Madam Chair, thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee. I look forward to answering questions in both official languages.
I will start with some ad hoc remarks about cybersecurity in the current context, and then pass to some broader remarks about the continuity of constitutional government in the context of an emergency and a crisis. I shall edit those remarks and I shall indicate to the translators the edits so that you have the full written version in front of you in both official languages.
With regard to cybersecurity, here are a few brief considerations.
The deliberations you are having are hard to mess with because they're in real time and they're open, so tricks like deep faking what somebody might be saying seems to me to be pretty hard and difficult to make effective. On the next panel, I know there's somebody who is going to raise concerns about the Zoom technology, but I actually think that this is not particularly relevant in the current context. Yes, end-to-end encryption is the gold standard, but in this case, we're talking about an open Parliament and open conversations, so if we have interserver encryption.... We want people to be looking in anyways. If our adversaries want to listen in and see what a resilient democratic conversation looks like, all the better.
No matter what tool you're going to use, all the tools have vulnerabilities and are somewhat insecure. Some are less secure than others, but inherently there's always an issue with regard to compromise. I actually think this is a misguided conversation. This points to technological determinism, and technology is not ultimately the issue. It's behaviour that's the issue. It's how we use the cyber domain, so we need to have a more human-centric conversation about cybersecurity.
Many of the measures technologically can be readily solved as your parliamentary administrators already have with regard to Zoom, by sending passwords separately and locking down meetings. Really, it's a matter of what conversations we can simply not have online because we have to assume the conversation is compromised. There's still a lot you can learn from the metadata, even if you have end-to-end encryption. For instance, are you logging in through a virtual private network when you're logging in as a member of Parliament?
The greatest risk is probably not the software but your personal device. Is it already compromised? What kind of device are you using? What mechanisms are you using to connect: hard-wired or mobile? Are you on an approved device? Is the device hard-wired on a secure network with unique key identifiers, with a KPI card? Are we routing the traffic through a Canadian network to ensure Canadian data sovereignty, or is it being routed the most efficient way?
All this is to show that we need to think in human-centric terms, including how our adversaries might be thinking about this environment and their intent, and not in tech-centric terms. It's about the human factors of cybersecurity. Humans are ultimately the greatest vulnerability, but they're also an underused asset.
I'll point to, in this conversation we're having, nine issues with regard to human factors and cybersecurity that we are all experiencing every day.
The first is societal issues: How do we ensure that our democracy and our institutions are adequately defended? How do we ensure that they are cyber-resilient? How do we adapt our democratic institutions and how do we ensure that we have evidence-based policies?
With regard to regulation, we want to think about how we protect privacy, how we increase transparency and accountability, and how we standardize cybersecurity.
In terms of behaviour, we want to think about criminal networks, about enabling the behavioural change by users, and about designing more usable machines and more usable interfaces.
This ultimately leads me to questions about the role of Parliament. Ultimately the underlying primary constitutional principle here is the principle of responsible government. It is about ministerial responsibility, first and foremost, during a crisis and an emergency. It is about holding government to account and it is, in the Westminster parliamentary system, about parliamentary supremacy.
What does this mean concretely? It means voting supply on spending, on accountability, but also on how we raise revenue. I'm deeply concerned about how Parliament had very little say in how we raised revenue. Usually we think of this as taxation, but what we have seen in recent weeks is the largest and most rapid expansion of government in the post-war era. It has imposed unprecedented intergenerational burdens. We have seen this previously. The percentage of the debt this year that is being taken up in new debt is roughly what it was in the early 1980s. It hobbled government for a generation and led to considerable fiscal challenges down the road, hamstringing governments.
What are the mechanisms that are being deployed to ensure the spending that we are taking up is the most efficient and the most effective? I'm deeply concerned, in the current environment, about the temptation of privatizing profits and socializing debt, including private debt. When we restart the economy.... People are already talking about infrastructure, but this is what some people have called the “she-cession”. Unlike in 2008, the people who are disproportionately affected are women, and they are women in precarious situations. Building lots of bridges, roadways and subways is not going to help them, directly at least.
How do we think about how we restart the economy? In all of this, Parliament has a very important role to play.
I shall now pass to my remarks. I shall read from the first page and then extract lines from subsequent pages.
This is the greatest test for the maintenance of Canada's democratic constitutional order in at least 50 years. It raises many important questions. What is the legitimate extent of the federal government's power during an emergency? Is the federal civil service that drives Canada's federal system for coordinated emergency response a boon or a bane during a complex multijurisdictional, prolonged emergency? Did the Prime Minister get the best advice? Was the Prime Minister aware that the World Health Organization has had a very troubled relationship with China since 1957? These challenges are not new.
What are the appropriate roles—before, during and into a recovery—of the executive, judiciary and legislative branches? To what extent can the executive abrogate civil and privacy rights in the public and common interest, especially if citizens' confidence were to falter? Metadata will be an important part for mobile devices in reopening, in particular aggregate metadata and understanding people's behaviour. These require conversations.
To what extent do the proximate failures of the Canadian government to protect the safety and security of its citizens at home and abroad expose distal failures and weaknesses in intelligence, strategic assessments, emergency preparedness, continuity of constitutional government and the civil service's capacity and commitment to provide the best possible impartial advice to the government of the day, along with weaknesses in the structures and institutions of the Government of Canada and constitutional governance? After all, many democracies have fared significantly better than Canada in the speed and agility with which they responded to the epidemic, without the massive expansion of the state to which Canada has had to resort at a cost of billions of dollars.
The underlying rationale for the answers to these questions needs to be transparent and intelligible. There are questions about proportionality and suitability of these measures, as well as the fundamental transformation of the social and economic role of the state and public sector, whose expansion in recent weeks is without precedent in the post-war era. There's no precedent within living memory for anyone in a position of leadership of how to govern in this crisis, so Canada's democratic institutional order is absolutely critical. It is insufficient simply to tolerate criticism. The resilience and superiority of the democratic way of life is at its best when objections to the way the state optimizes how to manage and contain societal risk are actively sought out, enabled, heard and reciprocated. Even during a crisis, the government's power should not be absolute, unchecked and without recourse.
The hallmark of constitutional democracy is that, even during an emergency, executive power is contingent: The people have recourse through their representatives in Parliament to check the executive. Under such extraordinary circumstances, what are the prerogatives of the legislature in holding the executive accountable within the prevailing ethical and moral framework?
I'll move on to the top of the next page.
For over three centuries, voting supply has been the bedrock principle of the Westminster parliamentary system [Technical difficulty—Editor].