the absence of legislation, at some point, people, the courts, will say that you may be out of your boundaries.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  For my first point, I would like to talk about two aspects you mentioned, which are the lack of culture and the lack of political interest. If we were to look, let's say, at the reports to which Mr. Rigby alluded last week, the one from the University of Ottawa, to which I contributed, and the one from CIGI, the Centre for International Governance and Innovation, the lack of a culture was mentioned.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  You have to remember that it was signed and that it took two years before it was ratified, and some of the national security concerns were very much at play, but in all our trade deals, in our FIPAs, we always protect our ability to be able to do national security reviews. Other countries have made a mistake not doing that; we have not made that mistake.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  No. First of all, that's not what the rapporteur's report says. It says that, whatever actions we take, we should be careful. He was talking about taking actions. In terms of the memo, it was very clear we had concerns about growing activities of foreign interference by China.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In fact, the first thing the chief counsel of the rapporteur told me is, “Your memo is quite clear.”