Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
It is extremely disappointing to once again see the Liberals, with their cover-up coalition ally the NDP, blocking the work of this committee to get to the bottom of a matter that is about as serious as it gets and that must take priority. That is the prima facie question of privilege involving 18 members of Parliament.
Mr. Chair, for two years 18 members of Parliament were kept in the dark that Beijing had launched a cyber-attack against them—a progressive reconnaissance attack.
There is only one reason that they found out, and they found out notwithstanding that for two years the government had that information; they found out because the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China had seen an unsealed indictment from the U.S. Department of Justice in March of this year. That prompted IPAC to ask questions of the Department of Justice, as well as the FBI, as to why members of Parliament—not only the Canadian members of Parliament, but parliamentarians around the world and members of Congress who were targeted as part of a cyber attack—were not informed.
The answer provided by the secretary of IPAC is that with respect to parliamentarians outside of the United States, they had not directly been informed by the FBI or the Department of Justice due to jurisdictional issues. The FBI indicated to the IPAC secretariat that in early 2022, that information had been passed along to each of the governments of those countries that those members of Parliament were from. That included the Government of Canada being informed by the FBI in the early part of 2022. It was more specifically the Communications Security Establishment that had received the information that 18 sitting members of Parliament had been targeted, all of whom were members of IPAC.
That resulted in IPAC then briefing certain Canadian members of Parliament that they had been the target of this cyber-attack and that the Government of Canada had not informed them of that fact. It was subsequent to this that there was a report in The Globe and Mail a few weeks ago.
What we have is a situation of the government knowing for two years that members of Parliament were the target of foreign interference by the Beijing-based Communist regime. Those members—unacceptably—found out about it either through IPAC, as a result of an unsealed indictment of the U.S. Department of Justice, or they read about it for the first time in The Globe and Mail.
This is part of a pattern. We on this committee just completed a study on another prima facie question of privilege that was reported to this House almost exactly a year ago, involving the member of Parliament and our colleague Michael Chong, the member for Wellington—Halton Hills.
Just as these 18 members of Parliament were kept in the dark that they were being targeted by the Beijing Communist regime, Michael Chong was kept in the dark. Just like these 18 members of Parliament, he was kept in the dark for two years.
Just like these 18 members of Parliament, Mr. Chong did not find out by way of a briefing or as a result of any transparency on the part of this government to alert him that he and his family were being threatened by none other than an accredited Beijing diplomat at Beijing's Toronto consulate, one who had been accredited and continued to be accredited by these Liberals across the way and their government. No, he found out about it by speaking with Steven Chase or Robert Fife on the eve of a report that they wrote for The Globe and Mail.
What we have seen in this instance—just like with what happened to Michael Chong—was this Liberal government and this Prime Minister refusing to accept responsibility. They're the government, but somehow they're never responsible. They're never responsible for anything, according to them. They blame. They always talk about lessons learned—