Thank you, Chair.
If you're a person who is facing these kinds of issues, if you're a victim of this and you're looking for support, where do you go? Who is responsible for coordinating this response? I don't think that response is going to be coordinated by this small office that, as it sounds in the budget, is going to exist sort of independently from these other institutions.
There's a lot of information that CSIS already has, but the issue has been political will. The issue has been the government not responding to that information or taking it seriously or maybe making the calculation that it's not in their interest to respond seriously to that. What we have seen in reports in various newspapers is that the Communist Party in Beijing believed that it was in its interest to see the re-election of a minority Liberal government.
That's what has been reported, so it's, I think, this structural challenge that we have, which is that if we are seeing foreign state-backed interference that has as its goal political interference that benefits political actors—and those political actors are the ones who are supposed to be solving the problem and those political actors are not motivated to solve the problem because they are the ones who are in some way benefiting from this interference—then we have a problem. I think the only response to that is some degree of sunlight. When these issues get exposed, the public understandably is concerned about the issue and puts pressure on its leaders to do better.
We have a case right now that has just come out. It's really a baffling and horrifying situation, such that it was the lead item for all three opposition parties in question period—rarely does it happen that there's such a unity of focus and concern on a particular issue—which is to say that we have foreign interference that involved threats against the family of a member of Parliament in response to a vote and work done by that member of Parliament on human rights issues, particularly on the Uyghur genocide. The government, it seems, was aware of that information and did not inform the member involved until it became public.
The government's response since then has been to say it has offered reassurance to the member and so forth, but that engagement should have come much, much earlier. I think any of us would expect that if a foreign government were involved in something that was impacting one of our families, the government would be engaged with us right away.
These are questions that I think we need to put to the Minister of Public Safety. We need to understand what he knew and when. He was asked repeatedly in question period today: When did he get this information, and when was he told what was happening? In fact, at no point did he provide a response. Well, he provided responses, but at no point did he provide an answer to the question in terms of actually saying when he became aware of this information or not. These are the kinds of questions we would likely pose to the public safety minister if he were here.
Related to that, to the BIA, I think it's important to establish what the government is actually planning on doing structurally to combat these problems. On this “we're going to create a new office and we're going to appoint someone new” response, how is that actually going to constructively respond to the problem?
It has been, I think, the pattern of the government in general, as is recommended in the great British television show, Yes Minister . When the minister sees a problem and his officials ask him what is he going to do, he says, “I'll appoint someone.” He almost has a special rapporteur, but he's not at that point yet.
This is the tendency, but it's not actually resolving—