Early meetings with associate assistant deputy minister Sébastien Aubertin-Giguère regarding the legislation were promising.
We expected a commissioner to be appointed rapidly via an order in council to begin the work of interpretation and implementation. We thought this would happen in the fall of 2024. Public Safety assured us that the registry would be operational by June 2025, a year after the law was passed unanimously in the House of Commons.
Instead, no commissioner was named in the fall of 2024. A year later, in August 2025, the Minister of Public Safety indicated that an appointment would be announced in September. That didn't happen either. We're now hearing that an appointment may occur before Parliament's winter break.
Recent briefings by Public Safety suggest a troubling shift. The commissioner may not have the kind of independence from the minister described in the legislation, Bill C-70, that would make it fully effective. We fear that the government will avoid making the strong senior appointment this role demands. I hope I'm proven wrong about that.
For the coalitions I work with, these unexplained delays feel like cynical stakeholder management rather than sincere consultation with Canadian Chinese and other stakeholders. There is growing sentiment in these groups and in the Chinese Canadian community in general that the government is cavalier about the impact of foreign interference on diaspora communities. The concern is that institutional resistance—or murky forces within the establishment—is stalling the registry. It appears that some current and former members of Canada's political elite fear transparency, lest it expose how they've been induced to serve a foreign state's agenda against the interests of Canada.