Procedure and House Affairs Committee on May 11th, 2023

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

Mr. Cooper, open-source documentation raising concerns about this donation dates back to 2016, so we have had ample time to have an honest discussion, which I think people are not prepared to have. It is also why people are resisting a foreign agent registry, because of the number of Canadian elites who would get ensnared in such a registry.

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

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

You have 24 seconds.

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

Mr. Leuprecht, I'll allow you to use the balance of your time to add anything you wish.

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

These are very serious matters in a parliamentary democracy. There are many options available to the government today if it wants to show that it is serious about defending Canadian democracy. We need to decide: Are we standing with the tyrants or are we standing up for Canadian democracy?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

Mrs. Romanado, you have six minutes.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for being with us today.

My first question is for Professor Leuprecht.

The last panel we heard from had some pretty powerful testimony with respect to foreign interference and the fact that it's been going on for decades. I'm not sure if you were watching, but in that last panel we heard about the case of a Chinese state-run agency, Xinhua, asking a journalist to spy on the former prime minister. A reporter at that same news agency was involved in a scandal with the parliamentary secretary to foreign affairs minister John Baird, Bob Dechert, in an apparent honeytrap operation.

How concerning is it that this was all so close to an important ministry like foreign affairs?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

Other open-source evidence is problematic with regard to John Baird in terms of financial matters and Jean Charest, which has been documented, as well as the former ambassador and cabinet minister Mr. McCallum.

We can see from the evidence you have provided that, if we triangulate that, there are multiple attempts to target the same individuals in different fashions. This effectively correlates with the types of operations that have been documented against sitting parliamentarians today.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Professor Leuprecht, I'm going to follow up on what you just mentioned in terms of financial matters. Could you confirm that Mr. Baird went to work for a Chinese billionaire after he resigned from the foreign affairs post? Is that something you think should be addressed in our legislative recommendations?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

The matter of concern is public record. It shows that the Canadian framework is not sufficiently robust to lay out clear rules as to what is and is not acceptable, both while in office and when out of office.

Rather than looking back, the valuable work the committee can do is to make sure that we lay out much clearer rules and lay out clear penalties for violating those rules, whether they're being violated by Canadians, by foreigners or by accredited diplomats in Canada.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Further to that, on our previous panel Mr. Juneau-Katsuya said that Prime Minister Stephen Harper became “soft” on China at the end of his mandate due to agents of influence getting to him. What would you make of that assessment?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

As I testified to before the Canada-China committee, I believe elite capture is a significant challenge. This is elite capture by China—both by pecuniary interests and by companies and law firms that are related to elite capture. As I have just stated, I believe this is the major reason for significant resistance and active lobbying against the foreign agent registry that has been proposed.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Thank you very much.

My next question is for Professor Juneau. In full disclosure, we both have the same alma mater, which is McGill University.

Professor Juneau, you mentioned a bit about the overclassification of classified information. Can you elaborate on that a bit ? Also, can you provide me with any feedback with respect to the same questions that I asked the previous witness?

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

On the issue of overclassification, I mentioned it very quickly in passing, simply because, as part of broader efforts for the intelligence and national security community to be more transparent on the issue of foreign interference and when dealing with other threats—economic espionage, disinformation and others—overclassification is an obstacle to the sharing of information.

I find—and I think it's a view shared by quite a number of observers, former ones too—that a lot of information within government and within the intelligence community is classified while it could easily not be classified, or it should be classified but it is classified at too high a level. That makes efforts to share information with Canadians generally speaking, with parliamentarians in many cases, including as we've seen in the news in the last few days, and with civil society much more difficult.

As part of what I was trying to suggest—having a broader, much more significant push to be more transparent to help us better counter foreign interference—that is going to be a major obstacle. It is the result of a culture in the national security community that remains very insular, very protective, and where the incentive structure very much favours overclassification. You can be penalized for not classifying information, but you can't be penalized for overclassifying information. It's very easy for me to come here and say it's a problem. In practice, I fully acknowledge that solutions are not easy, but they are essential.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Thank you so much.

I have one last question for Professor Leuprecht. Do you think then minister Baird made any decisions at Foreign Affairs that lead you to believe there was some level of elite capture?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

I'm afraid there isn't sufficient information in the public domain to be able to draw conclusions, but concerns about the relationship and consequences in terms of the extradition of one individual, for instance, are a matter of public record.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

Ms. Normandin, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I'd also like to thank all the witnesses.

Professor Leuprecht, I'll begin with you, but Mr. Juneau should feel free to comment if he wishes.

You spoke about the role of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians. I'd like to return to that briefly, because it was touted as a panacea that could obviate the need for an independent public inquiry. You also reminded us that the committee doesn't report to Parliament and that there are other problems, like the trouble it has in obtaining information from the Privy Council Office, which makes it very difficult for it to do its investigative work.

What do you think about getting this committee of parliamentarians the information it needs to do its work properly?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

Ms. Normandin, You've just raised a very important question.

I wrote an entire book about that, called Intelligence as Democratic Statecraft, which has a chapter on exactly how Canada operates, and the positive and negative aspects of the existing system.

In Canada, the sharing of information is definitely a problem. As I point out in my book, we need to place more trust in our parliamentarians. They know precisely how to use the intelligence and information available to them. They are in a very good position to decide what should be done with the information and how to communicate their conclusions to the general public.

I understand the reluctance about the structure of the committee on the one hand, and the sharing of intelligence on the other. However, the evidence obtained from other parliamentary partners, like the United Kingdom and Australia, would not lead to the current government's conclusion that you can't really trust parliamentarians. The very opposite is the case.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Professor Leuprecht.

Professor Juneau, I'd like to look more deeply into the matter of declassifying information and the role of the media. One of the things we were told was that the media had been aware of foreign interference in the past, but that they weren't interested in it.

With more information, and more data being declassified and made available, might the media take more of an interest in what is going on, and do a better job of informing the general public so that they could understand what's happening? Have we misjudged the role of the media in transmitting information.

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

Thank you.

I'm going to return to your previous question about the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, the NSICOP. I'm in complete agreement with the suggestion made by my colleague, Professor Leuprecht, about transforming it from a committee of parliamentarians into a parliamentary committee.

But it's important to point out that on the basis of information resulting from my research on a number of projects, there is no evidence of inappropriate political interference in the redaction of classified NSICOP reports before they are released. That needs to be said. The redaction is done at the senior management level of the bureaucracy. Based on available information—I've done some research on this for various projects—there is no evidence of inappropriate interference.

The NSICOP reports have been very good so far. I've read them all and find them very substantive. The problem is not the committee itself, but rather the fact that many of its reports have been ignored or neglected by the government. A partial solution could be a procedure requiring the government to respond to all the committee's reports, which is not currently being done. This requirement would draw attention to the reports and put some pressure on civil society, the opposition parties, and the media to discuss them at greater length.

I think you're right to focus on the media issue. As I said in my earlier presentation, the national security community has not been transparent enough with the media, whether in terms of technical briefings, which often don't say much, or in responses to media inquiries. When journalists contact someone at a minister's office or someone in the public service, it often takes much too long to get a reply, which in any event usually contains more doublespeak than information.

And yet the media play an absolutely essential role in transmitting information to Canadians, whether on national security or other areas. We really are not doing enough about this. If we truly want to be more transparent in order to provide better information to communities like the Chinese Canadian, Iranian-Canadian or Indo-Canadian diaspora about a threat and what might be done to counter it, then the media need a lot more information and they are not really getting it at this point.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you. I don't have very much time left, but I'll give it a try.

It's been suggested that we set up an independent body to investigate foreign interference, which would not report to the Minister of Public Safety and would be separate from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Just briefly, do you think this is worth pursuing?

[Dr. Thomas Juneau]

I'm not convinced, but I could be. The details of the proposal would have to be looked at for a clearer picture. I don't think that establishing yet another new agency is necessarily the solution. I would tend to say that the solution lies more with better tools and more resources, in addition to a clearer legislative mandate for the existing organizations.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

What do you think, Professor Leuprecht?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

As I mentioned in my testimony, I would remind you that there are already teams integrated into national security in all of Canada's major cities. They've dealt effectively with counterterrorism and are doing a good job on their investigations. They could be provided with the resources and mandate needed to carry out an investigation into foreign interference. The problem is that because we have not yet clearly defined what constitutes foreign interference, it would be difficult at this time for any of these agencies to conduct such an investigation.