QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Public Safety
Cybersecurity
September 19, 2024
Thank you, minister, for being with us. It appears that global criminals find Canada to be an increasingly profitable country in which to conduct identity theft and fraud. This poses significant risks both to citizens’ security and economic integrity. While your government has made important strides in bolstering our anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing, or AML/ATF, framework, generative AI is already enabling increasingly sophisticated cybercrimes.
My question relates to the gap in leveraging made-in-Canada solutions. Your mandate includes working with Minister Champagne to support intellectual property-intensive business as well as the adoption and scale-up of new technologies. Yet, according to The Canadian Press’s recent analysis, leading Canadian cybersecurity companies are much more successful in selling to foreign governments than to their own.
What is your government doing to ensure that Canada’s investments in cybersecurity research and innovation help to protect Canadians and not just those elsewhere?
Senator, thank you for the question and for properly noting the leadership of many Canadian companies in this important space. To pick up the question of the previous questioner, our Five Eyes partners have talked to me about how much the intelligence and law enforcement agencies in their jurisdictions appreciate the work that Canadian companies are doing. I certainly share your view that it would seem ironic that we could be selling this technology or know-how to foreign partner governments and not taking advantage of this innovation here in Canada.
As you correctly noted, the Minister of Innovation and I work in this area. A lot of the work is done by the Communications Security Establishment — as you would know, senator — which is an agency under the authority of the Department of National Defence. But I am happy to go back to my officials and talk to my colleagues Bill Blair and François-Philippe Champagne about how we can ensure that rather ironic circumstance won’t be allowed to be perpetuated or continue.
I have also noticed a number of academic institutions, such as the University of New Brunswick and the Frank McKenna Institute there, have done terrific work with a number of private sector partners. I’m trying in my time to encourage this work and wouldn’t want to inadvertently do something that would discourage it. I am happy to follow up on that very important question.
Thank you very much, minister. Are you aware that the Innovations Solutions Canada program — which is to put innovators in government and innovators in Canadian-funded businesses together to procure innovative solutions for big Canadian problems — was cut by 50% by your government in February in the reallocation of funding? This is one of the problems with respect to those programs that are working — $1 invested there created $1.50 in new taxes in five years and $3 in GDP growth. Yet that program was cut, and it was one of the ways that we had some of this work happening, so it does require your attention. I’m hoping you appreciate that irony.
The irony, senator, that I was referring to was that Canadian companies would be selling technology to other partner governments while being unable to do the same here. I wouldn’t want you to attribute the irony to financial decisions that my colleague the Minister of Finance would make. That wasn’t what I said.
I do recognize that our government has invested significantly in cybersecurity infrastructure. Every government must do so. Private businesses are massively doing that; businesspeople often talk to me about their own investments in this area. So I am happy to figure out the best way that we can encourage a Canadian private ecosystem that is very effective to also benefit Canadian companies and the Government of Canada.
