Public Safety committee  In terms of information sharing and being able to communicate more with universities in Canada, for example, the provisions in Bill C‑70 would really go further to help us prevent situations like that. The same is true of exchanges with our leading scientists.

Public Safety committee  I'll take that question. Yes, of course they can act on it. This is why recently I offered to all parties to have a representative, in particular the leader, receive information so they can, for example, act during a by-election, act during a general election, manage their caucus and equip themselves to look at how they behave, what kind of events they are attending and what kind of relationships they are keeping.

Public Safety committee  Minister Virani explained the legislation we have for preventing that, and behind that legislation, there are some fundamental principles. Collecting information through intelligence processes is not a contradictory process, and the targets of those collections are not in a position to defend themselves.

Public Safety committee  One thing I can say is that there are a lot of mechanisms to reduce the threat. For example, CSIS can do a threat reduction measure, a defence briefing. A leader can manage his or her caucus. We can do a démarche for foreign actors. We can name what we call a PNG, persona non grata, for a consulate.

Canada-China Relations committee  I have, maybe, one thing. As I said, yes, in retrospect, we can always say that things could have been faster. However, at the beginning, it was not even clear that it was a national security issue. It was more a case of lax administrative procedures. It took some time—after the fact-finding, after the reference to CSIS—to identify that we were in front of national security.

Canada-China Relations committee  Mr. Chair, if I may, I'll respond to that. I have a couple of things here. The nature of research and scientists, their DNA, is that you need to share the result, that you need to work with others. This is how they work. When I say that a shift happened, it's that now they understand that the desire to put their results out there, to share their outcomes with others, comes with an important security component.

Canada-China Relations committee  I can't say. You have heard Minister LeBlanc and others say on a few occasions that they would like CSIS, for example, to have the necessary powers to share information with other levels of government.

Canada-China Relations committee  No, not at all. As I said earlier, it was not a refusal to disclose the documents. It was a refusal to do so in the forum that was presented. Unfortunately, for what I would call political reasons, the situation became very black and white: do it or don't do it. That is in addition to the fact that we were torn between having to respect your privilege as parliamentarians and having to obey the laws that you pass and that we are required to obey.

Canada-China Relations committee  Yes, and we also have to obey the laws that you pass. This is an absolutely fascinating legal debate for a lawyer, but unfortunately, it has not yet been resolved.

Canada-China Relations committee  As you know, I started that job in January of this year. I did have some bilaterals with some colleagues where we talked about different risks, whether it's the risk relative to artificial intelligence, securing our space or economic security. We also talked about different risks, but not specific to managing labs, for example.

Canada-China Relations committee  On AI?

Canada-China Relations committee  As you know, there is tremendous potential when it comes to AI, but also different risks relative to that—individual risk in terms of how you use AI, and organizational risk in terms of the potential of hacking systems in cyberspace. There's also a systemic risk or ultimate risk when we stop controlling the machine and the machine is controlling you.

Canada-China Relations committee  It's easy to say that we could have acted more quickly, but the important thing is that we are doing it now. I would like to draw your attention to something else. I really believe in the importance of raising awareness. There can be partners or employees who started working with the Government of Canada without being recruited by China, but who were recruited later on.

Canada-China Relations committee  There is, in fact, a list of organizations that Canada does not have a relationship with. For the time being, there is no agreement between the Winnipeg lab and the institute in China. That said, as I mentioned earlier, other international partners may have business relationships with the institute of virology.

Canada-China Relations committee  I was at the Department of Justice at the time, so I'll speak from that perspective. The goal was not to avoid sending the documents to parliamentarians, but rather, it was to send them to the authorities who could handle that kind of information. As we can see today, the information in the documents was extremely sensitive.