Procedure and House Affairs Committee on May 9th, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Good evening, everyone. I call the meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 71 of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. The committee is meeting today to continue its study on foreign election interference.

We have with us today Mr. Kenny Chiu, former member of Parliament, by video conference, as well as Mr. David Salvo, managing director and senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, also by video conference.

Mr. Chiu, welcome to PROC. We now pass the floor to you for your opening comments.

[Kenny Chiu, Former Member of Parliament, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for the invitation.

Freedom, democracy and the rule of law are not clichés. In fact, many from around the world have chosen Canada because of our respect for and practice of these ideals. Arguably, those who are from the outside come to treasure them and want to protect them even more, because many of us have seen and lived lives without these rights.

Twenty-first-century Canada is a multicultural society with immigrants and refugees from all continents and all walks of life, who call it their settlement home. It is a beautiful and ideal world that those before us in this generation worked very hard to build—a fair, respectable, multicultural society that honours diversity and yet commits to preserving the uniqueness and the very essence of being Canadian, those much-cherished ideals of equality, universal values and human dignity.

Authoritarian regimes around the world, however, do not subscribe to this same value system we believe in. Not only do they work to undermine us, to turn our country into a subservient state—kowtowing to their direct influence, whether they are the Russian Federation, China, Iran or other less resourceful or ambitious regimes—but they are also willing to sacrifice our trusted institutions, the harmonious society we have carefully built over decades and the people who are in it.

I used to be a partisan politician, but now that I'm back as an ordinary Canadian citizen, I continue to share with millions of fellow Canadians the same deep level of worry and concern for my adopted country, because foreign interference is a national threat. It should have been a pan-partisan issue. Protecting the country and its people is arguably the top job for any sovereign government, yet we are seeing an inexplicably action-free policy exercised by our federal government vis–à–vis interference from the most resourceful and ambitious of all foreign states, the Chinese Communist Party regime.

To be clear, the government is not mute and has not been seen to have done nothing. It loudly verbalized its spontaneous concerns and cited SITE, CSE, NSICOP, NSIRA, CEIPP, CSIS and, recently, a rapporteur as proof of things it has done, but none of that, I would argue, has protected sufficiently the 21st-century Canada that we are in, and my experience has been that my country did not protect me from foreign interference and the attacks I've experienced.

In a thriving, diverse, multicultural country such as ours, it is up to those who are in power to stop the corruption and the deceit, to safeguard the exposed and the vulnerable few, to safeguard Canadians of all mother tongues from predatory states and their coercion, and to safeguard Canada from exploitation and manipulation.

I thank you for giving me this opportunity to answer many of the questions you may have and to share my views. Recently in the Canadian broadcasting world, we have seen more than sufficient coverage on the issues and the challenges that have been presented to us today, and I urge all of you to take some action, to be determined, to stand up and to protect our country, especially the people who are in our country.

Thank you again for this opportunity.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you, Mr. Chiu.

We now go to Mr. Salvo.

Welcome to PROC. The floor is yours.

[David Salvo, Managing Director and Senior Fellow, Alliance for Securing Democracy, German Marshall Fund of the United States]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Distinguished members of the committee, good evening from Washington, D.C., and thank you for inviting me.

I was asked to discuss the collaboration of my organization, the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, with the Government of Canada and Microsoft on a joint initiative that brought together leading experts, policy-makers and industry professionals from around the world to produce a practical guide of best practices that key stakeholders in democracies can use to counter foreign interference in elections.

To provide some context to what motivated us to join this partnership with your government, it's worth briefly explaining the genesis of the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

We launched in the summer of 2017 to put Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election into context for American policy-makers and offer solutions on how to better defend our democratic institutions and processes from autocratic threats, not just from Russia but from other state-sponsored actors like China and Iran.

The name “Alliance” was very deliberate. What happened in the United States did not occur in a vacuum. Over many decades, Russian interference has targeted numerous democracies, including several of the U.S. and Canada's allies and partners in Europe. Autocrats' tools of interference, which include cyber-operations, malign finance and information manipulation, among many others, have been refined to exploit modern technologies and target all sectors of democratic society.

We knew that as a civil society organization we had some small role to play in facilitating the exchange of best practices between governments, companies and other civil society organizations, and that we could learn lessons from across sectors and national borders in order to offer guidance to policy-makers and shut down institutional vulnerabilities in our democracy. In this regard, our partnership with the Government of Canada and Microsoft on combatting election interference as part of the French government's Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace was at the heart of what we do.

The compendium of best practices that we published along with the Government of Canada and Microsoft offers reminders of best methods to secure election infrastructure, procedures to ensure voting integrity during the pandemic, transparent ways of communicating with the public about threats to elections, and best practices in building citizen resilience to disinformation. It even highlights examples of Canadian good practice, which include the Canadian Heritage programs to fund civil society initiatives to tackle election-related misinformation and disinformation, and the government-wide critical election incident public protocol. If used as intended, Canada's protocol should be an excellent model of transparency and communication with the public to reduce the likelihood of politicians' manipulating threat information about election interference.

This compendium of best practices is not just in circulation in Canada and the United States, of course. It is being put to good use around the world. Anecdotally, U.S. government colleagues have informed me that they disseminate the compendium to government counterparts in the global south, where many nations are under-resourced and increasingly at the forefront of Russian and Chinese malign influence operations.

In Canada, you do not need me to tell you that foreign interference in democracy remains a serious challenge. The rise in Chinese state-sponsored interference in Canadian democracy through targeting specific ridings and candidates in elections, malign financial coercion and subversion of civil society, including the Chinese Canadian diaspora, have been well documented and on the agenda of your committee, of course. Russian state-sponsored actors have amplified domestic divisions on issues of heightened political sensitivity, including the war in Ukraine, vaccination mandates, the “freedom convoy” in Ottawa and economic hardships facing Canadian voters.

Undermining Canadians' confidence in democratic governance and the integrity of Canadian elections is an overarching objective of these authoritarian regimes. Therefore, the compendium of best practices that we published continues to be a useful guide, not just in Canada but for democracies worldwide. It's illustrative not only of the importance of cataloguing the policies and procedures that can secure elections to rising autocratic threats, but also of the utility of conducting such multi-stakeholder exercises.

No nation, government, company or civil society organization is an island unto itself. By working together as allies and breaking down barriers between governments, industry and civil society, we will be better positioned to secure democratic elections and institutions from an ever-evolving autocratic threat ecosystem.

I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you very much.

We will now start with six-minute rounds, starting with Mr. Cooper and followed by Mr. Turnbull, Madame Gaudreau and then Mrs. Blaney.

Mr. Cooper, the floor is yours.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I'm going to direct my questions through you to Mr. Chiu.

Mr. Chiu, do you believe you were the target of Beijing's interference in the 2021 election?

[Kenny Chiu]

Yes, sir.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

What do you base that on? Can you describe some of the incidents that occurred in your riding and some other experiences that you had on the campaign trail?

[Kenny Chiu]

The experience was not just within my riding, as we all know—as you all know, as federal politicians. A lot of time, especially at election time, the party's platform and the party's leadership accounts for a large number of people...who will be voting for you or not.

Much of the disinformation that I observed was levelled against my party, misconstruing the platform as well as attacking the leader for the Conservative Party of Canada back then, Mr. Erin O'Toole. It was also levelled at me. They attacked Mr. O'Toole as if he was a white supremacist and anti-Chinese, anti-Asian.

As if that's not ridiculous enough, they levelled similar attacks on me personally. The fact that I'm an ethnic Chinese, that I speak fluent Cantonese and Mandarin, and that I read and write the language, didn't prevent them from labelling me as a traitor. I was a sell-out for what I had proposed in the last session of Parliament as my private member's bill, Bill C-282, the foreign interference registry act. It was misinterpreted and misconstrued as something that would cause persecution against all Chinese-Canadians, causing them significant grief.

These are things that I saw and personally experienced.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Thank you.

Do you believe it was coordinated?

[Kenny Chiu]

With the level of organization, the various facets, and especially in contrast to previous elections that I was involved in, yes, I believe it was organized.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

We know that the rapid response mechanism at Global Affairs detected a Beijing-driven disinformation campaign targeting you and other Conservative candidates, specifically in the Lower Mainland.

Did anyone from the Communications Security Establishment or from the SITE task force ever reach out to you about this disinformation campaign—and by the SITE task force, I mean the election panel that had been established?

[Kenny Chiu]

No, sir. None of these national security apparatus contacted me. I had, however, been contacted prior to the election by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Therefore, during the election, when I observed unbecoming activities, significant evidence that showed me that there had been a coordinated attack against me and my party, I gave a call to the same CSIS contact I had. They came to my campaign office, and we had a meeting.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

When would that have taken place, approximately?

[Kenny Chiu]

It would have been in September 2021.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

How long was that before the election?

[Kenny Chiu]

It would have been 10 days, maybe two weeks, maximum.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Thank you for that.

You heard nothing back, and as far as you know, no further action was taken by the critical election incident public protocol.

[Kenny Chiu]

Negative—I did not hear anything.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

You said, with respect to this government, that there is an inexplicably action-free policy when it comes to countering Beijing's interference. Can you elaborate upon that?

[Kenny Chiu]

The foreign interference started by the Beijing authority is not something new. We know, for example, of Huseyin Celil being kidnapped by the Uzbek police, per directions by the CCP, followed in 2014 by Kevin and Julia Garratt, and the hostage diplomacy that was involved. Then there were the two Michaels. These were things that were happening to Canadians overseas, perhaps. At the same time, we also know that for years, CSIS, under Dick Fadden, for example—

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Mr. Chiu, I apologize for interrupting, but—as you can appreciate, as a former member of Parliament yourself—my time is very limited.

I'll put it to you this way: Do you believe the election integrity defence infrastructure this government has established is adequate to deal with Beijing's foreign interference tactics?

[Kenny Chiu]

I don't know about adequate, but I surely do not think it's been effective.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

You would submit that it was not effective in your riding, obviously.

[Kenny Chiu]

It was not effective in my riding or in a couple of other ridings I've been paying attention to, sir.