Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to echo the comments made by my colleague Ms. Dancho. They are very apt and disturbing.
Information was shared with a foreign media outlet, The Washington Post, before Canadians were made aware of the situation involving the allegations that a foreign government, in this case India, has been sponsoring acts of crime in our country, which is of concern to all Canadians as our sovereignty is impacted in this case.
I think that, if the allegations made by The Globe and Mail are true, then it illustrates a greater point that speaks to the subamendment my colleague Mr. MacGregor put forward. He talks about how the release of the names must only be done in accordance with national security. I'll say that, at all times in my original amendment, it's implied that we will not violate the safety of agents who are in the field in the release of any information.
However, with the addition of this subamendment, I have concerns. It's clear to me that we have a government that feels that it can leak information if it's to its own political benefit. Information gets shared with groups like The Washington Post. Information is being leaked, like the Prime Minister outrageously at the Hogue commission selectively saying that he has information related to Conservative parliamentarians. I think that people in the media and across the country have rightly denounced and criticized that as a blatant partisan act by the Prime Minister.
We know from security officials that foreign interference is a broad issue across this country. For the Prime Minister to try to weaponize information that he's privy to in a way that is vague really puts a cloud of suspicion over all members of Parliament. Frankly, I think it devolves this foreign interference debate into a partisan debate when it really doesn't need to be. We will call this out. We will hold this government accountable when they put their own partisan interests above the national security of our country.
We know that this is a Prime Minister who's facing an internal revolt. He's facing numerous pressures. He's attempting to distract in any way he can by outrageously using selective information curated solely to benefit himself politically and not to benefit the national security of our country.
I will note that this all could have been avoided. Our House leader, the Honourable Andrew Scheer.... In the wake of findings from the NSICOP report that there were members of Parliament who were compromised by foreign interference, Conservatives put forward a way that would respect our national security in a letter that was put forward to Parliament. It requested that the Hogue commission be given a broader set of powers and a broader mandate and receive the unredacted information needed in order to reveal, when possible, the names of members of Parliament or other parliamentarians, both current and former, who have been implicated in foreign interference.
I think it's only fair that those members of Parliament who are involved be notified about this. They're under a cloud of suspicion, and they need to have the ability to clear their names if they are innocent. Canadians need to be given a chance to, you know.... There will be an election by October 2025, guaranteed. Canadians need to know that the air needs to be cleared and that our Parliament is free from these serious allegations of foreign interference.
I'm sure that, if this Liberal government had its way, Canadians wouldn't even know that foreign interference was happening in this country. We saw the lengths that this government went to to hide this very serious information and the lengths it went to even to outright deny that foreign interference was happening.
In the case of Minister Blair, when he came to this committee in his role as Minister of Emergency Preparedness and answering for his tenure as Minister of Public Safety, he said they had received no evidence that there was foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 elections. This was the Minister of Public Safety saying this in 2022, and we now know, from the Hogue commission and from information what's been shared in the public space, that there was indeed foreign interference that affected at least eight ridings in the 2021 election.
I feel very personally about this, because one of those members of Parliament was a good friend, Kenny Chiu, in Richmond. His name was slandered, and it was found to have been done by agents of a foreign government that was using its arm in Canada and numerous assets in Canada to spread falsehoods that Mr. Chiu, a man of Chinese descent himself, was attempting to create a foreign agent registry that was going to list all Canadians of Chinese descent. It's a patently ridiculous, absurd and ludicrous idea, yet, as we've seen with foreign misinformation and disinformation campaigns, a lie can spread around the world before the truth has a chance to tie its shoes. Kenny Chiu was a victim of that.
There were a number of other Conservative MPs in particular who, to the benefit of Liberal MPs in all of these cases, coincidentally, lost their elections because of this foreign interference. If it had not been for leaks from our national security apparatus and if it had not been for the work of the Hogue commission and enterprising journalists like Sam Cooper, Canadians would have never known about this serious threat to our country's national security. They would have never known the depths and the extent to which foreign powers, be they numerous, are attempting to influence our country, intimidate politicians and intimidate diaspora communities in our country so they don't participate in politics or they vote out of fear instead of in their own self-interest.
To see that be allowed to happen.... I saw a journalist tweet on X the other day that the Canada of 2015 seems so quaint now after nine years of this Liberal government. Certainly, we can't rule out foreign interference prior to 2015; however, the extent of the foreign interference that we've seen in the last nine years proliferating under this Liberal government is shocking.
If you took somebody who was here in 2015 and they could travel forward in time and they woke up in 2024, they'd be shocked at what has happened to their country—what has happened to our country—where not just one country but multiple countries with different complicated layers of intrigue are actively interfering in our democratic system and in our public debate, yet we have a government that said it wasn't even happening just a few short years ago.
We had here, previous to this motion coming forward, a motion to explore the very serious issue of foreign interference in relation to the alleged threats of India threatening Canadian citizens, particularly citizens of the Sikh community. These are very serious allegations, and the fact that we're not studying that right now, I think, is problematic.
I understand that we're dealing with a motion here today related to clearances. We have a Prime Minister who has access to this top secret information and has chosen to weaponize it for his own partisan ends and has, having had this information, failed to act for nine years.
In the case of one serious allegation involving a former Liberal member of Parliament, the Prime Minister, who had been fully briefed on the issues related to that member of Parliament, stood up in the House and said that he looks forward to welcoming him back to caucus in the future. For the Prime Minister, with the knowledge that he has, to make a claim like that is absolutely shocking.
It's only because this information has not been transparent or has not been shared and has been basically kept, keeping Canadians completely in the dark, that this has been allowed to continue. The government has been able to get away with the selective release of national security information for the purpose of keeping Canadians in the dark about their members of Parliament.
The fact is that there's been lots of talk about the importance of getting these security clearances. However, it's also been noted quite effectively that even with these security clearances, there is basically nothing that any member of Parliament can do to act on this. It's been said earlier that the names can't be revealed.
If a leader of a party were to get clearance and receive information that one of their members was compromised by a foreign state, they couldn't kick that member out of caucus because, if there was a risk, as has been said, that the information about that member had been gathered clandestinely by a member of our intelligence or our allies' intelligence, then it could compromise them.
I don't know what people expect when the Prime Minister, who has had this information for years—he's had this information for as long as he's been Prime Minister—failed to act in numerous cases within his own party. He has not removed a single member from his caucus. There was a member who left caucus voluntarily, but the Prime Minister has failed to act on these issues.
I don't know how they can expect any other leader in this Parliament to be able to act on this information, especially when this information was ostensibly supposed to be shared with the chief of staff of the Conservatives. They're being told that it's on a need-to-know basis. Well, I think the chief of staff needs to know. I think certainly the chief of staff to the Prime Minister knows this information. I know the chief of staff of the Conservative Party to be a man of honour and a man of integrity. I think that's entirely suitable.
What we will not accept is a situation where our leader, who has been fighting the fight on foreign interference publicly in the House of Commons, would in any way be restricted in his ability to hold this Liberal government to account.
We have Conservatives who are members of the NSICOP committee. We have a chief of staff who has top secret security clearance. We have all the tools that the government says we should have at our disposal, yet what I see here from the NDP and the Liberals is just a blatant attempt to prevent the Leader of the Opposition from doing his constitutionally mandated job, which is to hold this government accountable for its failures. I think one of its chief failures is going to be remembered as its lack of action on foreign interference, which has allowed us to get to this point today.
With that, I'd like to get back to the very important debate that we're having about India. I was really sad to see that we didn't receive unanimous consent in the House yesterday. I heard a Liberal member deny consent for starting a committee to deal with this very important issue.
With that, I would like to move a motion to adjourn, and I'd like a recorded vote, please.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.