Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
First, I want to thank my colleagues for making this emergency meeting possible. We are here to address an extremely hot topic of considerable concern to Canadians, and rightly so. Voters have a right to have access to honest elections that they can trust. That right is currently threatened according to revelations that Global News made on November 7 that the 2019 election was subject to organized interference planned and even funded by the Chinese communist regime. This goes far beyond anything we've heard to date in the study that we've begun on foreign interference in elections in Canada.
I would note that the committee has already started a study on foreign interference in the 2021 election in which we received very clear confirmation of foreign interference in the Canadian electoral process. We heard from representatives of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, who explained to us the measures in place for detecting foreign interference activities. I must say that, since little time has elapsed since the 2021 election, we wanted to go further and determine what steps would be taken in future to counter foreign interference.
According to an article published by Global News on November 7, the foreign interference concerned dates back at least to the 2019 election, and people knew about it at the time. That completely changes everything and requires us to alter the previous direction of our study on foreign interference in that we must now recall the experts who previously appeared and discuss the 2019 situation with them. We want to know who was made aware of this, which ministers were informed of it and what measures the government took starting in 2019 to prevent further foreign interference, particularly by the Chinese communist regime, in the subsequent election held in 2021.
We must ensure, for Canadians, that the democratic process is above all suspicion and especially free of any foreign interference on the part of any dictatorial regime whatsoever, particularly that of the Chinese communist regime in the matter before us.
The first victims of this surveillance and interference are the members of the Chinese community here in Canada, as well as their fellow countrymen living in China, who can't exercise any right to speak out without being subject to undue influence, pressure or intimidation on the part of the regime currently in power in that country. For those people, we have a duty to shed light on what has happened, considering the Global News revelations of November 7.
For the purposes of this study, we request that four meetings be added to the committee's calendar.
We further request that the representatives of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Elections Canada and the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force be recalled to testify on the events reported by Global News.
We also request that Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities; Mélanie Joly, Minister of Foreign Affairs; Jody Thomas, national security adviser to the Prime Minister; Vincent Rigby and David Morrison, former national security advisers to the Prime Minister; Dan Stanton, former Canadian Security Intelligence Service officer; David Mulroney, former Canadian Ambassador to China; and Dennis Molinaro, former Canadian Security Intelligence Service analyst appear to shed light on what Global News has revealed.
We also request the production of a series of documents because we must absolutely shed light on the circumstances surrounding this foreign interference in our elections by the Chinese communist regime. As I noted a moment ago, we want to know who was made aware of this, how we learned of this foreign interference, why we knew nothing between 2019 and 2021, why Canadians were not made aware of it and, especially, why the Prime Minister clearly did nothing to protect the 2021 election from the foreign interference known to have occurred in 2019.
We have a duty to voters, to Canadians. That's why I will support my colleague's motion. It's important to shed all possible light on the democratic process. I also hope my colleagues will support the motion for the sake of the next election in Canada. We don't yet know when the next election will be held, but one thing is certain, and that's that there will be others.
Thank you.