QUESTION PERIOD — Public Safety
Foreign Interference
October 10, 2024
Senator Gold, former public safety minister Bill Blair claims his chief of staff didn’t show him a Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS, warrant request to monitor Liberal Party contacts with the Chinese Communist Party agents for 54 days, yet he continued to employ that chief of staff for another two years after that. Senior officials, including his own deputy minister, testified this week at the foreign interference inquiry that then-Public Safety Minister Blair liked to work from home and did not read classified material.
Unbelievable.
He relied “exclusively on verbal briefings.” Minister Blair is one of the few Canadians with access to extremely sensitive intelligence on foreign interference, and he couldn’t be bothered to read it. Blair should have been fired immediately, but, instead, Prime Minister Trudeau promoted him to Minister of National Defence, where he is now in charge of even more crucially sensitive information.
Why is this minister still employed if he refuses to read critical information about threats to Canadian democracy?
Because we have an incompetent prime minister.
The issues surrounding the delay are being, as you pointed out, properly examined and discussed before the Hogue commission, which is an appropriate place for these important and sensitive issues to be raised.
With regard to the rest of your question, it’s my understanding that the government continues to have confidence in Minister Blair, who has served this country honourably.
So it’s fine that he doesn’t read. Senator Gold, I don’t envy you having to stand up and defend the Trudeau government’s staggering incompetence every day, but it’s tough for even you to justify this one. Public Safety Minister Blair wouldn’t even read classified briefings, so the Prime Minister then makes him Canada’s Minister of Defence? When will Minister Blair be fired?
Thank you for your expression of solicitude for my situation. I have to confess, I do rather envy you the ability to — or at least the support you have in transmitting statements from the other place into this chamber.
The government has confidence in Minister Blair, as I stated in my previous answer.
