Thank you, Chair.
I do want to start by congratulating you on becoming the chair of the procedure and House affairs committee. I wonder if it's one of those things where, when you're the new guy, you have to do the job that nobody else wants, but no, in all seriousness, congratulations.
There's some irony in where I am sitting in the room. Because we have a large number of members here, I am sitting in a seat that is normally where witnesses sit. I had anticipated that the next time I would be back at this committee might be in the role of witness, because it was my question of privilege, the prima facie case of privilege granted by the Speaker, that led to the referral to this committee on the matter of foreign interference.
I want to just briefly share with committee members what happened to provoke this case. Hopefully, it helps members to understand the importance of proceeding in the fashion proposed by my Conservative colleagues.
In 2021, 18 Canadian parliamentarians, we now know, members of Parliament and senators, faced a cyber-attack from what's known as APT31, a China-based PRC-affiliated hacking outfit that was targeting specific legislators around the world because of their affiliation with an organization called the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, or IPAC.
IPAC does incredible and effective work in bringing together legislators from across the world and from different political traditions to work together on issues related to China. The IPAC model is that in every country where legislators are members, they have co-chairs from two different parties. In this case, for instance, John McKay and I serve as co-chairs, and we have been able to work very collaboratively together, including in the context of raising this issue in the House.
Mr. McKay and I, as well as 16 other parliamentarians, were subject to this cyber-attack in 2021. We were not told about it. The cyber-attack came to our attention because, a few weeks ago, an unsealed indictment in the United States revealed that there had been this global attempt by APT31 to target IPAC legislators. This was the first time that IPAC found out about it, so they followed up with the U.S. government, saying, hey, it sure would have been nice if you had told us that our members and our organization were targeted by APT31.
What ensued was some dialogue between the various organs of the U.S. government and the IPAC secretariat, in which they identified that they did become aware of this attack and they did disseminate information, but because of sovereignty concerns, it is not the policy of the FBI, for better or worse, to contact directly individuals in other countries who are subject to these kinds of attacks. Instead, it is their policy to disseminate this information through notifications to governments, and then the governments respond accordingly. In some cases, legislators were informed at the time this information was received from the U.S. government, and in some cases they were not informed.
In Canada, we were not informed. On this information, the details of which were subsequently shared with the IPAC secretariat, Mr. McKay and I were jointly briefed. This was followed by a briefing to other members of the IPAC membership who were affected. We subsequently both raised a question of privilege a week and a half ago now, which was the first Monday back from a break week during which we had received this briefing. The question of privilege was raised. There were a number of other interventions, and the Speaker granted in a ruling last night that this did constitute a prima facie case of privilege.
I presume and hope that there is an appreciation here of the seriousness of the events I've just described. What matters is the mechanism, the action and the fact that it was a cyber-attack, but what matters more, I think, is the intention, the objective, of the attack.
This was a pixel reconnaissance attack. What that means is that it's a kind of introductory attack, a reconnaissance attack aimed at gathering initial information, which will then be used subsequently for further attacks. Those further attacks could take the form of attempted surveillance, disruption, identifying things that were involved and perhaps identifying individuals we are corresponding with and putting some pressure on them or applying additional pressure or surveillance to those individuals.
We don't really know what all the follow-up of these initial reconnaissance attacks was. Although the House of Commons has said that the attack was unsuccessful, they can't know that, because it was not only parliamentary accounts that were targeted. In my case, my personal account was targeted, a personal email account that is not publicly available anywhere. I still don't know how APT31 hackers got this information. I was targeted in a personal, private place or context because of my parliamentary work.
The other issue is one that an MP raised in debate on this privilege motion yesterday in the House: the fact that his staff had actually been able to find in their email account that these emails were fake news emails. I'm not making an editorial comment when I say “fake news”. They were actually from someone pretending to be part of a news organization when they were not. This was not in the way that we often see it happening, but in a more uncommon way, where they were identified as.... These fake news articles had pictures in them. Each of those pictures may have had one or two pixels in them that kind of opened up an access point into someone's computer and allowed them to gather more information.
The point I'm making is just that one of the members during debate yesterday pointed out that his staff had been able to find these emails still in his account, which indicated that at least the emails did get through. That raises some questions about whether or not we can be certain that there was an effective protection in the case of parliamentary accounts. In any event, that doesn't apply to personal accounts, and that doesn't change the fact that people were targeted.
This is the context. I hope members appreciate the seriousness, not only because of the nature of the attack but also because of the motivation that informs it, which is to disrupt our parliamentary work. This is why it's not just an unfortunate event but a question of parliamentary privilege, because our constitutional framework recognizes that we have critical jobs to do as members of Parliament, as part of our democracy, and those jobs were interfered with through a foreign actor. In any case where there is some interference with our ability to do our jobs, that constitutes a matter of privilege, and Parliament prioritizes dealing with that, as certainly we have.
That brings us up to where we were last night with the Speaker's ruling and the subsequent debate that occurred, in which many members made the point that it is an attack on our privilege that there was this foreign interference in our democracy happening again, and that, for the second time, the government failed to inform members of the fact that there was a threat to them or an attack on them by a foreign actor.
Members will recall that this committee studied the issue of the threats against Michael Chong's family in detail. What happened in that case was found to be a prima facie breach of privilege by the Speaker. In the context of some of the conversation around that, the government issued a ministerial directive aimed at ensuring that members would more likely be informed of threats against them, but still, in this case, that did not happen.
The events in the context of this hacking happened before the new ministerial directive was put in place, but you would still expect that the ministerial directive would reasonably be interpreted.... I would hope, if there were threats or attacks made against members that are still relevant to their lives today, that in the context of the new directive members would be informed. I think that perhaps one thing that can be looked at in this study is just getting some clarity around the fact that if there were threats the government became aware of that started prior to that new directive and that are still applicable to members of Parliament, in light of that new directive, members should certainly be informed.
It seems to be the case that in spite of some of the statements that were made, there are still these outstanding issues of threats that have been made that may and likely do have ongoing relevance to members, which members have not been informed about. This is the critical issue going into this discussion: what happened, why it happened, what the motivation was and how we respond.
I hope the response is for this committee to put together robust, detailed recommendations about how to ensure this never happens, to ensure that members of Parliament are informed, and to ensure that in general, when people are subject to foreign interference threats, they are informed—that there's not a hiding of information, but rather that the information is given to those who need it and who can then use that information to take steps to protect themselves.
I hope we also see action, by the way, on holding APT31 accountable. One piece is protecting ourselves and addressing the privilege issues here. Another piece is the response to APT31. I believe in and IPAC legislators across the world have called for the sanctioning of individuals affiliated with APT31 and involved in trying to attack our parliamentary institutions through hacking. We obviously should respond to those kinds of actions with strong sanctions. I speculated last night that one of the reasons the government may not have wanted members of Parliament to be aware of what was happening is that informing members of Parliament would likely have led to calls for a strong response, a strong response in particular of holding accountable those who were perpetrating this hacking.
This morning, there was an agreement in Parliament to move this issue quickly to this committee. There was a unanimous decision by the House of Commons to adopt my motion, which was in the context of the privilege question. My motion was that this matter be referred to this committee. Needless to say, that referral by the House on a matter of privilege is a very serious matter.
There are many other issues that this committee could look at that are issues of great importance, naturally, but there is a limited number of matters that have been referred to this committee by the House unanimously, by members of Parliament from all parties, saying that this is a pressing matter relating to the privileges of parliamentarians and we need PROC to provide an answer in terms of what has happened and what we can and should do going forward in response to that.
Recognizing the electoral timeline, the election.... If certain events remain on the trajectory that they are on, we'll have an election next fall. Of course, in a minority parliament, an election can always happen sooner. I would submit to you that, given the importance of this matter, it's important for our democracy that there are some critical issues of foreign interference that need to be addressed and resolved prior to the next election. One of them is the resolution of this matter of members of Parliament facing cyber-attacks and being able to receive the information related to those attacks and protect themselves in the context of those attacks.
This is why Conservatives have moved an amendment to the existing study motion to emphasize that the other study that has been proposed on an important subject matter begin after the completion of this committee's work on foreign interference. I think that respects the mandate this committee has and, actually, that all parliamentary committees have as creations of the House of Commons. When the House of Commons creates parliamentary committees, their primary responsibility is not to envision themselves as a group of independent members of Parliament doing their own thing, so to speak. They shape their own agendas, generally speaking, but the exception is when they're given direction by the House and their primary responsibility is to report to the House on the matters they study.
The foreign interference issue is one that the Speaker has ruled on, that the House as a whole has unanimously pronounced itself on. Therefore, it is an issue on which the committee should prioritize reporting back to the House.
I hope that, as part of this study, the various members, as well as senators, who are affected by this foreign interference issue are given an opportunity to present. Some have not indicated it publicly, but everyone impacted has been informed. We need to hear about the decision to not inform members. The justification that the government has used for not informing members is to say that it passed information along to certain officials within the House of Commons. Its argument is.... Well, I would say that it admits more than it denies. The government admitted that it received this information from the FBI regarding attacks on members and that it chose to not share it with members. It said, to paraphrase the parliamentary secretary, something to the effect that, well, because of the separation of powers between the executive and the legislative, it decided to tell parliamentary officials instead of members of Parliament.
I am not aware of any tradition of legislative-executive power separation that prohibits the executive from informing individual legislators of information that's relevant to them. Of course, the nature of our system is that we have an executive branch and a legislative branch, and those branches talk to each other. It happens every day in question period. It will happen shortly. It happens in the form of informal conversations or cases in which, if the government is working on pieces of legislation, it will inform members of certain things it's working on, certain intentions, etc.
It doesn't follow for me that somehow the separation of powers that should exist includes a prohibition on members of the executive or organs of the executive communicating with individual members of Parliament. I accept and understand, of course, that the mandate of our security agencies has generally been to report to the government, not to report outside of government. However, that makes the point all the more; it should have been a decision of a directive of government to say that this is information critical to our democracy and sharing this information allows members to protect themselves.
I'll just say that very often, when it comes to foreign interference in general, this government wants to hide information, even in cases where sharing information likely is an effective way of combatting that interference. Someone once said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. In the case of foreign interference, sometimes simply knowing that foreign interference is happening, knowing that particular messages and presentations emanate from foreign interference, and just having that information out there helps to reduce the impact of that foreign interference. However, this government looks for every possible excuse to not share information, even if the national interest would actually be more clearly and directly advanced if that information was shared.
I maintain very strongly that the government should have shared this information with us. It was disappointing to hear, during debate last night, the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader again double down on basically saying, in spite of the Speaker's ruling, that he didn't think the government did anything wrong. If the parliamentary secretary's position reflects the government, then the government's position as a whole is that the government did not do anything wrong.