:
I call this meeting to order.
Welcome to meeting number 68 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.
Today’s meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of June 23, 2022, and members can therefore attend in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application. Should any technical challenges arise, please advise me. I don't expect that we're going to have any, but please note that we may need to suspend for a few minutes as we need to ensure that all members are able to participate fully.
Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(h) and the motion adopted by the committee on Wednesday, December 7, 2022, the committee is resuming its study of foreign interference and threats to the integrity of democratic institutions, intellectual property and the Canadian state.
We have one witness today, and I would like to welcome him. As an individual, we have Mr. Morris Rosenberg. He is the author of “Report on the assessment of the 2021 Critical Election Incident Public Protocol” and the former president and CEO of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation.
Just before Mr. Rosenberg begins, I am going to advise the committee that we received up to 120 pages from our witness on Friday. Many of them have to be translated. We've also received information that will have to be transcribed. My understanding from the clerk is that it may take a few days for that to happen.
It's actually closer to 200 pages, is it not, Madam Clerk?
Prior to becoming president of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation in September 2014, I was a public servant working under both Conservative and Liberal governments. I was a deputy minister of three departments—justice, health and foreign affairs—for over 15 years, and I was appointed to the foreign affairs position by Prime Minister Harper.
I want to disclose that I have been a member of the Conseil de l'Université de Montréal since August 18, 2016. I was not a member of the conseil at the time of the donation in question. I've not participated in any discussions of the conseil or its committees on what to do with the donation received by the university.
I first want to address some of the points raised by Madame Fournier at this committee last Friday.
First, the donation at issue occurred while I was president of the foundation, yet not once over the past weeks did foundation management reach out to me to answer any questions about the donation. Finally, on Friday afternoon, the foundation sent me a package of materials, including 160 pages released under access to information, as well as a copy of a policy on donations enforced in 2016. I'd be happy to share that with you.
I believe the donation should be assessed from the perspective of Canada's relations with China in 2016 when it was made, not from the much more negative context that exists today. At that time, universities, corporations and governments were all attempting to strengthen ties with China, including Mr. Harper's government, which signed a foreign investment promotion and protection agreement in 2014. From that perspective, this was seen as a normal and desirable donation consistent with the foundation's priorities.
The tax receipt was made out to Millennium Golden Eagle International (Canada) Inc. because that is the entity that made the donation. A corporate search shows that this is a Canadian corporation headquartered in Dorval, Quebec. Therefore, this is not a foreign donation.
All interactions with the Canada Revenue Agency were handled with care because the consequences for the foundation of not doing so could result in a loss of its charitable status. It made no sense not to be scrupulous.
In addition to being chair of Millennium Golden Eagle International, it's well known that Mr. Zhang was president of the China Cultural Industry Association. This is mentioned in articles in the Université de Montréal publications about the donations. He also represented himself that way at the time of an earlier donation to the University of Toronto.
There was nothing nefarious about staff in his organization contacting the foundation for administrative purposes, like providing a mailing address to send a tax receipt. Moreover, if CSIS had any concerns about the donors, at no time did anyone from the service speak to me about this, or, I don't think, anybody else in the foundation either.
Madame Fournier said that the donor list in the annual reports of the foundation identified the two individuals as donors rather than the company to which the tax receipts were issued. I don't recollect the reason, but it makes sense that the foundation wanted to acknowledge and honour the two men whose names were associated with the conferences.
Madame Fournier questioned whether Alexandre Trudeau could legitimately sign a donor agreement on behalf of the foundation. As per the policy, I approved the donation—or it wouldn't have gone forward—but the policy doesn't actually require that I put my own signature on a donation agreement. It was felt that, given the donation was to honour Pierre Trudeau, who opened up diplomatic relations with China, it would be more appropriate for his son to represent the foundation at the ceremony and sign the agreement. This was consistent with the policy on donations in 2016.
Second, I'd like to point out that Mr. Zhang's intent from the start appears to have been to donate $1 million to the Université de Montréal law school. This is confirmed in interviews in Le Devoir with both Mr. Guy Lefebvre, the former vice-rector of international affairs at the university, and Guy Saint-Jacques, the former Canadian ambassador to China. I can provide you with copies of those articles.
Mr. Lefebvre, who was aware of the 2013 donation to the University of Toronto medical school by these same donors, wanted to meet Mr. Zhang. It was Ambassador Saint-Jacques, our ambassador in China, who introduced Mr. Lefebvre to Mr. Zhang in 2014. As Mr. Saint-Jacques told Le Devoir, it was a much better era; we didn't really distrust China.
In early September 2014, Monsieur Lefebvre invited the foundation to meet the donors, who were in Montreal for a few days. At a meeting on September 24, Mr. Zhang stated that the $1-million donation would establish scholarships for students at the Université de Montréal law school and perhaps eventually at other law schools in Canada.
It was agreed that the foundation, the university and Mr. Zhang would form a committee to flesh out the donation. However, on November 17, 2014, the university published an article announcing that it had already received a $1-million gift for the law school from these same donors, and there was no mention of the Trudeau Foundation. It was only in September 2015, after several discussions, that the donors decided to earmark $200,000 of the original $1 million for the foundation to hold conferences.
Third, at no time did the donors ask the foundation to connect them with government or political officials. Professor Wesley Wark of the Centre for International Governance Innovation, who has written extensively on foreign interference, said the following in his online newsletter of March 21, 2023:
How exactly such a donation could be considered an influence operation in terms of how the funding was utilised was also not addressed in the reporting.
Knowing something of the operations of the Trudeau Foundation in supporting scholarly work I have to scratch my head at the idea that this was a calculated interference operation.
Moreover, the foundation is independent from the Government of Canada and simply did not coordinate decisions with the government.
The Trudeau Foundation has supported some brilliant scholars over the past two decades. Without its help, they wouldn't be where they are today.
This is an important moment for the foundation. I strongly believe that an independent investigation is needed to separate fact from innuendo.
I just have one last tiny point. I want to clarify something—correct the public record on one thing. In an interview early in March with the Canadian Press, I was asked if I had met the donors. I said that I thought I had met them once at the signing ceremony. Having now had access to these 160 pages of documents, I note that I was at a meeting with them on September 24, 2014. I just wanted to put that on the record.
:
I appreciate that. We've been running into some circumstances where it's open to interpretation.
In my view, Mr. Villemure's motion is appropriate and tight enough and gives direction not just to me as the chair, but also to the clerk. I appreciate you asking that.
We have an amendment from Mr. Fergus. Do we have unanimous consent to accept that amendment?
(Amendment agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])
The Chair: Do we have unanimous consent for Mr. Villemure's motion as amended?
(Motion as amended agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])
The Chair: Madam Clerk, are you clear on that? Okay.
[Translation]
Mr. Villemure, I have stopped the clock. You have 5 minutes and 54 seconds. You may begin.
I didn't see a connection. As I've cited, Professor Wark didn't see how this was an influence operation at all, and neither did I, frankly.
When I took the job, by the way, back in June or July—it was offered by the Privy Council Office—to examine this, I wasn't getting the whole view on whether there had been election interference. I was examining the operation of this one piece, the protocol, and whether it was adequate. I said, “Well, it worked as it was intended to work, but there are some really big problems with it.”
I know that nobody wants to talk to me about my report, but a lot of stuff in that report is critical of the government. There are 16 recommendations on things they need to fix.
:
This is an issue that I didn't actually make a recommendation on, but I said it needs study.
I talked to the Liberals, the NDP and the Conservatives—the Bloc Québécois didn't want to talk to me—and there are different views among the parties, but I felt that the threshold was so high that only something akin to Russian interference in the U.S. election in 2016 would invoke the threshold.
However, what happens if you are aware that one or two ridings or a particular ethnic group is being targeted with false information and nobody says anything to them? I think you may need to consider a way of communicating that to the public without saying the sky is falling and the whole election is going to be undermined, but in specific instances, there is a problem and they should be aware.
This happened in the U.S. before the 2020 election. Three weeks before, there was a press conference by the FBI and their cybersecurity agency about Iranians posing as Proud Boys and emailing voters in Alaska and Florida, telling them, “You'd better vote for Donald Trump or else.” These agencies came out and said this is false.
First of all, I think a start would be unclassified briefings about what to watch out for and about the kinds of methods that foreign diplomats or others might try to use to entice MPs.
Very importantly, I would add that when my focus was on the federal election, what I learned in doing this work was that this influence starts much earlier. It starts with people who are interested in public issues, people who are community leaders, people who are on school boards, people who are in municipal government and people who are in provincial government. Really, these briefings need to be much broader than just for MPs and senators.
The fact that we haven't yet been briefing MPs and senators, I think, is something that needs to be remedied very quickly. It needs to go beyond that as well. There have to be discussions with provincial and municipal governments to educate them on these issues.
:
As far as I know, they can't.
The example I would use is this. I make a donation to a Canadian company, and I'm retired and spend six months in the south of France. If I say, “Send the receipt to my address in the south of France”, then I get it there. I would then file the receipt with my income tax to get a deduction for my tax. I think this is something along the lines of what happened here.
The assumption that we were somehow nefariously trying to hide the real identity of the donor.... The cheque came from Millennium Golden Eagle International (Canada) Inc. The receipt was made out to Millennium Golden Eagle International (Canada) Inc. This is why I think there needs to be an independent investigation in this whole thing.
Somebody not only needs to look at the documents but also needs to bring in the people at the Trudeau Foundation who were there at the time. Frankly, maybe somebody should go and speak to the company in Dorval. Maybe somebody should speak to the Canada Revenue Agency about whether they thought there was anything untoward about this.
We had no malevolent intent. We thought, and we believed strongly, that we were complying with the law by sending the receipt to the person who made the donation.
:
Interference is more of a secret intervention.
[English]
I'm going to say this in English, just to be clear.
With the Chinese, one thing that's really difficult is.... If you take what happened in B.C.—it was Kenny Chiu's riding—there was stuff that started in China in newspapers and was picked up on WeChat. There were people in the community who said, gee, this guy Kenny Chiu is a bad guy because he'll bring in this foreign influence registry that's going to require all Chinese to register and the Conservative Party is going to break relations or whatever. The question is, how much of this was being orchestrated by Beijing and how much of this was a genuine view of Chinese Canadians or other Canadians?
There are people in Canada who have business relations with China and who have very strong interests in maintaining them. If a party takes a view that's counter to China's, they may, completely in good faith, be expressing their views. On the other hand, there are other people who may have family in China who have been threatened, and they need to speak the party line. How you tell the difference between the two is very hard.
:
The negotiations evolved. Mr. Lefebvre, in one of the articles where he talked about this, actually said that he thought at the time that engaging with the Chinese would give him and the Université de Montréal an opportunity to make them familiar with our governance methods, with rule-of-law issues and with human rights issues. Was that naive? At the time, in hindsight, it probably it was naive.
I remember going to China under the Harper government and having a dialogue with my colleague. Part of my instruction—and I followed it—was to raise human rights issues with the Chinese. They don't like it, but we did it because at that time, we honestly believed—this is going back to Bill Clinton and bringing them into the WTO—that if we only brought them into the international economic system, they would become more democratic over time. We were wrong, but we believed that. That belief still existed in the 2010s. That's why we operated that way.
I'm sorry that Mr. Green doesn't buy that, but I think we felt we could do more good. We weren't being told what to do. Having conferences on climate change, on trade and even on human rights issues and other global issues would be a good thing. Some of the Chinese students who were at the Université de Montréal and who would attend those would be influenced by them.
The Université de Montréal believed that the Chinese students—they did have a Chinese students program—being exposed to our way of life and to our rule of law, would, I guess by osmosis in a way, impact China. I don't think any of us saw the current regime coming. It took a number of years for us to change our minds.
In 2017, you had an article in University Affairs by the rector at the University of Ottawa saying they should do more research with China. This was in 2017.
It took a while. It took the wolf warrior diplomacy, the change of attitude in Hong Kong and the kidnapping of the two Michaels for us to realize that this was not the China we were dealing with a few years ago. Until then, I think a lot of us were in a more naive place. Hindsight is 20/20.
:
The one I want to go back to is CSIS uncovering a Chinese plan to donate to the Trudeau Foundation. This appeared in the Globe on February 28 of this year. It was based on an anonymous source, apparently not based on a document. This is intelligence.
Intelligence is different from evidence, and I'm going to tell you something some of you may have heard from David Morrison. When he appeared at the other committee, at the House committee, he said, “intelligence rarely paints a full, concrete or actionable picture”. It's not truth; it's often inaccurate or partial or incomplete. In fact, we don't know what happened to that intelligence. We don't know where it went. We don't know who was briefed on it. We don't know if anybody was briefed on it. We don't know if it was taken seriously or not. I wasn't briefed on it.
There is a question, and it's a policy question as to how far CSIS should go outside the government when they become aware of something that might affect another non-government Canadian organization. I understand that there are limits on them with respect to revealing sources or methods, but maybe they need to be a bit more proactive in speaking and letting people know—and this is not just CSIS but the whole security community. What is the public interaction and the transparency of the Canadian security community?
I didn't know about this. I don't think anybody knew about this until February 28, and to say that nobody believes me, frankly, I'm insulted by that.
:
At the end of that same document I'm referencing, which you've acknowledged now, it says that, once the proposal is ready, the foundation will involve Alexandre Trudeau. We talked about evidence, so we have evidence that the president of the foundation met with consular officials from a foreign government to arrange a donation, where they have the brother of....
You're shaking your head, sir, but I'm reading to you from the document. You first said that you didn't meet with them, but now you acknowledge that you did because I brought receipts. We have the receipts. You said it was extraordinary, and you couldn't recall another time Alexandre Trudeau would sign a donation agreement. He did it in this case. The foundation met with a foreign government, arranged this donation, ensured.... It's minuted that it was a requirement to have Mr. Trudeau personally involved.
At the time, even without the benefit of hindsight, could you not see that this was a foreign influence operation? This is not based on intelligence. This is based on evidence. You differentiated them before in your response to another colleague.
I'm seeing here that you attended the meeting, that consular officials from the PRC—the communist dictatorship in Beijing—were at the meeting, that the direction was to have Mr. Trudeau involved and that's what they got. They asked for it. The PRC asked for it, and the PRC got it. The Trudeau Foundation got the $140,000, and the individuals who were cut-outs acting on behalf of the dictatorship both got access directly to the within five months of this two-year process. Within five months, they both had access directly to the Prime Minister.
:
Yes, you can provide them to the clerk.
I would ask that all documents that you are to provide and undertake to the committee be submitted before Friday at five o'clock.
The other thing that I do need clarification on from the committee—we didn't do this on Friday—is that Madam Fournier has been providing documents, so I would like to accord her the same opportunity, by Friday at five o'clock, as we just did with Mr. Rosenberg, to provide us with all of the documents that she said she would provide. She's provided some at this point, but there may be more.
For both Mr. Rosenberg and Madam Fournier, do I have committee consensus—the clerk can advise Madam Fournier—to have their documents here by five o'clock on Friday?
Some hon. members: Agreed.
The Chair: Mr. Rosenberg, on behalf of the committee and on behalf of Canadians, I'd like to thank you for appearing before our committee today.
To our clerk, our analysts and our technicians, thank you for your assistance today.
This meeting is adjourned.