Debates of Nov. 6th, 2023

(Return tabled)

Question No.1739—

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

With regard to Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) and the Critical Injury Benefit (CIB): (a) how many times and to how many individuals has the CIB been granted; (b) what is the breakdown of (a) by type of injury; (c) how many times has the CIB been granted solely for post-traumatic stress disorder or other mental health conditions; (d) are file numbers attached to each instance where the CIB has been granted for mental health conditions, and, if not, why not; (e) on what date did veterans with mental health conditions become eligible to apply for the CIB; (f) what is the web address for the CIB application that is available for the public to download; (g) where is the CIB application available on the My VAC Account portal for veterans; (h) does VAC plan to update the CIB application form for veterans applying solely for injuries to mental health, and, if so, when will such changes be implemented; and (i) are the Veterans Review and Appeal Board decisions related to the CIB available for the public to review, and, if so, how does the public access them?

(Return tabled)

Question No.1741—

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

With regard to policies, directives, standards and guidelines enforced by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat concerning people management, broken down by department or agency: (a) on what date was the last staffing review completed and presented to the deputy minister and senior managers; (b) what were the conclusions of the last staffing review, including the (i) number of vacancies, (ii) future staffing needs of the department, (iii) ability to fill existing and future job vacancies; (c) did the department hire third-party management firms to provide recommendations on people management; and (d) what are the details of all contracts with management firms in (c), including the (i) name of the company contracted, (ii) value of the contract, (iii) expected deliverables, (iv) titles of the final the reports, summaries, or recommendation lists, (v) deadlines?

(Return tabled)

Questions Passed as Orders for Returns

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Speaker, I would ask that all remaining questions be allowed to stand at this time.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Is it agreed?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

The House resumed consideration of Bill C-34, An Act to amend the Investment Canada Act, as reported (with amendment) from the committee, and of the motions in Group No. 1.

National Security Review of Investments Modernization Act

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today to speak in support of Bill C-34, An Act to amend the Investment Canada Act.

This bill would improve our ability to respond to changing circumstances that affect Canada's economic well-being and to remain vigilant in upholding our national security. More specifically, I want to focus on how our government's efforts to modernize the Investment Canada Act would help protect the intangible assets of Canadian businesses, which are the cornerstone of economic growth in a 21st-century economy.

As all members are fully aware, intangible assets, such as intellectual property, trade secrets and data, are of immense importance to our economic vitality and prosperity. As such, our country and other open economies are increasingly being targeted by hostile actors, which pose a threat to our national security, continued economic well-being and prosperity.

Consequently, our government is taking timely action to respond to evolving threats to our economic well-being and national security. Foreign investment certainly fuels innovation and assists businesses to succeed and grow. However, I want to emphasize that we should not compromise when safeguarding Canada's economic interests. As members will note, we should be laser-focused on striking the right balance between attracting foreign investment to help Canadian businesses grow and remaining mindful of the need to protect our intangible assets and intellectual property.

Highly innovative Canadian companies are at the forefront of developing new technologies, such as quantum computing, biotechnology, medical devices and innovative clean energy. Attracting investments to actualize innovation is complex and challenging, yet the safety and protection of Canadians is our government's number one priority. Canada must have a robust and flexible tool kit to protect Canada's interests from national security threats, which come in many forms.

We heard from multiple witnesses on this topic in the context of hearings arranged by the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology. Those witnesses shared their expertise to highlight that hostile state and non-state actors are increasingly pursuing strategies to acquire goods, technologies and intellectual property for uses that are incompatible with our national interest and economic outlook.

We also heard witnesses signal how foreign investment can be a conduit for foreign influence activities that seek to weaken our long-term economic prosperity. Around the world, foreign investment regimes are getting finetuned to better incorporate national security considerations. Our international partners are taking action to respond to shifting technological and geopolitical threats by amending their investment screening regimes.

The U.S. overhauled its foreign direct investment laws in 2018 by adding new types of transactions to government review. For the first time ever, the U.S. also mandated notifications in transactions involving critical technologies. These regulations came into effect in February 2020.

Similarly, Australia updated its regime in January 2021 to grant its government the discretion to require mandatory notification for transactions with a national security dimension. The same can be said for the United Kingdom, which introduced a new stand-alone regime for national security and investments in January 2021.

The U.K. established a mandatory obligation to secure clearance for transactions where control of a business was acquired in 17 sensitive sectors, to be secured before the transaction is completed. The U.K. also introduced legislation that allows the government to impose interim orders while the review is being conducted.

I reference such changes in the U.S., Australia and the U.K. to make a simple point: Canada's national security review authorities under the ICA have been in place since 2009. Quite often, changes introduced by our allies are meant to ensure that they catch up to where we already are. Given our track record, Bill C-34 is the latest in a series of actions our government is taking to make our regime more robust, responsive and flexible.

I would remind members that in March 2021 we updated the national security guidelines to advise that investments involving sensitive personal data, sensitive technologies and critical minerals, as well as investments by state-owned or state-influenced investors, would face enhanced security. The next step came in 2022 when we issued a new policy for review of foreign investments originating from Russia.

In 2022, we also introduced a new voluntary filing mechanism for investors intending to obtain greater regulatory certainty with the same statutory deadlines as a mandatory filing. In addition, we now have five years to review and adopt measures regarding an investment in the absence of a voluntary filing.

As members can see, Bill C-34 is just the latest effort to ensure Canada's foreign investment review regime represents the gold standard. Fundamentally, our government believes that an effective investment review regime must adapt to changing world dynamics and business practices. To respond to the evolving and accelerating threat environment, now is the right time to modernize key aspects of the ICA.

Bill C-34 would better align Canada with our international partners and allies. One of the ways our regime would align more closely with allies includes introducing the new requirement for prior notification of certain investments. This particular amendment would ensure that Canada has greater oversight over investments in certain sensitive sectors, especially when they give investors material access to assets and non-public technical information, such as cutting-edge intellectual property and trade secrets, once the investment is finalized. It would enable the government to prevent potentially irreparable damage. Investors would have to provide notice of the transaction within the timelines specified in the regulations.

A second important change is that it would provide our government the authority to impose interim conditions on an investment during the course of a national security review to prevent potential national security injury taking place during the time the review is being conducted. Another amendment would allow Canada to share case-specific information with international allies to support national security assessments.

Finally, the ICA includes a provision to allow for closed material proceedings. As such, the act would introduce new rules that would allow for more effective judicial review of national review decisions by allowing the use of sensitive information, while also protecting such commercially sensitive information from disclosure. Ultimately, these significant amendments would ensure that Canada's tool kit evolves and adapts to the changing global threat landscape.

It is for these reasons that I believe the House should support this bill and these new amendments. Where national security is concerned, we should never hesitate to take decisive action.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Madam Speaker, the member spoke about some of our allies. He spoke about Australia and the U.K. and how they are moving toward our system of examination of these matters on an international basis.

Does he have any information whether those two very important allies actually have a process where one minister determines whether one gets past a security review in those countries? Frankly, that is the worst part of this bill. Can he comment on that, please?

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Madam Speaker, as the member is fully aware, I did make reference to three countries but the purpose of those references was to say that our regulations are to be fine-tuned every so often. The reason for that, as I tried to emphasize in my comments, is that we face a world that has a changing global threat landscape.

In this particular case there are a few aspects of this bill that would require that we draw on the expertise of not just one minister but several departments. However, that is a good thing because we need to make sure that the regime we currently have in place is robust and flexible and will allow our authorities to thoroughly protect Canadians.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Madam Speaker, foreign investment has generally been based on the size of the transaction and/or the sector in the transaction. It has now come to the point where size or sector does not actually matter, in terms of security review and the sensitivities involved. Small companies can create security difficulties for Canada. Sectors one would never have thought of can create difficulties for Canada, particularly dual-use sectors.

I am interested in the hon. member's comments as to whether this bill addresses this dramatic change in what should be available to or reviewed by the Canadian authorities.

[Ali Ehsassi, Liberal, Willowdale, ON]

Madam Speaker, yes, my hon. colleague has rightly emphasized that our regime, as a general rule, has thresholds in place that allow us to screen investments coming in. In other instances, it is sectoral because there are various sectors of the economy that are vulnerable to falling into the wrong hands, if you will.

These have been ongoing changes. I made reference to changes that we made in 2021 and 2022. This does not mean that if we bring in some of these new provisions, they are necessarily replacing all of the old safeguards that were there previously.

Our intention has always been to have the gold standard when it comes to screening investments coming in. This will ensure that we will continue to lead the way in having a good, robust system in place, which does evolve as security threats around the world evolve.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Madam Speaker, it is always a privilege to rise in the House.

Before I really dive into my speech on Bill C-34, I just want to acknowledge Marilyn Bouw, the president of the Springfield Agricultural Society, for hosting my wife and me at their annual banquet. She is a tremendous advocate and supporter of agricultural communities in her riding of Springfield and broader.

I also want to mention Mayor Myron Dyck from Niverville, Manitoba, who also hosted my wife and me this weekend, together with his wife Shari, at the Niverville Heritage Centre annual fundraising banquet. The Niverville Heritage Centre does a tremendous amount of good work in the community, especially supporting our vulnerable seniors.

I thank Niverville Heritage Centre very much.

The interesting thing about what came up this past weekend at both of those events was the issue of the carbon tax. Folks at both venues talked to me about the carbon tax vote that we had here earlier in the House today. They said, “How is it going to go, Mr. Falk? Is this a confidence vote? Will this actually bring us into an election?”

We know that the Liberals want to quadruple the carbon tax and we know that, already, Canadians right across the country are experiencing significant increases to the cost of living and affordability is top of mind for almost all Canadians.

They asked me—

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I am struggling to find any kind of link between what the member is talking about and the bill that is before the House right now. We have had a number of opportunities to discuss the subject that he is trying to discuss but, right now, we are talking about this bill.

Perhaps you could encourage him to get back to the subject at hand.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

There is a little flexibility during the speeches, of course. I remind members who are getting up to speak on bills before the House that it needs to be relevant to the bill. They should mention either the bill or what is in the bill.

The hon. member for Provencher.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Madam Speaker, that is very good advice. I was paving the pathway to this bill on how this carbon tax is negatively impacting investment in Canada.

The Liberals today had an opportunity to reduce the cost of living for Canadians from coast to coast to coast and failed to do that. They were joined by the Bloc. The Bloc members had an opportunity to speak for Quebeckers to make sure their cost of living was also being reduced and they failed to do that.

The members for Winnipeg North, Winnipeg South, Winnipeg South Centre, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, who are Liberal members, could have reduced the cost of home heating for their constituents, but voted against this motion to expand the carbon tax pause to all Canadians. It is very disappointing that their constituents cannot even count on them to represent them adequately here in the House.

Let me now dive headlong into my speech and carry on with that.

We have seen before where the current government subjects a bill to being discussed, even this critical one here, and this is something we should have seen long ago. It requires legislation of course on the whole issue of Invest in Canada, but this legislation presented by the government lands so far from what is needed, so far from the reality of the problem that it seeks to address, that it is really difficult to see a common-sense solution here. This is the kind of stuff we continually get from the Liberals. We see this on their approach to the environment, immigration, the economy, guns, drugs and the list goes on.

There is a common series of steps the Liberals go through when they encounter these various problems. First, they deny there is a problem. Once that stops working for them, then they start to blame the Conservatives. Then they start blaming Canadians. Finally, when they run of out people to blame, once the PM's wizards and the PMO finally recognize that something needs to be done before even the CBC starts dumping on them, then they put something like this forward. However, it takes all of those things to happen before the Liberal government takes steps to address real issues. When they do finally present something, it is unremarkable, as members will see later in my speech.

For years, the Communist dictatorship of Beijing has been taking advantage of Canadians, of our weak acquisition laws, Canadian industry and our proprietary technology. Why is that? Part of it seems to be the bizarre fascination that the Prime Minister has with China. We all remember his comment about admiring Beijing's basic dictatorship, though at the time few thought he was naive enough to believe that and throw open the doors to Beijing, but it turns out that he actually has that fascination.

When the former environment minister visited China in 2018, she too gushed over China's leadership on climate change and its ability to “scale like no other country”. In her address to Boston's Northeastern University this past May, the Deputy Prime Minister “said the fundamental question of our time is: 'Does capitalist democracy still work?'” I think it would be better if the minister were here working for Canadians, but that is what she said.

She stated:

That is the question being posed around kitchen tables, in my country and this one, as parents wonder if our children can count on capitalist democracy’s essential promise of a future more prosperous than our present.

These comments, of course, raise the spectre of what she considers a viable alternative. That would be China's basic dictatorship perhaps. To read between the lines, her thought process seems to be that Canada's current economic woes are not the result of her government's incompetent management, but rather the fault of capitalism and democracy.

As one journalist recently noted, if we are talking about what passes for capitalism and democracy in Justin Trudeau's Canada, not unlike those of China, where capitalism has come to be characterized by close—

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. This is sometimes what happens when members are just reading speeches that are given to them that are written by staffers who perhaps do not know the rules of the House, but the member just said the Prime Minister's name in the context of it being “the [Prime Minister]'s Canada”.

Perhaps the member should inform those who are writing his speeches how the rules of the House work so that this does not happen again.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I am sure the hon. member cannot prove for sure who has written the speech.

The hon. member mentioned the Prime Minister's name. I would ask him to please be careful and ensure that he is not mentioning the name of parliamentarians who sit in the House. I know that does slip from time to time and I think it is done on both sides of the House.

[Greg McLean, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I would ask that you ask the member for Kingston and the Islands to withdraw his comment.

I know it is the practice on one side of the House to just read canned speeches, but I know this member, and I know he wrote that speech. I know he writes all his speeches, just as most of our members do.

I would ask the Speaker to kindly ask him to withdraw that comment, which was meant to put down one of my colleagues on this side of the House.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I have indicated that hon. members should be careful with what they put in their speeches, and they should also be careful when saying whether somebody has done something or has not done something.

I am not sure if the hon. deputy government House leader would like to rise to apologize for that. I understand he is not willing to do so.

I would ask all members to please be careful as it causes disorder in the House, which is not the way we want to function here.

The hon. member for Provencher.

[Ted Falk, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Madam Speaker, to carry on, in a so-called capitalist system where the Prime Minister picks the winners and the losers and stacks the deck to ensure a select few friends get rich while everyone else is pushed to become reliant on government for everything from housing to basic income, the general trend, and I believe the endgame of the government, will inevitably collapse.

Likewise, so would a democracy that has been left unprotected and consistently undermined by the actions of the Prime Minister and his friends in Beijing. Beijing had spies, scientists with ties to China's bioweapons program, in our National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, which is one of our most secure facilities. Now, they are nowhere to be found.

The Prime Minister took the former Speaker of the House, the person who sat in Madam Speaker's chair, to court and sued that person to prevent the truth about what was happening at the Winnipeg National Microbiology Lab with those Chinese spies from coming out.

There is hacking and espionage against Canadian infrastructure, academia and industry. The list goes on and on. It is always China. What has the government done so far? In eight years, what has the Liberal government done? It has done nothing up until today, unless of course we include cash for access with Chinese billionaires and donations to the Trudeau Foundation.

However, now the Liberals have a plan, which is Bill C-34. What is the solution government members have put forward? Are they proposing to ban Communist Chinese acquisitions of Canadian companies or to take China to the World Trade Organization? Would they expel Beijing-run spies and state police from Canada? No, they would not. Their solution is more government, more bureaucracy and specifically for more power concentrated in the minister. This would not be the Minister of Public Safety or the Minister of National Defence, but with the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry. It is bizarre. One cannot make this stuff up.

In almost case with the government, it is the same minister who created the problem tasked with fixing the problem. In this case, we have the minister of industry, who I actually like. I wish him all the best in his leadership bid. In 2017, before his time, the minister of industry failed to request a full national security review of the acquisition of B.C.-based Norsat International and its subsidiary Sinclair Technologies by Hytera Communications, which is owned by the People's Republic of China.

Then, in December of 2022, under the former public safety minister, the RCMP awarded a contract to supply sensitive hardware for its communication systems to Sinclair Technologies, which was then owned by a Beijing company and major supporter to China's public security ministry. Then it was revealed, also in December of 2022, that since 2017, the CBSA had also been using communications equipment and technology from Hytera Communications.

Hytera has been charged with 21 counts of espionage in the United States and has been banned by President Biden from doing business in the U.S., but it has not been banned here in Canada, not under the Liberal government. How did the minister respond to these acquisitions? He thought it was cool.

Let us look at another example. In March 2021, the minister updated and enhanced guidelines for national security reviews for transactions involving critical minerals and state-owned enterprises, but in January 2022, he failed to follow his own guidelines when he fast-tracked the takeover of Canadian lithium company Neo Lithium Corp by, once again, Chinese state-owned Zijin Mining Group, without a national security review taking place.

Then, in November of 2022, the minister ordered three Chinese companies to divest their ownership of three critical mineral firms, but guess who he forgot to mention? It was Neo Lithium. The list goes on.

I am not sure what is more astounding: that it is always China with the Liberal government or that the minister can put forward this legislation with a straight face. How can he expect the House or Canadians to trust him to solve this problem when his own lack of oversight has been so instrumental in creating the problem?

As I wrap up, I will say that the member for Kingston and the Islands always asks whether there is nothing positive in the legislation, and if we cannot say one positive thing. Even he needs reassurance that the Liberals are not completely dropping the ball.

Therefore, I am happy to inform him and his—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

The member's time is up. We will come to questions and comments in a moment, and he will be able to add his additional comments during that time.

Order. It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Spadina—Fort York, Public Safety; the hon. member for Battle River—Crowfoot, Carbon Pricing; the hon. member for Nunavut, Indigenous Affairs.

[Chad Collins, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Madam Speaker, that was interesting to listen to. There was some real revisionist history there. The member opposite referenced political relationships with dictators, and I am going to pick up on that.

It is no secret that the member for Carleton has hitched his political wagon to former president Trump. We know of former president Trump's relationship with Putin and his affinity for the government in Russia, and we know that the member for Carleton has been eerily silent on his support for Ukraine.

Is that an indication of his lack of support? Can we chalk up the member's silence on his support for Ukraine to his relationship with former president Trump and, by extension, his relationship with Putin? Can the member explain that and connect the dots for us when it comes to relationships with dictators?