Information & Ethics Committee on May 3rd, 2018

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Kent.

Mr. Saini, you have five minutes.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Mr. Collins, I want to ask two questions. Specifically, can you comment on why Andy Wigmore of Leave.EU would refer to AIQ as SCL Canada in an interview with Emma Briant, if they weren't referring to themselves in that manner?

[Damian Collins]

What you've rightly discovered and highlighted is that this is what the people who worked in this company thought AIQ was. It's not just the view of one person who might have got it wrong; this seems to be a consistent view about what this entity is.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

I just want to paint a broader picture so you can help the committee understand the effect of this issue on the Brexit campaign. You had a very close election result: 51.9% versus 48.1%, or a less than a 4% difference. It was 3.8%, to be exact. You had 30 million people who cast a vote, so that just happens to be about one million people. You've come out now and said that you're trying to conclude your investigation by July, right?

Since article 50 was triggered a year and a half ago, the departure of the U.K. from the EU will happen at 11 p.m., U.K. time, on Friday, March 29, 2019. That's a little less than a year away. You've had a run-up to that date by companies, corporations, and organizations that are divesting themselves, making manoeuvres, and readjusting their alignment. You have U.K. citizens who live in other parts of the EU, who are also thinking about where they're going to fit within the new relationship.

Your investigation is going to conclude in July. Whatever your recommendations will be, there will probably be further investigations. If it is determined that the Brexit result was compromised, isn't it effectively too late? The momentum, the shift, the resources, the negotiations, everything is working towards this date. With all the energy that's being consumed right now for that date, isn't it effectively too late for this inquiry's conclusions?

[Damian Collins]

To be clear, we have looked at issues connected with the referendum because they have been relevant to our inquiry, but we're not investigating the referendum itself. The Electoral Commission is investigating these issues, and the Electoral Commission will be the body that will determine whether it believes laws were broken and, indeed, will recommend what should be done next. In the past, they've imposed fines. People have gone to prison for their breaches of election law. However, that's a matter for the Electoral Commission to determine.

All we can do is to pursue our investigation and lay out the evidence that we've uncovered. Ultimately it will be for Parliament to determine if it feels that there should be a reconsideration of the referendum itself and whether that should be rerun. That would be a decision for Parliament to make.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Saini.

Last up, Mr. Angus has a letter that he would like to present.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I received this letter last night at 11 o'clock, and I haven't had a chance to get it translated into our two official languages. It's very clear to me that we do not present documents unless they're in both official languages, but I would like to present it to the committee so that it can be shared. It was written to Chair Zimmer and Vice-Chair Erskine-Smith, as well as me, from Mike Baukes, co-CEO of UpGuard in Mountain View, California, as well as Greg Pollock, and Jon Hendren, their director of strategy.

I'm not going to read the whole letter, but there are key elements to put on the record, especially as Mr. Collins is here. It says:

We at UpGuard are reaching out to you, honorable chair and vice chairs of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy, and Ethics, regarding an important matter of privacy and data integrity affecting not just Canadian citizens, but individuals around the world. The issue of preserving any and all relevant data stored by companies AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica, and SCL on the systems of external services, including but not limited to Github, and Amazon Web Services, is a matter of great urgency and public significance.

It goes on to say:

The news today that Cambridge Analytica and SCL are being dissolved raises a serious concern: is there more data out there, hosted using services such as AWS, that is relevant to inquiries in the US, UK, and Canada into all three companies?

We write to you in the hopes that public servants might immediately put forward data preservation requests to GitHub, Amazon Web Services, Facebook, and other relevant data services, to freeze and preserve the data in any accounts used by AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica, and SCL.

It continues:

We hope these data preservation requests would be made public, as ultimately the directors for all of these companies should be held accountable. We fear that if the proverbial paper trail is wiped, important information could be lost of interest to the relevant international inquiries.

The risk is that one cluster of companies have the keys to all of this data, yet turns a blind eye to all of the egregious uses of their platform without governance nor controls in place for transparency or oversight into their operations. It would compound the potential issues under investigation were this data to now disappear with the dissolution of Cambridge Analytica and SCL

They've listed a series of questions they're asking us to consider, and they would be eager to discuss this matter with any Canadian or international officials.

I will present the letter to the committee, and we can have it properly translated so that everyone has a copy.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Okay. Thank you, Mr. Angus.

I would like to ask you, Mr. Collins, to stay on the line to go in camera with us for a few minutes. You had mentioned that you wanted to say a few things in camera.

I want to thank you publicly for appearing before us. It's deeply troubling. The foremost concern to me is our allowing foreign money to influence our elections, with viewers not knowingly being a part of that. That's deeply concerning. Enabling those bad actors to influence our democracy is troubling to all of us here at our committee.

I want to suspend for about five minutes until we clear the room.

Please stay on the line, Mr. Collins.

[Proceedings continue in camera]