Madam Chair, thank you for the invitation to come today.
The Chinese Communist Party's ultimate goal is to constrain Canada's capacity to make sovereign decisions. Foreign interference is fundamentally a matter of Canadian sovereignty. Too many Canadians and MPs are taking democracy for granted. Instead, a government that claims to have a values-based foreign policy should be defending and protecting Canadian democracy and freedoms and our way of life.
Subversion by Beijing is the single greatest threat to Canada's sovereignty and democratic way of life today. Canada needs a coherent deterrence strategy that imposes cumulative costs on hostile state actors.
One, lower the threshold for investigations by following the lead of our allies and establish, in law, clear thresholds for foreign interference, as well as punitive consequences.
Two, delineate foreign interference, subversion and subterfuge. When a foreign hostile actor intentionally, deliberately and repeatedly violates Canadian law and resorts to prima facie illegal and criminal conduct, that amounts to subversion and subterfuge.
Three, foreign interference in Canada appears to be concentrated in large metropolitan areas, so task the integrated national security enforcement teams, which have already proven themselves effective against terrorism, with foreign interference investigations and resource them accordingly. At a minimum, activities directed against MP Chong, his family and, ostensibly, other MPs amount to conspiracy and harassment, which are Criminal Code offences and thus readily meet even the exceptionally high threshold for the expulsion of diplomats the Prime Minister has laid out.
Four, in effect, the CCP's United Front Work Department behaves like a state-sponsored transnational organized criminal syndicate, so let's treat it as such and shut down these thugs and their club of secret police stations.
Five, the UFWD is enabled by China having the second-largest foreign diplomatic service in Canada. Why is Canada accrediting so many more Chinese diplomats than Canadian diplomats are accredited in China?
Six, explicitly restore CSIS's subversion mandate, which was abandoned after the Cold War.
Seven, having just retasked NSICOP with yet another study, for the purpose of this one study only, the Prime Minister could opt to turn NSICOP from a committee of parliamentarians into a parliamentary committee, while giving Canadians public assurance that there would be no executive interference in the study. That would give NSICOP, rather than the political executive of the day, latitude to decide on the content and timing of matters it feels would be in the national interest to report to Parliament.
Eight, build a cross-party agreement on an integrated national security strategy the way some of Canada's key allies have long done.
Nine, now that it appears the Prime Minister may have misled Parliament, which is a very serious matter in a Westminster constitutional democracy, there is yet more reason for an independent public inquiry.
Canada needs to draw red lines and stand up to bad actors by sending a cordial yet clear message that breaking Canadian law to constrain Canadian sovereign decision-making is unacceptable and will have real consequences.
Thank you.