Evidence of meeting #81 for Citizenship and Immigration in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was ircc.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal
Major-General Prévost, Major-General Smith, do you want to comment quickly?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal
Thank you.
Now we're going to go to the next round. We'll go to Mr. Redekopp for five minutes, please.
Mr. Redekopp, we're very strict with the time today.
Thank you.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
Okay. Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Major-General Prévost, you're on the cross-government committee to coordinate emergencies like Afghanistan or the more recent evacuation of Canadian citizens from Israel. Is that correct?
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
Okay.
We clearly saw political interference with the evacuation from Kabul. Evidence tabled at this committee by Liberal politicians showed a group chat with Liberal politicians and Liberal political operatives making plans around the evacuation, and they did so without proper security clearances.
Recently, when war broke out in the Middle East, it took a full week for the Canadian Armed Forces to get planes into Tel Aviv. Have you talked with the current chief of staff and chief of the defence staff to coordinate this better? You said before that you hadn't talked.
MGen Paul Prévost
Mr. Chair, I'm not going to answer the first part of the question as I'm not aware of the political interference that the member is referring to.
In the case of Israel, there are a lot of moving parts that go into organizing an evacuation of Canadian citizens. Some of the limitations that Canada has are that we don't have a global presence with our resources. We don't have a global presence through bases—
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
My time is very limited. I just want to know if you were speaking with the chief of the defence staff and the chief of staff on these issues.
MGen Paul Prévost
I advised the chief of the defence staff every day on our potential contributions to those options for the chief of the defence staff to recommend to the government.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
Was that in addition to the chief of staff of the minister as well?
MGen Paul Prévost
I informed the chief of staff of the minister of the actions that we were taking and some of the decisions that would need to be made by the minister in order to effect the evacuation of Canadians. That's correct.
Conservative
MGen Paul Prévost
No, it's never really a one-way conversation. My role is to advise the chief of the defence staff on the options that we can provide in order to bring Canadians home. The chief of the defence staff provides military advice to the government.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
What about with regard to the chief of staff of the minister?
MGen Paul Prévost
I inform the chief of staff of the minister that the chief of defence will provide military advice. We do have discussions on any of the files that the chief of defence will push to the minister for approval.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
The political interference we're talking about is the Marilou McPhedran case, where there were implications of fake documents and fake letters that were done.
Were there any changes that were done to mitigate and prevent that from happening again?
MGen Paul Prévost
I believe I've answered that question before. We were not involved and not aware of any facilitation letters being moved. As per normal process, the documentation that we send to the minister's office are appropriate Government of Canada communications letters sent by the chief of defence.
I was not aware of any letters being sent at that time.
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
Mr. Sajjan told this committee that when he was defence minister, he never read his emails. His quote was this: “I had no time then to be looking at emails.” He also said, “I'll be honest with you. I don't know...I did not have time to look at emails” and “I don't remember looking at my emails”.
As a general, do you use email in your job?
Liberal
MGen Paul Prévost
Mr. Chair, I obviously read my emails as the director of staff of the Canadian Armed Forces.
Conservative
Conservative
Brad Redekopp Conservative Saskatoon West, SK
If you had a superior or a subordinate who wasn't reading their emails and monitoring their emails during a crisis, would you consider that superior or subordinate either grossly incompetent or extremely negligent?
MGen Paul Prévost
I'm not too sure where the line of questioning is going here. I think everybody has email boxes and manages their email boxes as best they can.
Liberal