(Ottawa) The Trudeau government will support a Bloc motion asking the Hogue commission to broaden the scope of the investigation into foreign interference. We want it to examine information that parliamentarians are in the pay of foreign states.
Federal Minister of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc confirmed Monday during question period that the Bloc Québécois approach was favored by the Liberals.
He also specified that senior officials at the Privy Council Office began evaluating options over the weekend.
The motion sponsored by the Bloc René Villemure was tabled a week after the tabling of a report from the Committee of Parliamentarians on National Security and Intelligence (CPSNR) which caused a stir.
According to this document, Canadian parliamentarians knowingly or unwittingly contribute to the interference efforts of foreign states.
MPs allegedly did so by providing confidential information to representatives of the Government of India, it says.
The Bloc motion asks the commission to investigate federal democratic institutions, and the parliamentarians elected during the 43rd and 44th legislatures as well as the parliamentarians sitting in the Senate.
The Conservative Party, for its part, continues to demand that the names of the alleged culprits be revealed in broad daylight.
Again on Monday, Minister LeBlanc insisted that the law prohibits it, as confirmed to him by the Deputy Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Mark Flynn.
“I asked [him] what would happen if I stood up and revealed the names as my colleagues asked me to do, and he told me that I would expose myself to criminal prosecution,” he said in the House.
“Well guess what, Mr. President, I’m not going to do that,” Minister LeBlanc said.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre refuses to take advantage of the security clearance that would allow him to read the CPSNR report in its uncensored version.
For his part, Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet is now open to this possibility.