Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak about our government's record when dealing with foreign interference. However, I want to start with where the member seemingly left off.
He asked how long it would take for the U.S. or China to react to these things. I am surprised that he would suggest in the House that we should follow the lead of the Chinese government in how it handles things, whether it is foreign interference or the rules of law and order in its country. We will not take lessons from the Chinese government on that. Instead, we will follow the rule of law in this country as parliamentarians.
As we have heard throughout the debate today, when it comes to illegal police stations, it is absolutely unequivocal that they need to be shut down. However, the suggestion that it is the federal government that polices them in this country shows how naive the member opposite is in terms of the role of the RCMP. I have every bit of faith and trust that the RCMP will do the right things to ensure not only that any illegal police stations that are open will be shut down, but that any additional police stations would be shut down as well. The suggestion that the police require this House to tell them to enforce the law is frankly insulting to our very capable RCMP members.
When it comes to foreign interference, it is not a new phenomenon. It is not unique to Canada. In fact, we have seen many examples of it around the world. The member opposite raised the issue of Australia. We also saw very public cases in the U.S. in the 2016 presidential election, as well as in France, Australia and New Zealand. We hear often of incidents in Estonia of foreign interference by the Russian government.
This is not new. In fact, it was the 2019 NSICOP report in this very House that raised issues of foreign interference and the targeting of MPs. As I have said in the House time and time again, reports are tabled in the House, and even though the suggestion is made that the government somehow never took this seriously and never addressed it, it was in those very reports that all members of the House had access to. It was actually our government, right from the beginning, that took serious action on foreign interference by creating NSICOP and the oversight body NSIRA. We are also moving ahead with a foreign agent registry.
We continue to take serious action on this. If the member opposite thinks there is a silver bullet to solve foreign interference, I would like to inform him that foreign interference is always going to be a threat that all governments must take incredibly seriously. We must be diligent. The forms that foreign interference takes may be changing. All governments and all parliamentarians need to be very aware of that, and all Canadians need to be able to trust the democratic institutions in this country. All governments must take this extremely seriously and continue to combat it.