Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Feb. 3rd, 2026

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

In your opening remarks, Madam Drouin, you talked about mitigation, but my sense from dealing with this issue now for most of the past Parliament and this one, starting up in this conversation again, is that the organization, the task force and everybody are very good at detecting, but the countermeasures and the mitigation are never really fully understood, I think, by the Canadian public, other than basically our communicating with the public that something is happening.

Can you tell us, without exposing any tradecraft secrets, what countermeasures you're actually doing that Canadians are unaware of?

[Nathalie Drouin]

As I said, it's a multi-layered type of thing that we can do. We can do some diplomatic démarches, and my colleague from Global Affairs can talk about that. CSIS can do threat reduction measures. We can engage with a social media platform. We can talk to the candidate himself or herself. We can talk to the political party. We have a range of actions that can be taken in order to mitigate the threats.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

I don't mean to interrupt, but that sounds like communication but not a countermeasure. Can you explain to me how that would translate into a countermeasure? How would going to the embassy...actually, do you think that meeting would actually change any direction coming from the government in Beijing? I don't know if it would.

[Nathalie Drouin]

Maybe you want to talk about that, David.

[David Morrison]

In the wake of the Public Inquiry Into Foreign Interference and in the lead-up to the 2025 general election, we as the foreign ministry thought about what our role is here and what more we can do. On November 24, 2024, we called in the entire diplomatic corps. That had never been done. I personally sat on stage and talked through with all of the ambassadors—

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

I'm not disputing that you've made the effort. What I'm asking about is how you can measure the result, Mr. Morrison.

I only have five minutes. I want to get to the succinct heart of the matter.

[David Morrison]

A measure of the result is that in the after-action reports, you're not reading a lot about misbehaving diplomats. That's either because they got more clever—

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

Okay.

[David Morrison]

—and we didn't find out or they took to heart the three warnings that we gave: two in advance—

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

I have no clarity, and I don't think you do either—I think that's a fair assessment—as to which, if either, of those conditions might actually be true.

I'm not making any judgments here, but right now roughly 25% of Canadian citizens are foreign born. That means we have large diaspora communities in our country. If you take a look at the handful of ridings, nobody's disputing the outcome that the Liberals clearly won the election, but they did not get a majority. The difference between their getting a majority and having a hung parliament right now would be a few hundred votes.

My colleague Mr. Cooper already indicated that there are several million views just on one WeChat article alone, which doesn't appear to be interdicted. Canadians have a lot of questions about whether the needle can be moved using a foreign interference method or by foreign actors.

In the case of this particular Parliament, the difference between a majority parliament or being close to a majority parliament could have been determined by a few hundred voters. Are you completely confident that the results we have in the House of Commons are a true reflection of the will of the Canadian public without foreign interference?

[David Morrison]

Yes, I am.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Ponoka—Didsbury, AB]

I'm not sure you can say that with confidence, but I appreciate that.

One of the criticisms raised in the report was the high disclosure threshold. This was an area of concern in the last discussion, it's been an area of concern in the Hogue commission and it's a criticism raised in the report itself. It's akin to a smoke detector that has no alarm: It's very good at detecting the smoke but not very good at raising the alarm or broadcasting or saying anything.

What are you going to do to fix this notion that everybody seems to know there's a problem but nobody is really able to solve it?

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Answer very quickly.

[David Morrison]

Madame Drouin outlined in her opening remarks all of the new measures we took in advance of the 45th general election, including the very important measure of speaking out publicly on things that didn't meet the threshold but that we thought Canadians should still know about to help them make educated choices.

We have debated this issue of threshold. We have had after-action reports by several very prominent Canadians who have argued that the high threshold should be maintained but who have also said we should do more in the area of transparency and communications, and that's what we tried to do in advance of and during the election.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you so much.

We'll move to Mr. Wilkinson for five minutes, please.

[Jonathan Wilkinson, Liberal, North Vancouver—Capilano, BC]

Thank you to all the witnesses for appearing.

I will take it up a level. This body is relatively new and foreign interference has only emerged as a major issue in the last number of years.

How does the incident public protocol compare to similar mechanisms that other democratic countries have put into place? Are there international best practices we have looked at with respect to addressing foreign interference? I assume we are continuing to look at that as it evolves in other countries.

Maybe you can comment on that.

[Nathalie Drouin]

Thank you.

We have done some engagement with many democratic countries when it comes to monitoring democratic exercises. We are, here, very confident that we have the best-in-class system.

We can be inspired by other countries. They do sometimes have some mechanisms that are probably better than ours, but in terms of the overall system, we have the most comprehensive system in the world.

We have been told by both the U.K. and France that the fact we are going public during the election campaign is something they admire but they don't think that right now they will have that latitude.

We are being looked at. Minister MacKinnon, in his role regarding democratic institutions, is having a lot of engagement with other partners to talk about the system we have put in place.

We should be very proud. I'm not saying we have a perfect system. We are always ready to enhance it, but we should be very proud of the system we have put in place, all together.

[Tricia Geddes]

Maybe I'll just add that as we evolve, so too will others who are trying to take advantage of our system. We're in a constant learning mechanism. I would say that all three of us and our departments spend an inordinate amount of time, or perhaps a necessary amount of time, meeting with partners around the world to understand how the threats are evolving and how we can better protect ourselves. Some of the areas that I know people are concerned about in terms of social media amplification of fake information are the types of things that we continuously need to stay vigilant on.

I would agree with Madam Drouin's points. We are actually seen as one of the best in class when it comes to the system we put in place, but there's a lot more we can continue to do to improve. The acceleration and the change of threats are things we'll need to keep pace with and ideally get ahead of.

[Jonathan Wilkinson, Liberal, North Vancouver—Capilano, BC]

I'll move to a different topic. Commissioner Hogue took note of the fact that many Canadians don't necessarily understand that public servants are non-partisan. She made a recommendation that we add to the panel membership a distinguished Canadian in whom the public would perhaps have greater confidence. The clerk, I understand, did send a letter to all the political parties in March to try to achieve unanimity with respect to that recommendation.

To be honest with you, it seems to me to be a very reasonable recommendation that could enhance the credibility of the work of the group on the part of Canadians. That unanimity was not achieved, and I don't understand exactly why. Is that something we're going to revisit? It does seem like a very reasonable thing that could actually help.

[Nathalie Drouin]

Yes. I mean, it would be for the government to decide, but we all agree, as actual members of the panel, that having an external member sitting on the panel could be very good. In the Hogue report, she mentioned that she was not expecting this recommendation to be in place for the 45th election. We gave it our best effort to find a good individual, but as you said, we were not able to get consensus on the suggested representative.

[Jonathan Wilkinson, Liberal, North Vancouver—Capilano, BC]

People have asked a little bit about the thresholds. In the documents underpinning the work of the committee, the threshold with respect to public disclosure is relatively clear. What's not clear to me is the threshold to be achieved to share information with political parties or to take other actions. How do you determine what those thresholds are, and what are they?

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Give a very quick answer, please.

[Nathalie Drouin]

In terms of sharing information with a political party, to go back to a previous question, the threshold is low. Any information that can help potential victims of foreign interference to resist I think should be shared with the relevant parties. The threshold is very low.

This is except when we believe that the information we get is not credible, the source is not corroborated or things like that. If we believe that the information we are receiving is credible, even if it is not hitting our guidelines in terms of whether or not we should have communication with the public in general, we will share with the parties.

[The Chair, Liberal, Chris Bittle]

Thank you very much.

We will move on to Madame Normandin for five minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Drouin, I want to follow up on the question you were just asked about how the thresholds are set for communicating information to the political parties or the public.

You said that an independent group does the incident analysis. The idea is to highlight the connection to politics during the election. In terms of setting the actual threshold, do I understand correctly that it's done prior to the election?

Before you answer, I want to read you something Allen Sutherland said when he appeared before Judge Hogue. This is from a CBC article:

Sutherland said the threshold for informing Canadians was deliberately set very high because of the risk that such an alert could disrupt an election. Changes are being considered to allow the government to inform Canadians of lower-threshold events, he said.

Do I understand correctly that the threshold is set prior to the election and that it is partly left to the government's discretion?