Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I will be voting against the amendment that was put forward by my colleague. However, you'll recall, Madam Chair, that much earlier today, we circulated the NDP approach on how these hearings should be conducted. Mr. Turnbull has taken one small element of that, but has not taken the overall, comprehensive approach. I hope that once this amendment is defeated, I'll be able to move my more extensive amendment.
What we believe needs to happen is to ensure, first off, that we have a national public inquiry. That is something I hope we will debate tomorrow. I moved the notice of motion today. It will be in order to move it tomorrow, and I certainly hope that the motion for a national public inquiry will be supported by all members of this committee.
Until the government indicates it is willing to do that, we will have work to do as a committee. The key element, to my mind—this is where I would disagree with my Conservative colleagues—is that we need to be looking comprehensively at the Chinese government and state actor interference, but also at Russian state actor interference.
I want to flag the University of Calgary's school of public policy. It came out with a study just last summer indicating that in the Canadian Twitter ecosystem, around 25% of the accounts were “spreading pro-Russian talking points”. These were accounts that were talking about the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
An article reads:
The analysis—
This is from the University of Calgary's school of public policy.
—of the content of the tweets found similar pro-Russian views expressed among right-wing figures and their supporters in the U.S. and Canada, he said.
He said supporters of the “Freedom Convoy” and anti-vaccine movement, some of whom may not realize they have been digesting messaging originating from Russia, were also tweeting messages in support of the invasion of Ukraine.
Finally, one member of the team from the University of Calgary's school of public policy who examined the millions of tweets that were required for this very extensive study said in an interview:
...that the Russian "state apparatus" is associated with many accounts tweeting in Canada, and is influencing posts that are retweeted, liked or repeated by different accounts again and again.
There is a concern of Russian interference, as I mentioned earlier, in the United Kingdom with the Brexit referendum. The result is attributed to Russian interference. It's the same with Donald Trump's election and the allegations around the “freedom convoy”. The fact is, as we know from the report that the U.K. government finally issued after the 2019 election, that the Russian state actors were involved in heavily financing the United Kingdom's Conservative Party.
These are all of serious concern. If we do not have a public inquiry that examines all of those things, both Russian interference and Chinese interference.... As I mentioned earlier, Madam Chair, Chinese interference is to the extent that those allegations are serious enough that the electoral laws may have been broken. This requires the government and the Prime Minister to step up and call this public inquiry because of the seriousness of the allegations.
Violations of the Canada Elections Act are not something that should be taken lightly. I mentioned a couple of examples earlier today. We need to have the Prime Minister call this public inquiry. It needs to be comprehensive, on both Chinese state actor interference and Russian state actor interference, and there are a number of witnesses who need to be called.
As I've circulated to every member of this committee, in a way to be open and ensure that everyone is aware of what the NDP proposes in terms of a way forward, we will be proposing—and I'll move the amendment at the appropriate time—that Katie Telford and Tausha Michaud, chiefs of staff to the Prime Minister and former leader of the official opposition, come forward to this committee.
As well, we would be proposing that the national campaign directors for the Liberal Party of Canada and the Conservative Party of Canada during the 2019 and 2021 federal election campaigns also be brought forward and that we have an extensive request for documents that includes rapidly getting documents through to this committee, but also relies upon an agreement that we already have among all parties.
You will recall, Madam Chair, that under the Harper government, documents were almost impossible to come by. I remember those dismal years in which parliamentarians had no rights to documents. What we have put in place coming out of that, signed by all recognized parties, is a way of treating top secret documents, documents that deal with national security, that involves referral to that committee. If there is disagreement among the four parties for any reason at all, the national security document would be referred to a special committee of judges who would rule on whether or not they would be admissible or subject to national security. This is a way of ensuring that all documents are available to the committee and that we can compare the redactions as well.
This is a way of moving forward, Madam Chair, that is ensuring that we as a committee are doing our work.
I'll have a chance to move this later when, I hope, we will have defeated the amendment and there will be space for a new amendment to be moved.
That's what I would like to do.
I think it's really important that we look closely at all of the allegations. These are serious allegations regarding Chinese interference in the last election campaign, but also of Russian interference in our democracy, and potentially in our elections, as well, as several studies and articles seem to indicate. We need to get to the bottom of this and get answers for Canadians.
The NDP amendment, which has been circulating for hours now, would allow the committee to fulfill its duty. If a national inquiry is launched, the committee could then move on to other things. If no inquiry is called, the committee will have to do the work. As far as I'm concerned, our amendment is the best way to deal with this serious matter in the interest of all Canadians.