Bill C-70

Countering Foreign Interference Act

An Act respecting countering foreign interference

Part 1 amends the Canadian Security Intelligence Act to, among other things,
(a) update provisions respecting the collection, retention, querying and exploitation of datatsets;
(b) clarify the scope of section 16 of that Act;
(c) update provisions respecting the disclosure of information by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service;
(d) provide for preservation orders and production orders as well as warrants to obtain information, records, documents or things through a single attempt;
(e) expand the circumstances in which a warrant to remove a thing from the place where it was installed may be issued; and
(f) require a parliamentary review of that Act every five years.
It also makes a consequential amendment to the Intelligence Commissioner Act .
Part 2 amends the Security of Information Act to, among other things, create the following offences:
(a) committing an indictable offence at the direction of, for the benefit of, or in association with a foreign entity;
(b) knowingly engaging in surreptitious or deceptive conduct at the direction of, for the benefit of or in association with a foreign entity for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State or being reckless as to whether the conduct is likely to harm Canadian interests; and
(c) engaging in surreptitious or deceptive conduct, at the direction of or in association with a foreign entity, with the intent to influence, among other things, the exercise of a democratic right in Canada.
It also amends that Act to remove as an element of the offence of inducing or attempting to induce — at the direction of, for the benefit of or in association with a foreign entity or terrorist group — by intimidation, threat or violence, a person to do anything or cause anything to be done, that the thing be done for the purpose of harming Canadian interests when the person who is alleged to have committed the offence or the victim has a link to Canada.
It also amends the Criminal Code to, among other things, broaden the scope of the sabotage offence to include certain acts done in relation to essential infrastructures and ensure that certain provisions respecting the interception of “private communications” as defined in that Act apply to certain offences in the Foreign Interference and Security of Information Act .
Finally, it makes consequential amendments to other Acts.
Part 3 amends the Canada Evidence Act and makes consequential amendments to other Acts to, among other things,
(a) create a general scheme to deal with information relating to international relations, national defence or national security in the course of proceedings that are in the Federal Court or the Federal Court of Appeal and that are in respect of any decision of a federal board, commission or other tribunal;
(b) permit the appointment of a special counsel for the purposes of protecting the interests of a non-governmental party to those proceedings in respect of such information; and
(c) allow a person charged with an offence to appeal a decision, made under the Canada Evidence Act with respect to the disclosure of certain information in relation to criminal proceedings, only after the person has been convicted of the offence, unless there are exceptional circumstances justifying an earlier appeal.
It also adds references to international relations, national defence and national security in a provision of the Criminal Code that relates to the protection of information, as well as references to international relations and national defence in certain provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that equally relate to the protection of information.
Part 4 enacts the Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act which, among other things,
(a) provides for the appointment of an individual to be known as the Foreign Influence Transparency Commissioner;
(b) requires certain persons to provide the Commissioner with certain information if they enter into arrangements with foreign principals under which they undertake to carry out certain activities in relation to political or governmental processes in Canada;
(c) requires the Commissioner to establish and maintain a publicly accessible registry that contains information about those arrangements;
(d) provides the Commissioner with tools to administer and enforce that Act; and
(e) amends the Public Service Superannuation Act , the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians Act and the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency Act .

[Dr. Wesley Wark, Senior Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm grateful to appear before the committee on this important study.

There are two concerning aspects of Russian disinformation targeting Canada. One is real. It's the effort to manipulate Canadian attitudes towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The other is what I call a “potentiality”. It's the use of Russian intelligence and cyber-capabilities, which are significant, to interfere in Canadian elections and democratic processes in the future. These elements were captured in the CSIS intelligence assessment of May 2023, which was recently released to PIFI.

The conclusion to the CSIS assessment reads:

While the Russian diaspora and its organizations may not have a broad impact on Canadian society, their influence becomes more apparent when consolidated with other organizations and their online presence, pro-Russian proxies or agents of influence, and [the Russian Federation's] global disinformation efforts.

There is also, of course, the blowback potential of Russian disinformation operations targeting other countries, especially the United States.

The question I want to address concerns Canadian governmental capabilities to detect and counter Russian-directed online information operations.

The first is on detection. This involves attack attributions back to a Russian state or proxy source, the tracing of methodologies of attack—especially technical ones—and an understanding of intended targets. Canadian capabilities for detection of malicious online information operations are nascent and were created in an evolving and reactive way. This is the history of the rapid response mechanism, or RRM Canada, in a nutshell.

I'll very briefly go over that history. The RRM, as I'll call it, was created following the 2018 G7 meeting in order to perform a coordination function that can respond to a variety of shared threats to democracy. It was only after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that the Prime Minister announced, in August 2022, the establishment of a dedicated unit in RRM Canada at Global Affairs to address Russian and other state-sponsored disinformation. In essence, RRM Canada's disinformation unit is brand spanking new. Its resources are minuscule and its capacity to engage with a range of expert, private sector media-monitoring and open-source intelligence organizations is very limited. It was an innovative idea and has potential, but its “engine room”, as I call it, is far too small, and its fit as a Global Affairs Canada unit within the broader security and intelligence community is very problematic. Our detection side is weak.

What about countering? There are various tools. I'll list them: engaging with foreign state actors directly; working with allies, which is an important one; naming-and-shaming campaigns, as they're sometimes called; helping to strengthen the resilience of targeted communities, not least by giving them the means to be the eyes and ears against disinformation; and providing broader public education through published threat assessments from organizations like CSIS and CSE. At the pointy end, there are two things. One is using CSE powers to what could be called, colloquially, “hack back”. This is, in essence, using powers provided to CSE in 2019 for offensive cyber-operations. The other is criminal sanctions, which should be boosted by some of the provisions in Bill C-70. No one tool will suffice. All are necessary.

What about the foreign influence transparency registry, newly established through Bill C-70? Here I would urge the committee to have realistic expectations. FITR—the acronym—will mostly be a registry for good guys. It won't stop covert bad actors, but it might have a deterrent effect on grey-zone activities and open up a criminal sanctions path, such as the one utilized in the recent United States Department of Justice indictment against two Russia Today actors.

What do we need? First, I would argue that we need upgrades to RRM Canada's capacity and changes to its placement in government. One suggestion would be to move it to Public Safety's office for countering foreign interference. It's in the wrong place at Global Affairs.

We also need—and this is critical to any understanding of foreign malign influence operations—a much stronger open-source intelligence capability in the Canadian S and I community.

There is some capability. The function is far too widely distributed within the S and I community and subject to too many diverse mandates and sets of authorities. We saw some of this at work with regard to the government's efforts to respond to the freedom convoy protests. A central OSINT—open source intelligence—agency with a clear mandate is needed.

Finally, I would encourage the committee to give some serious thought to creating an equivalent of Sweden's Psychological Defence Agency, which was established by Sweden in January 2022. This agency combines an operations role in detecting and countering foreign malign influence operations, especially over social media, with a public role to strengthen societal resilience. A psychological defence agency may sound a little Orwellian, but that's the world we live in.

Thank you, Chair.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for enlightening us, Dr. Giles. I understood very clearly from your opening remarks what the distinction is between need to know and right to know.

What concerns me when it comes to parliamentary privileges is actually whether I can get access to the information that is going to be useful to me in my role as a legislator. You have reassured me tremendously on that point.

Where you worried me is when you talked about international relations, particularly with the Five Eyes member countries, about CSIS's image and about potentially sullying its reputation. I heard that clearly.

I also heard clearly that Bill C‑70, which lacks teeth, in my opinion, has also contributed to providing us with more information in order to potentially avoid what we are experiencing in our legislative menu, which is going to last a very long time and is coming back to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

So I am trying to understand what benefit is provided by Bill C‑377 when I could get the information I need by making a request, unless the government decides not to authorize access, obviously.

I would like to get your opinion.

Since there is some delay in answering me, I am thinking my question was a very good one, Mr. Chair.

[Dr. Nicole Giles]

Mr. Chair, I think those are excellent observations, and I have perhaps two comments to offer.

First of all, one of the changes that was made to section 19 of the CSIS Act as part of Bill C-70 really removed what essentially was a prohibition from CSIS sharing any information or analysis outside the federal government, including unclassified information. Those amendments enable us to also provide a lot more unclassified information, advice and expertise in a way that we couldn't before.

That's enabling us, for example, to participate with allies in multibranded security advisories in a way that perhaps we couldn't before. It's also to enable sharing unclassified information that we previously couldn't provide. As the member mentioned, this gives us a great opportunity to have a far more sophisticated national security conversation.

Now, in some particular cases there will be specific pieces of information that are classified that we would like to be able to share outside the federal government to those who have the appropriate clearance. For example, there could be a situation where a parliamentarian is representing a particular constituency where we know a foreign interference actor might be interested, given the natural resources in the area or a particular ethnic or minority community that makes up the riding.

What we would like to be able to do is provide that specific and perhaps classified information to the parliamentarian to enable the parliamentarian to build their resiliency by being able to recognize and then, as a result of that, manage the threat.

That's the purpose of the changes to the CSIS Act. It is to allow us to do those resiliency disclosures.

Sometimes it will be unclassified information. Sometimes it would be classified, but classified information would be provided to only those who do have the requisite clearance.

In each of those cases there would need to be a determination by the owner of the information as to whether there was a specific need to know for that particular specific piece of information.

[Alex Ruff, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

Thanks, Chair.

Thanks, Ms. Giles, for the opening remarks.

Thanks to everybody here for what you do on a daily basis to help keep our country safe. There are some very familiar faces sitting at the table.

Ms. Giles, you talked about the threats, about the need to up our game and about the important changes that Bill C-70 allows that will allow CSIS, in particular, to share additional information. However, one of those conditions upon sharing additional classified information—and we're talking only at the secret level here, with my bill—is that you're still going to want those people to have a clearance before you share that information. That could be other levels of government. That could be—in particular here with Bill C-377—parliamentarians, so that's MPs and senators. That's a necessary safeguard that they're going to need in order to get that information.

Is that correct?

I would just ask if that is part of the reason this was evident and brought forward by CSIS—whether to NSICOP through reporting up to the government—and why it was included in Bill C-70.

Is it that there is that recognition that more classified information needs to be shared at a much wider level in order to address the ongoing security threats?

[Dr. Nicole Giles, Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Policy and Strategic Partnerships, Canadian Security Intelligence Service]

Good morning, Chair and members of the committee. It's an honour to join you today and to have the opportunity to discuss Bill C-377.

We hope to provide some insight to this committee on government security screening processes and policies, as well as on access to classified information and the importance of protecting it.

In the interest of time, as the chair mentioned, I have the honour of providing opening remarks on behalf of the entire panel of witnesses.

Security screening is a fundamental practice that makes it possible to establish and maintain a relationship of trust within the government, between the government and Canadians, and between Canada and foreign countries.

Security screening involves the collection of personal information from individuals with their informed consent, as well as information from law enforcement, intelligence sources and other sources, using methods to assess their reliability and loyalty to Canada. My colleagues here from TBS and PCO will be very pleased to expand upon these issues.

A security clearance is sometimes misunderstood or portrayed as a special designation, a set of privileges or an earned qualification like a rank. It is none of these. Simply put, in the Government of Canada, it is an administrative decision taken by the deputy head of an organization that an individual is an acceptable security risk when accessing government information, assets and facilities, and when working with others in government.

The deputy head makes their decision based on the information and advice provided by the police and intelligence services, including the RCMP and CSIS. A security clearance may be granted, denied or revoked by the deputy head at any time.

Since clearance holders work in every part of government, a security clearance does not automatically grant the holder access to all information or assets at that level of clearance.

Safeguarding sensitive information is critical to the Government of Canada's ability to function and to keep Canada and Canadians safe. There are rigorous measures in place to prevent the release of classified information to anyone who does not strictly require it.

These measures are imposed with very good reason. The inadvertent release of sensitive information can result—and, very sadly, has resulted—in serious harm to individuals, even costing lives, Canada's national interest and our international relations. Mitigating this risk underpins everything that members of the security and intelligence community do. The release of information could mean risking the safety of human sources, exposing the tradecraft and other methodologies used to conduct investigations, and threatening the stability of indispensable allied relationships upon which Canada depends so heavily for intelligence. Put simply, if partners cannot trust Canada with their information, they will no longer provide it to us.

Similarly, if human sources do not trust that CSIS can protect them by safeguarding the information that they provide to us, our ability to recruit sources and collect information vital to Canadian security will be seriously impeded. We could also lose access to a valuable technical collection source that took years and expensive investments to develop.

What may appear in the first instance as information that's not especially sensitive or harmful, when viewed in conjunction with other publicly released information, can be used by adversaries to make inferences with very serious consequences. This is called the mosaic effect. Our adversaries carefully watch and track every word we say and release publicly, and we're very confident that they are watching now. They put together many pieces of information to identify our sources, our methodologies, our tradecraft and intelligence gaps. Many adversaries are very good at their jobs.

There are important principles that reinforce this system and that lie at the foundation of safeguarding all sensitive information. This is the need-to-know principle. An individual's specific duties and functions and the files they were working on at that particular moment in time are what establish their need to know for relevant sensitive information. Even the most senior officials at CSIS, who have the highest possible clearance levels, do not receive sensitive information that is not relevant to the current job and files that they're working on. In other words, there is no deemed need to know.

We need to ensure that sufficient information is disclosed to hold the government to account while also ensuring that classified information is protected. There are several critical avenues for review and oversight of classified information, including the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, the National Security Intelligence Review Agency, the intelligence commissioner and the Federal Court, among others.

The people who work for these organizations have the necessary security clearances; they will receive the information classified as secret that they need for performing their specific jobs.

There are safeguards in place to ensure that no national security injury occurs as a result of disclosure of that information. These individuals are bound to secrecy under the foreign interference and security of information act, formerly known as the Security of Information Act, SOIA, and they must not knowingly disclose any information they obtained or to which they had access in the course of their duties and that a department is taking measures to protect.

At the same time, CSIS is making efforts to enhance its transparency, including in its public annual reports, which now say more than ever about its operations and the threat overview, and in its discussions with the media and the information it communicates to the public proactively.

We have taken extensive efforts to “write for release” information, for example in the proactive provision of chronologies of events to parliamentary committees. We've done that in the last couple of months.

Recent amendments to the CSIS Act through Bill C-70 further enhance CSIS's ability to share information, and we look forward to working more closely with parliamentarians as we up the national security conversation in this country.

We will be happy to answer your questions.

[Benjamin Fung]

One example is that it is not just focusing on social media disinformation. When we talk about disinformation, we often talk about social media, but the CCP is not just working on social media. It also works with traditional media, which is the Chinese media running in Canada. There are newspapers. There are radio stations in Vancouver and Toronto. They are collaborating with the CCP and different Chinese organizations running in Canada.

One of the questions raised previously was about the difference between Russian disinformation and this Chinese disinformation here. It is the economic power, because China can use advertisements to directly control what radio stations and newspapers put out in their content and how they invite different commentators to the radio stations. It can use its local economic power to control that, which is not the same in the Russian case.

To fight against this type of collaboration, I think Bill C-70 will play a part of the role by trying to identify the foreign agents in this case.

[Heath MacDonald, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you for those comments.

One you've left out—and I think I'll just touch on it briefly—is that around this table, we need to work together. This is a turning point for Canada. It's a scary situation that we find ourselves in. You talk about our future. You're talking about our children. I think it's extremely important that partisan politics, not only around this committee table but also in the House of Commons.... When we do come to votes, we've seen what we can do with Bill C-70, and I will get to that in a second. I think the more pressure that people like you put on politicians of all stripes is certainly important as well.

In saying that, apply Bill C-70 to this case—the foreign interference. How could Bill C-70 help in this type of situation that we find ourselves in?

[Marcus Kolga]

I'll try to be brief.

I think that the government has made some progress, even significant progress, in terms of addressing foreign influence operations. I think a shining example of that is the rapid response mechanism at Global Affairs Canada. It started out rather slowly, some six or seven years ago, but has really become quite bold in its efforts to expose foreign information narratives and those tactics to Canadians to build that awareness. That is exactly what is needed. It's that boldness in clearly exposing those narratives and tactics that will help build awareness.

Bill C-70, as you mentioned, is a step in the right direction. We still don't know how that's going to be implemented.

The previous panel mentioned the fact that there have been major changes to the CSIS Act. Allowing CSIS to communicate threats that they are detecting and observing to vulnerable ethnic community groups, for example, is extremely important. It's incredibly important for them to be able to communicate with civil society organizations like DisinfoWatch to let us know what they're seeing, so that we might be able to expose some of those narratives and tactics.

Making sure that the foreign influence transparency registry is properly implemented will be critically important as well, to help protect Canadians against these sorts of operations as well as against transnational repression.

The last thing I will say is that we need to be enforcing our sanctions legislation. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, with the Tenet Media case we know now, thanks to the United States and the Department of Justice, that two Canadians received financing and funds directly from RT—well, through some U.K. shell companies. They received this funding in 2024, according to that indictment.

As I mentioned in my opening remarks, RT was placed on our sanctions list in 2022 already. That raises a number of questions in terms of the Special Economic Measures Act, which allows us to place sanctions on these entities. There are questions as to whether that legislation has been violated.

Enforcing our sanctions legislation is the first thing we need to be doing.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to both witnesses for being with our committee today.

Foreign interference has obviously been a hot topic this year. We had the explosive revelations in the NSICOP report, and we also saw the House of Commons come together in a rare show of unanimous support for an important piece of legislation in Bill C-70. We certainly are looking forward to updates on how our intelligence and security agencies are going to make use of that legislation to beef up their capabilities.

I want to go back a bit further, because, of course, Mr. Kolga and Mr. Shull, you were both really good witnesses for our previous study looking into Canada's security posture vis-à-vis Russia. Certainly your testimony back in 2022 aided this committee in making a lot of the recommendations to the government. It's in that context that I would like for both of you to weigh in.

Is there anything else you would like to tell this committee about? If you compare the recommendations we made in that report, which was tabled in the House of Commons in March 2023, and where we are now, is there anything more you would like to see this committee focus on, where some of those recommendations are still a work in progress? Is there anything that we should be highlighting in that context?

Mr. Kolga, I'll start with you and then move to Mr. Shull.

[Marcus Kolga]

I completely agree that an agency, a unit within government, to support the victims of transnational repression would be extremely helpful.

When these sorts of attacks happen, it is psychologically taxing. It is very difficult to deal with them. Reputations are harmed. There are impacts on family members. At the moment, there is zero support for the victims.

I would also argue that there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims of transnational repression in Canada right now. We have seen how the Chinese government has targeted its own diaspora, and how it has targeted Uyghur and Tibetan activists in this country.

The only support they have is when we talk to each other. We have an informal network, and we try to do as much as we can to support each other. The government really does have a role here to support those victims, but also to enforce the laws that we have by implementing Bill C-70, which will provide some degree of protection for the victims of transnational repression.

I would also argue that Canada has a role to play in creating an international network of nations where there are victims who are targets of transnational repression. Canada is not the only country where there are victims. We know that citizens of the U.K. and Sweden, among others, have been targeted. Working together, maybe within the framework of the G7 or NATO, might be helpful in creating that international network and an international front, like a coalition, to push back on transnational repression.

[Alex Ruff, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

You don't get access to it if you don't have the clearance, and that was the challenge, even in an imminent threat in this scenario. Again, this wasn't about ensuring that parliamentarians had the information—obviously, the government had it—but actually all the different levels of government. When you're dealing with a massive....

Again, I'm using the example of a security threat, not something like consequence management of an earthquake, a flood or a fire, but when it comes to a security threat and the scenario to play it out. I mention this because I wrote the scenario and ran the exercise. It wasn't about the initial improvised explosive device having gone off, which overwhelmed the system and required the military to help support different levels of resources in Nova Scotia, and our being dependent on allies, like the Americans, to bring in capabilities. I wrote an inject into the exercise that said, “Now we have another potential improvised explosive in Montreal. We now have a threat. How are we going to brief the appropriate authorities in Montreal?” Guess what? Half of the provincial government people and nobody in the hospitals or the transportation system had the right clearances.

That's the good thing about Bill C-70, which will help fix some of that, since now CSIS finally has the authority to share classified information with levels of government other than just the federal government. We're moving the needle in the right direction on the sharing of certain information.

This is just an extension to it, in a parliamentary case, that should.... A great example Ms. Romanado brought forward is that the defence committee, the foreign affairs committee and the public safety committee all had studies in which they brought this forward and said, “Look, we'd like to know more here so that we can actually make good, solid recommendations to Parliament and the government of the day, to fix and address threats and shortfalls within Canada.”

[Marcus Kolga, Senior Fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, for the privilege and opportunity to testify before you today. I want to begin by expressing my gratitude for your recognition of the serious threat that Russian information and influence operations pose to our democracy and society.

For the past 15 years I've dedicated myself to monitoring and exposing Russian information warfare and influence campaigns targeting Canada and our allies. This is not a partisan issue. Safeguarding Canada's cognitive sovereignty and the integrity of our information environment is essential to defending our democracy and maintaining social cohesion.

The September 4, 2024 indictment from the U.S. Department of Justice highlights the extent of this threat, but it is just the tip of a much larger iceberg. For over a decade, Canadians have collaborated with Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik news, and with platforms like Montreal's Global Research, which the U.S. state department has identified as a key pillar of the Russian disinformation ecosystem. They also enable and collaborate in Russian transnational repression, targeting Canadian activists like me, communities and even parliamentarians.

Furthermore, Canadians continue to engage with sanctioned Kremlin-aligned think tanks such as the Valdai club and the Russian International Affairs Council, which played pivotal roles in the laundering of disinformation and in efforts to affect policy and opinions in Canada through the influencers connected to them. These Kremlin-controlled entities, including RT, are not merely propaganda tools. They are designed to weaponize information in order to manipulate our understanding of the world around us, undermine our democracy and erode our social fabric. They are not bound by any physical borders, either.

An FBI affidavit released alongside the DOJ indictment of September 4 provides detailed minutes of high-level Russian meetings and strategy documents. One of Vladimir Putin's closest advisers, Sergey Kiriyenko, was involved in these meetings, underscoring the personal importance of these operations to Putin. Among the documents in the affidavit are instructions to Russian propaganda agents to monitor western information environments for domestic conflicts, friction points and crises, and to artificially create and intensify tensions in countries allied with the United States. The documents instruct agents to create false narratives and lies. They are delivered through western influencers and state media platforms like RT to achieve this. Global Affairs Canada has now identified RT as an arm of Russia's intelligence apparatus engaging in psychological operations and disinformation, while its cyber-actors target western nations, including Canadian critical infrastructure.

The U.S. indictment exposes the significant involvement of Canadians in RT's activities. It alleges that a company established by two Canadians received $10 million from RT to create a platform for transmitting these narratives to Canadian and American audiences. While this may seem like a large sum, it is only a fraction of the $3 billion that Russia spends annually on information operations globally. The indictment claims that Canadians were producing content for RT as early as March 2021 and that RT funnelled money to these individuals through U.K. shell companies as recently as this year. RT was added to Canada's sanctions list in July 2022, which raises serious questions about potential violations of Canadian sanctions laws. This committee should inquire as to whether the RCMP is investigating these Canadians and others collaborating with Kremlin-controlled entities.

Both the DOJ indictment and the FBI affidavit are smoking guns. They provide clear evidence of Russian operations targeting Canada, a threat that has persisted for nearly 90 years. Perhaps the most alarming case of Russian intelligence operations in Canada, and one that's been largely ignored, is of GRU Colonel Mikhail Mikushin. For over a decade, Mikushin attended Carleton University and the University of Calgary. He even wrote an article for the Canadian Naval Review journal and volunteered on a Canadian political campaign. Shockingly, it wasn't CSIS, CSE or the RCMP that uncovered Mikushin's identity as a GRU colonel recently. It was Norwegian intelligence. That's Norway, not Canada. The service Mikushin provided to Russia's intelligence operations was so important to Vladimir Putin that he was included in the August prisoner swap, returning to Russia alongside Putin's other GRU assassins and hackers.

It's unlikely that Mikushin was the only Russian intelligence agent working in Canada, nor are the Canadians behind Tenet Media the only Canadians collaborating with RT and other Kremlin media. If we seek to disrupt, stop and deter such operations, we must hold those behind them and their Canadian collaborators to account by investigating and exposing them, enforcing our existing laws, properly implementing new ones like the foreign influence transparency registry and BillC-70, and simply ending our willful ignorance to this threat.

Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

At this committee we have often had the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service before us as witnesses to update the committee on their activities. Of course, a lot of what they do by its very nature goes unreported. They have to operate in a very clandestine world. They have to be very mindful that their sources could be compromised and their lives even put in danger if they reveal too much information.

However, in the spring session, there was a rare moment of unity when the entire House of Commons came together in very short order to pass Bill C-70, which among other things pretty much brought an analog law up to date in a digital world. It has allowed CSIS to be a bit more proactive in how it shares information with other entities. Certainly I've had meetings with CSIS officials since that act received royal assent. The service is still coming to terms with how it's going to implement some measures, but it certainly is being a bit more proactive.

When it comes to the work that our security and intelligence agencies are doing—and this includes the officials at Public Safety Canada—and you compare it to some of the European examples, are there any wishes that you have for how maybe those agencies could be a little more proactive with the Canadian public in a non-political way in underlining the gravity of the threat and the measures that need to be taken to counteract it? Could they maybe be a bit more proactive when we actually have some success in stopping some of these campaigns?

Maybe I'll start with you, and we can ask everyone to comment on it quickly.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I understand the need to know. I also understand its impact, especially in the case of foreign interference. There is a reason so many recommendations came out of the study on Bill C‑70.

On the flip side, what are the negative effects? What can happen following a request like that? There are considerations related to security and the protection of parliamentarians, to say nothing of the information itself, which has to be known and disclosed, but at what cost?

What would the risk be?

[Alex Ruff, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

Chair, we're here today to speak to my private member's bill, Bill C-377 , an act to amend the Parliament of Canada Act, by adding the following subclause:

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.

Really, what does this mean? It means that for the purposes of applying for the security clearance, parliamentarians have a need to know. The most important aspect to understand is that this bill would only allow parliamentarians to apply for a secret security clearance. The government would, then, not be able to deny, regardless of which party is in government, a parliamentarian from applying. That's all it would do; it would allow them to apply.

The bill does not guarantee that a parliamentarian's application would pass, should they apply. They still must go through the same government security vetting and clearance process. I've had a secret level security clearance for decades now. I've had a top secret security clearance for over 15 years. Having a clearance does not guarantee that one gets access to whatever classified information they want whenever they want, or on any classified issue. One still must demonstrate the need to know to the government to get access to the classified information. This is, really, the second safeguard of the “need to know” principle on how the system protects classified information.

Why is it so important to allow parliamentarians a secret security clearance? The preamble of my bill, Bill C-377, 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;

This highlights the need to improve transparency, accountability and education with respect to the ever-changing threats to Canada and our democratic institutions and processes, but ultimately for Parliament to rebuild the trust in those same democratic processes and institutions.

Let's look at some testimony that you have heard at this PROC committee in just the last year. You had Vincent Rigby here. He served as the national security and intelligence adviser from January of 2020 to June of 2021. He stated that transparency needed to be increased by producing annual public threat assessments, responding to the NSICOP reports, publishing intelligence priorities and, most important, sharing more intelligence with members of Parliament.

In the conclusion of Top Secret Canada: Understanding the Canadian Intelligence and National Security Community, edited by Stephanie Carvin, Thomas Juneau and Craig Forcese, it states:

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.

Let's look at a few real-life parliamentary examples where access to classified information has become a political hot potato both under this current Liberal government and under the former Conservative government, respectively, the Winnipeg labs and, under the previous Conservative government, the Afghan detainee file issue. How did Parliament ultimately address both of those issues? They formed ad hoc committees at the last minute and created a whole lot of undue politicization of the whole process, whereas, if Parliament had members already cleared, this would have sped up the process and helped downplay the politicization.

More recently, let's look at foreign interference. We know that parliamentarians are being targeted—and this isn't new. We can go back to the 2019 annual report by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, where they recommended that parliamentarians needed to be briefed on the threats they face from foreign interference. This, again, has been further emphasized and highlighted by the most recent and ongoing public inquiry into foreign interference, the NSIRA review, in their report, and in the most recent NSICOP report on public interference that was just tabled in May.

The point I'm trying to make here, and we've heard some of this feedback from parliamentarians who have received some of the generic defensive briefs on foreign interference, is that it's not specified and it doesn't have enough detail to actually make them understand the threats that parliamentarians are facing.

In response to these reports, the government tabled Bill C-70, and kudos to Parliament for fast-tracking that bill with all-party support, because there's one relevant aspect of Bill C-70 that made changes to the CSIS Act. These changes now allow CSIS to share classified information beyond the federal government with other levels of government—provinces and territories, municipalities and first nations—and with industry and other stakeholders.

However, one key caveat that still needs to be cracked is that those individuals still must gain a security clearance to be briefed. If they're not cleared, they cannot get access to that information unless it's an imminent threat, if it's going to save somebody's life or if it's a grave public threat. There are all sorts of caveats that allow our national security agencies, including CSIS, to help out.

Finally, I'd like to remind the committee of your own unanimous consent recommendation from earlier this year during the report on the question of privilege related to the member for Wellington—Halton Hills and other members. Recommendation 3 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 (particularly those who sit on committees with mandates concerning foreign affairs, national defence and national security), who shall be taken as satisfying [the] 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.

Basically, this committee has already recommended and supported what Bill C-377 is trying to achieve.

I look forward to any questions from my honourable colleagues.