Decaf coffee—right. I can assure members that this is not decaf. I don't think I could talk this long if I had decaf.
I know many people who have worked for DCAF. When I was in Kosovo, they relied very significantly on the Balkans in that period of time, when there was a transition, not only post-conflict, after the war in Yugoslavia, but also post-communist, because these were countries that were going through a transition from communism. It wasn't a matter of restoring a democracy; the democracy had never existed. When I was in Kosovo and trying to ensure that the parliament of Kosovo became a national parliament, it wasn't to recreate something that had existed before the war, but to build it from scratch.
DCAF is known around the world, with some of the best security experts, intelligence experts and parliamentary experts. Many of the people I worked with when I was in Kosovo had either worked at DCAF or went to work with DCAF afterward, and a lot of the best practices that we had were taken from this institute. I would encourage members to go on its website and look at some of the reports from over the years, because I'm not here just trying to say NSICOP is perfect and it's the only mechanism we need. The fact is there are ways we could improve NSICOP significantly, and we need to look at some of these comparative reports, look at what's worked in other countries, look at what hasn't worked in other countries and look at unintended consequences of creating certain processes and institutions, especially among the Five Eyes, because we have very similar security interests.
Might I say that we're in a position, in Canada, where we are asking for classified information in public settings. It's going to be harmful, not only in terms of some of the people out there who work in the security sector, who risk their lives for Canada, but also in terms of danger to other members of the Five Eyes. We need to think about what it is that we want to air publicly when we are a member of the Five Eyes. We have an alliance. When we're sworn in, when somebody is sworn to secrecy.... There is a list of people who are allowed to get information from the Five Eyes, and there are parliamentarians on that list, and I worry about the impact that might have.
Again, going to international best practices, I'm not saying that we can't oversee it. I would be the first to say that, because I've seen countries in which the security sector, behind the veil of secrecy, does tremendous overreach, and I've seen places where people can disappear.
I have a very, very good friend now, someone who at the time was a constituent, who was picked up in the Democratic Republic of Congo by the Republican Guard. He was at the airport. This was before I was elected. I was working at that time with the National Democratic Institute, which is another organization that does incredible work on parliaments and parliamentary strengthening. When I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this person from my riding, whom I knew well, who had been working with the opposition at the time, was on his way back to Canada. He was a Canadian citizen.
He went through security at the airport, and he was on the phone with his family. All of a sudden they heard something that sounded like he was being physically grabbed or taken, and then his phone went off. They checked on the flight, and he wasn't on the flight. That was, it turns out, the Republican Guard, which responds only to the president, at that time President Kabila. My friend had been picked up, and there was absolutely no oversight in this case. Because I knew him when I ran in 2011 and I had also been the head of NDI, I got a call from his family in my riding. At that time—and I have to give him credit—I called John Baird, because he was the MP. I had run against him in 2011, and he had won.
Again, here's an example. When it comes to things that matter in terms of the security and safety of Canadians, you can work across party lines. To his credit, John Baird immediately contacted our embassy, which put in a query to find out what had happened to this young man.
The first 24 hours are always absolutely critical. When I was working in Congo, we all knew that if people disappeared, after the first 24 hours you wouldn't see them again. Because the government at the time, which was the Conservative government, acted so quickly and John Baird acted so quickly, they did produce him. They put him in a prison. There's a book about this, by the way, Noël en prison, if you want to read it. They put him in prison and they charged him with insulting a general or something like that. Fortunately, because of the Canadian government's pushing, several weeks later, after a horrible experience, he was able to come back home to Canada.
The reason I'm talking about this is that I have seen first-hand what happens in countries where the security sector doesn't have oversight, where you don't have mechanisms and where, for those that represent the public, members of Parliament and security oversight agencies, there is a secret veil. I am the last person on earth, having seen this first-hand, having been sanctioned by China and Russia, who would ever say that we want to bury these things or that we don't want processes that are going to protect against the overreach of the security sector.
Look at everything I've done, not just as a parliamentarian but in my career, right from when I was a student. I was in the civil liberties association of Alberta when I was a grad student at the University of Calgary. I have been talking about the potential for overreach under the veil of secrecy and national security throughout my career. I feel comfortable, as somebody who is coming from that position, that NSICOP right now is the best place. It has the tools and the mechanisms to get access to secret materials. It has opposition members on it. That is the best place.
I would also say that we probably could improve it. I'm not here wearing a partisan hat. I'm here wearing the hat of what is best for our country. Back in 2002 and 2004, we suggested—in fact it was approved by cabinet at the time—that members of NSICOP be sworn in to the Privy Council and that they have access to cabinet materials. I would probably be the first to say that's something we may want to look at in order to strengthen the process. I'm not here because I'm parroting the government line or because I'm a Liberal member. There's a lot of cynicism out there. I hope my constituents at least know, and I think opposition members know, at least those whom I've worked with on committees, that if something's good for Canada, I don't care who gets credit.
I'm willing to push the envelope a bit on what our government is doing, put forward good ideas and fight for those good ideas in order to make the processes better, because at the end of the day I'm a process person. I firmly believe if the processes and the institutions function well, then you will end up with good results. I still firmly believe that our processes and our institutions function well. I have no doubt about the resilience and the strength of Canadian democracy. I think that we can maybe improve it. Like I said, if NSICOP were able to be sworn in and get access to those kinds of cabinet materials, to be sworn in as privy councillors, again, that would be unprecedented in the world.
First of all, we have a committee through which we allow top secret information to get to committee members and to members of the opposition unfettered. I can tell you, having worked in many places in the world, that if I had suggested as an international expert that they create a committee and allow members from the opposition access, I probably would have been kicked out of the country persona non grata, because they would have said there was absolutely no way they could ever do this, let alone swear them in and give them access to cabinet materials.
It comes down to trust a bit, and our government has trusted the opposition members who are on that committee. You saw some of the former members of the committee. Vern White was in the newspaper this week. I have exactly what he said. He said it is “BS”—that was the term in the newspaper—to say this isn't a committee that works well. He told CBC's The House, “Our work was done unfettered, totally unfettered.”
Here you have a senator from the opposition who is saying exactly the same thing that my colleague said to me when I was the parliamentary secretary. I tried to talk to her, as a parliamentary secretary, and she pushed back.
I would venture that all of the members of that committee want to make sure they are using the committee responsibly. We are trusting opposition members with top secret information, and I think we could use a bit of trust back.
We, as members of the government side, are fighting every day for Canada. We are putting in everything we have to do what is in the best interests of Canada. The fact that we've created that committee, which allows the opposition to have that kind of information, to be able to ask those kinds of questions and get those answers, suggests that we also believe that the opposition members are fighting in the interests of Canada as well.
Like I said, I meant to go through some of these international best practices. I care so much about this issue that I haven't even gotten to that, but let me go through one of the reports. It's called “The Contribution of Parliaments to Sustainable Development Goal 16 Through Security Sector Governance and Reform”, linking good security sector governance to SDG16.
For those of you who don't know what SDG16 is.... As many of you know, I'm the parliamentary secretary for international development now, so the SDGs are fundamental. However, I was also working at the UN when they called them millennium development goals, because we hoped we would achieve some of these by the millennium, or by 2015. The SDGs are the sustainable development goals, and these are things that, hopefully, we'll be able to achieve by 2030, although with COVID.... I call them the three Cs: conflict, COVID and climate.
There's a crisis happening in the world that is making it much harder to achieve those sustainable development goals, but the one that's relevant to the discussion today is SDG16, which says that we “promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels”.
This is the one that specifically addresses what I've been talking about today, which is those institutional processes. This report from 2021 talks about a number of recommendations. It's a long report, so I'm going to talk only briefly about the key recommendations, but some of my colleagues can elaborate on that a bit later.
The first recommendation is to:
Ensure that committees possess sufficient authority to fulfil their SSG/R—
That is the security sector governance and reform, but I'll say “SSG/R” because it's easier.
—oversight functions, to contribute to SDG 16. This includes the authority to conduct inquiries, interrogate members of the executive and senior officials in the security sector, and conduct site inspections; and implies broad access to information, with any exceptions based on national security concerns limited as much as possible.
That last bit about the exceptions that are based on national security being limited as much as possible, I think, is really the crux of the division that we have today. Are those exceptions limited too much, or are those exceptions reasonable? I would say that in an environment like this, those exceptions have to be in place.
We cannot have discussions about classified materials in an open setting like this. To a certain extent we can, but as it says here, those exceptions have to be based on national security concerns and have to be limited, whereas having a committee like NSICOP does allow for those.
In fact I don't know if there are exceptions as to which materials NSICOP can access. I think they're able to summon papers and all of the things it says here. They're able to conduct inquiries. They're able to interrogate members of the executive and senior officials in the security sector. I'm not sure if they've ever done site inspections. That's something I would have to ask the members, or maybe they wouldn't tell me because they really guard the process.
I would imagine if they wanted to do a site inspection, I know for a fact that as members of Parliament we can go to any military base in Canada and we're allowed access, something that actually, during the Harper years, was denied to members of Parliament. When we came to power, we actually said that as members of Parliament we should be allowed to go to a military base and, within reason, visit it and see it. Again I think our government has actually opened things up significantly from what was the case under the previous Harper government. I might go into some of those details later, but I really want to stick to the crux of the motion here today. Maybe on another day I can elaborate on some of those things. Conducting site inspections is something MPs have a right to do, and I would imagine NSICOP does too—although I don't know of any examples of where they have done that—and that implies broad access to information.
That is precisely NSICOP. That is precisely what that National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians is there to do. I would say that for the most part, recommendation number one is something that we have here in Canada. One of the things, as I said before, is that they don't have access to cabinet documents. Again I think there are pros and cons to that, but certainly if this committee, by the way, were to take on an issue that would actually have tremendous impact.... If I were still on the committee, I might suggest that we talk about how we can make committees like NSICOP stronger. It might be by hearing from other countries around the world about their processes. Also, maybe there's room to hear from experts on what might be the intended and unintended consequences of swearing in the members of NSICOP to the Privy Council and giving them access to cabinet materials. That's something I would say would be a good role for this committee, whereas what's being discussed in this committee now would be better done in NSICOP, which might even be strengthened based on the recommendations from this committee. As I said, when I was on this committee, we did tremendous work.
We did the entire family-friendly Parliament study. Once again, we weren't trying to make the other side look bad. When a good idea came from others—and I remember it was David Christopherson who was on the committee for the NDP and there were times when we clashed a bit, but the fact is he had a good idea—we weren't going to turn it down just because it came from the opposition. Frankly he had a lot of good ideas. He had been here a long time and he had a lot of good ideas as to how to make this place work better. If you look at the history of what our Prime Minister has done and what our government has done since 2015, we have consistently tried to open up and consistently tried to make the processes better, but I think that if PROC were to study anything right now, it might be whether or not there are models out there in the world that would be better or improve what we have in NSICOP. The fact is the rest of the world is looking to our model.
We might be a bit hard pressed to find models that are better, but as I said, the members of the U.K. Parliament are all committee chairs. I think that would be more difficult, because one of the recommendations is that members have the time and are able to dedicate themselves to that kind of work. As any of you who know some of our colleagues who are on NSICOP know, it takes so much of their time. It is all-consuming. In fact, sometimes, given the number of hours they sit and the materials and the briefs they have to read through, the members have to have the capacity and the time and not be pulled by being on other committees and certainly not by chairing other committees. I think that would be a little more difficult. In fact in that respect I think we're better than the U.K.
That's recommendation number one.
Then we have the second recommendation here, which is this:
Establish standing committees to oversee the implementation of the [sustainable development goals]. In order to prevent a siloed approach to implementation of the SDGs, parliaments should create specialized committees, preferably permanent or standing committees....
That's exactly what NSICOP is. In fact, we went one further. It's not even a standing committee. It is a specialized committee of parliamentarians, and it's not just the House; it's also the Senate. Because there are senators there, they aren't always looking at how to score a point for the next election. Yes, absolutely, having accountability is vitally important, and we are thinking about how things are going to reflect on us in our constituencies—at least I hope we're all thinking about that—but senators have a bit more of an ability to take a much longer-term approach.
Rather than looking to the next election, senators can look 10, 20 or 30 years ahead. In fact, if we look 10, 20 or 30 years ahead, I think what we're talking about today is going to be the greatest threat. It's not just the hybrid warfare, the interference, the cyber-interference, the influence mechanisms, the cognitive domain and the attempts to undermine democratic processes and pluralism and, I would say, to undermine the very openness of democratic countries that means there is inclusion and that means we have pluralism.
We heard in the SDIR committee just this week that there is a global anti-feminist, anti-human rights, anti-gender narrative that is happening right now, which is being put out there by countries like China, Russia, Iran and many other authoritarian countries. I think that if we look at the long-term view, as the senators on this committee do.... Hopefully we do too. I wouldn't say that none of us are looking 20 or 30 years down the road. I think most of us want to create a better place for our children and grandchildren. If we look at that, I'm very concerned, because I think the hybrid warfare and the threats we face right now aren't just to the elections and aren't just to committees—like I said, our committee was sanctioned by China, so talk about interference in a democratic process. The threats are also to our infrastructure, to our grid, to our communications, to our banking systems, to....
I have the old Nortel campus in my riding. It's now DND, but before DND could move in—and I'm citing media sources; I don't know this first-hand—it was reported that they found all kinds of listening and spyware devices on that campus, because someone was stealing intellectual property.
What we need right now is not this really partisan attack, saying, “That party tried to work with China to manipulate elections.” What we need is a very serious, non-partisan view of what the threats are.
It's not to overstate them, either, because one thing I know, having been the parliamentary secretary for defence, under which the CSE falls, is that I have tremendous respect for the work of our intelligence institutions. Our intelligence agencies, certainly the signals intelligence, are incredibly capable—some of the best in the world.
Yes, we need oversight. Yes, we need to make sure we guard against overreach, but not just overreach. Sometimes it isn't overreach. Sometimes it's that you're so focused on a task that you want to see that task accomplished, so you're not thinking about the transparency.
The fact is that's not the job of our intelligence agents. That's our job as parliamentarians. It's our job as people who obviously care deeply about our democracy, because we ran for office in this democracy. It's our job to make sure we set those limits and the criteria, that we create the balance between transparency and secrecy, so that, to the extent possible, we can ensure there is not overreach on rights.
Unfortunately, I'm going to have to bring my mom to the hospital shortly for a minor procedure. She's okay. It's a minor procedure, but it's been almost a year that she's been waiting to get this procedure, so I have to take her to the hospital.
I have to leave in a few minutes, but I want to leave with one last piece. Hopefully, I'll be able to come back and maybe elaborate more, or some of my colleagues can talk more about some of these other recommendations.
I am really concerned about the tone and the nature of what's happening. I think, frankly, that if China was trying to cause people in Canada to lose faith in democracy and in our processes, to turn on each other and to become polarized.... This is what we're doing. I came here today because I really wanted to put on the record that I think we can do better. I think we can work together as parliamentarians, put aside this pointing of fingers and saying.... God, none of us are working with China. Please.
I think that when you take intelligence, which.... By its nature, intelligence is partial. That's why you have to keep on gathering more. With intelligence, if it's partial, it's overheard and it's bits and pieces, you can come to the wrong conclusion, which is why people who work in intelligence rarely come to conclusions. They present it and then it's something that we can look into, try to find evidence and try to find.... When intelligence in its partiality and in its raw form is made public, it can utterly destroy lives.
Just look at Maher Arar. I've worked closely with Monia Mazigh, his wife, over the years. Look at what happens when assumptions are made about an individual person based on intelligence that was not gathered to make that assumption. It was gathered to show...and it continues to be gathered.
When those things happen, as soon as you say that someone is disloyal to this country and as soon as you say that someone is working with foreign agents for a foreign interest—not just that individual, but their families and their communities—their life is ruined, because once you say that about someone, how do you prove a negative? How do you prove that you're not?
I am fortunate. I can go back to my constituency and tell people, first of all, that I am white; I'm of Dutch descent and I am sanctioned by China. I can go back and I can say that, obviously, I'm not working for China, as I've been out there on the Uighurs. However, what if I was Chinese? What if my parents were Chinese? I think people should look at what Minister Ng said in the press conference this week, because the impact on communities in our ridings, when you start taking intelligence and treating it as if it's fact, can be extremely dangerous.
I have spent my life on human rights. This is one of the ways that human rights defenders are discredited. When I worked in other countries, sometimes if I went to the office of a member of Parliament or an elected member there, because I am Canadian they would be accused of operating with Canadians or with foreigners. One time I was accused, when I was with NDI, of being a member of the CIA.
There's distrust. They would say, “Please, let's meet in your office,” because they didn't want the perception that they were meeting with foreigners. This is what is used by authoritarian states to discredit civil society, feminists and LGBTQ activists. They discredit them by saying, “You are are a foreign agent and you're working in the interests of the other.” I don't want Canada to get into a situation in which we're saying those sorts of things.
Again, my mom's appointment is in half an hour.
Frankly, if this committee were to go down that road and start asking questions in public, or if there's an inquiry where these questions.... Sometimes a person might say something, not realizing. It seems like an innocent, small fact, but it might be the little piece that a foreign government was waiting to get that puts everything else together and allows them to clue in to what the whole picture is.
We don't know what is useful to another government. That's why I am exceptionally concerned about the tone and about the nature of the way this debate has been playing out in the House of Commons, in this committee and in the motions before this committee right now.
I think we all need to take a step back. I'm looking at my opposition friends now. Let's remember why we ran. Let's remember what it was that made us want to be members of Parliament. If we do that, we will get to a place where we can work together and get to a place where perhaps this committee can look at how we strengthen the processes that we have, but we'll still use the processes that we have. That's exactly why the NSICOP committee was put in place.
I think this discussion would be much better if it were to happen in a place like NSICOP. That's why we have a rapporteur who will come back to the public to say whether that process is working well or not. He'll come back to the Prime Minister. At that point, if he says it isn't, then we have to look at that again very carefully, but I don't think he will say that.
I think Canadians should have comfort and faith that all of us, as elected members, are working very hard to make sure that our democracy is protected. I can tell you that it's my life's work. It's almost my religion. It is what I'm here for.
Again, I'm getting messages that my mom is waiting for me to take her to the hospital, so I have to go, but I hope that I'll be able to come back. I'm going to also make sure that some of my colleagues have a chance to elaborate on some of these international best practices, because I think it is important that Canadians know that our institutions are strong.
Thank you, Madam Chair. Reluctantly, I have to go.