You’ve used two terms somewhat interchangeably. I know you don’t intend to do so.

But there’s
the term foreign interference and then there’s foreign influence. The proposed bill that we are
talking about is a foreign influence transparency bill. But when you read the government’s
consultation paper, the intent of having this bill is to deal with foreign interference. The
government itself tries to conflate the two issues. In a way, the appalling murder of seat leader in
Canada is a good way to focus our minds on how to address the issue. Because everyone will
agree that the assassination, the murder of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil no less is
abhorrent. And has to be condemned in the strongest possible terms. In fact, India was involved
or any foreign state was involved in his assassination. This is an egregious form of foreign
interference. Then you were to ask your question how could we have prevented it? Or how could
we prevent future occurrences of this kind of egregious foreign interference. I’m hard pressed to
understand how a foreign influence registry which is the solution put forward by the government
and indeed by the opposition and many MPs. How that mechanism would do anything to address
this concrete example of foreign interference. Indeed, when we look at the recent reports of
what are deemed to be harmful foreign interference. What we know is that they refer to not
murder such. But they refer to harassment, they refer to threats, they refer to bullying and so on.
And again we should be absolutely against these kinds of acts, whether perpetrated by Canadians
or by foreigners. But to the extent that these are the problems who are trying to solve
harassment, threatening actions, bullying, stalking those kinds of things again. It’s not clear to me
that a foreign influence registry would do anything to reduce those kinds of facts. In fact, we have
a criminal code that already outlaws harassment and threatening behaviour and bullying and so
on. I would encourage the government and all of us to think about how if we’re really concerned
about those kinds of actions, how we can look at the criminal code as a possible solution. Rather
than bringing forward a mechanism that not only will not solve, real foreign interference. But
could create a lot more harm.