QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Public Safety
National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
May 31, 2023
Thank you, and welcome, minister. My question concerns the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, or NSICOP. I asked Senator Gold about this at Senate Question Period yesterday and I didn’t get a good answer. I hope you will give me a better one today.
The membership of this committee is supposed to have three senators, but two of those seats have been vacant for a month. The last two times this committee was set up, the Prime Minister refused to appoint a senator from the official opposition. Now it appears he is doing the same thing all over again.
Minister, if NSICOP is so important to the Prime Minister, why hasn’t he filled the vacant seats? Why do you think he continually refuses to appoint a senator from the official opposition? Do you believe the official opposition in this chamber should be represented on the committee, yes or no?
Thank you for the question, senator.
I want to thank the members of this chamber for allowing me the opportunity to be here to take your questions.
Senator, in direct response, I believe firmly in the significance of the work of the National Security Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians. This is a committee that was set up and established by our government for the purposes of working across partisan lines with all parliamentarians, including senators from this chamber.
The work of this committee has produced concrete recommendations which I had been acting on expeditiously including the creation of a national coordinator to fight foreign interference, as well as moving forward with the creation of a foreign agent registry, but in the right way given some of the concerns expressed to me directly vis-à-vis diaspora communities and the like.
With regard to your specific concerns around the makeup of that committee, I do commit to relaying your concerns to the government, but I do agree that it needs to have broad representation as was originally envisioned when we set up this committee.
Thank you, minister. Certainly a better answer than I got yesterday, though not as complete as what I would like.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS, has told a former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada that he and his parliamentary caucus were targeted by a sophisticated misinformation and voter suppression campaign orchestrated by Beijing before and during the 2021 election.
CSIS told Erin O’Toole that the Communist regime paid for specific products of misinformation against him. Yet your boss, the Prime Minister, and his made-up rapporteur are still telling Canadians that NSICOP is sufficient to investigate Beijing’s interference. You say a secret committee is better than a public inquiry. That would be a joke, minister, if Beijing’s interference wasn’t so serious.
The Trudeau government doesn’t care enough about NSICOP to fill its vacancies quickly — and although you answered my question partly — to include a senator from the official opposition or to act upon the committee’s report and recommendations.
I can only conclude that you and the Prime Minister are desperate to hide something. What is it, minister?
Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to begin by underlining how seriously our government takes the threat of foreign interference. That is why our government passed Bill C-59, which gave new threat reduction powers to CSIS. But while we introduced those new authorities, we also understood that to bring Canadians along, we had to raise and strengthen the bar around transparency.
The creation of the National Security Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians was one way in which we could do that, but the other thing we did at the same time was to create the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, NSIRA, which is currently chaired by a former Supreme Court of Canada justice, Madam Justice Marie Deschamps.
Together, those initiatives reflect the sobriety with which we understand foreign interference poses a risk to our national security landscape. I assure you, senator, and all of the members that the path forward is through the engagement of Canadians, which we believe the public hearings process that Mr. Johnston has prescribed will facilitate as an objective.
