OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says it was “absolutely” acceptable that it took two years for his government to design and pass a major bill to help combat foreign interference.
Trudeau was the final witness of the latest series of fact-finding hearings of the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference (PIFI) Wednesday.
During the first part of his testimony, Trudeau confirmed that there were several intelligence or policy products relating to foreign interference that had never crossed his desk.
One example was a “targeting paper” written by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in 2021 on the Chinese government’s targeting of Canadian Parliamentarians. Former CSIS director David Vigneault testified previously that he thought the document should have been provided to Trudeau.
The prime minister said he relied on his National Security and Intelligence Advisor (NSIA) to triage information and determine what he needed to know. In the handful of cases put to him by commission lead counsel Shantona Chaudhry, he said the NSIA had made the right decision in not showing him a document and generally downplayed the novelty of their content.
“I have faith, having looked at the paper, that it was indeed the right decision by the national security intelligence advisor, that it wasn’t a document that significantly added… to my understanding of the situation,” Trudeau said of the targeting paper.
“The fact that Chinese diplomats are categorizing MPs in their outreach… is not itself particularly revelatory to me, or new information for its fairly obvious. It is part of what diplomats do in every country around the world” including Canada, he added.
Why, then, did it take two years for Trudeau’s government to draft, table and pass Bill C-70 which provided the government and intelligence agencies with a host of new tools to monitor and combat foreign interference in Canada, Shantona asked.
The bill, passed in June, gave increased intelligence-gathering powers to CSIS, created a foreign agent registry and introduced new criminal offences to combat foreign interference.
The Conservatives and national security experts accused the government of dragging its feet in tabling and passing the bill, whereas over a dozen civil liberty groups argued the new powers were overly broad and criticized MPs for rushing them into law.
Of his own admission, the world is “more uncertain and less safe” than ever, but Trudeau said two years was “absolutely” the right amount of time. The delay allowed the government to properly balance the new powers against concerns by civil liberty groups of potential overreach by intelligence agencies.
“Anytime you are giving more powers to security agencies to counter, in this case, hostile actions by state actors, or any time, in general, you’re giving more power to security agencies to do new things to counter new threats, you have to be very, very careful about the balance you get on protecting citizens rights,” he said.
“When C-70 passed, there was criticism that we moved too quickly on it. As you highlighted, there’s also criticism that maybe we took too long for it,” Trudeau told Chaudhry.
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