Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
My thanks also go to all the members of the committee.
Thank you very much. I will try to present in both official languages, which is very much the Canadian way, I suspect. My apologies also to the team of translators. Unfortunately I had difficulties with my technology today, and I was unable to deliver my text ahead of time.
Tonight I would like to speak about national security issues. My concern comes from three decades of observation as a member of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, being able to monitor, study, and even teach about the activities of the Chinese intelligence services in Canada.
The imbalance in the relationship between Canada and China is a serious concern. We are not on a level playing field. Neither side is playing by the same rules—at least, not the rules that Canada would like. Those rules are probably the norm on the international stage. Unfortunately, as several of the witnesses who appeared before this committee mentioned, China often chooses to ignore the way things are done.
What I've been able to observe as the chief of Asia-Pacific for CSIS is the great disbalance that exists on various fronts in the activities that have been conducted by the Chinese intelligence services in Canada.
To understand how they operate, we need to understand also that their methodology comes from a different set of operational standards that we don't have in the western world. In the western world, there's often the analogy that is used that if, for example, the Russian intelligence service wants to steal some information here, very often the analogy was used with grains of sand on the beach. The Russian intelligence service will go, in the cover of the night with a bucket and a shovel, try to fill up their bucket as much as possible and run away before the sun goes up.
The Chinese intelligence services and the Chinese government use what we call a mass collection process. In the mass collection process, basically they will be sending 1,000 people to sunbathe all day, and when they come back at the end of the day, they shake their towels in the same spot, and the amount of information they collect is absolutely phenomenal.
We talk about disbalance because there are many institutions and people who have been employed by the Chinese intelligence services, and among them, their greatest asset is what we call the agent of influence. The agent of influence in Canada has been capable of penetrating at various levels. Although the Canadian Security Intelligence Service does not share as much information publicly as it should and does not give briefings as much as they should to elected officials, we find these people all over the place, from the federal to the provincial to the municipal.
Mr. Dick Fadden, who was the director of CSIS many years ago, tried to warn the general public, and unfortunately he was severely reprimanded by the government at that time. At the end of the day, when we talk about the disbalance, we just need to look at, for example, the number of Chinese diplomats who are in place in Ottawa versus the number of American diplomats. America is our greatest business partner and we are in a trade deficit with China, yet they have almost double the number of diplomats in Canada. Why? It is because of the spy activities and the foreign interference that they do here.
Thank you very much.