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Tony Chats With Nova Scotia MP Rick Perkins About Bill C-18 And Chinese Interference
100 Plays2 years ago
This week, Tony catches up with Rick Perkins, MP for the Riding of South-Shore-St. Margarets in Nova Scotia. Perkins opens up about his role as Shadow Minister for Innovation, Science, and Industry plus he gives thoughts on Bill C-18, Bill C-11 and Chinese interference in Canadian elections.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Acknowledgments
00:00:00
Speaker
And another thing And another thing And another thing
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of and another thing podcast. I'm your co-host Tony Clement, Jodi Jenkins. I know this is going to upset some people. He unfortunately had to bail at the last moment, but we are going to continue with the show and certainly hope that Jodi will be back with me and that we'll be together again next week. But for the time being, it is myself.
00:00:43
Speaker
And of course our sponsors, municipalsolutions.ca, John Mutton and the gang are presenting sponsor as usual, and they are Ontario's leading MZO firm.
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Speaker
What does that mean? Well, it means they are there for development services and project management, development approval, permit expediting, planning services with municipalities, even engineering and architectural services, and things like minor variances and land severances, they can do that as well.
00:01:16
Speaker
You go to municipalsolutions.ca and they will be there for you. And of course, we also want to thank Hunters Bay Radio, 88.7 FM in Muskoka, where they have our podcast rebroadcast on terrestrial radio every Saturday morning, along with a host of other podcasts as well. I noticed on social media finally that it's the third anniversary of Lord and Lady Coffee. Remember them?
00:01:46
Speaker
They were one of our original sponsors and I know Jodi has an interest in that particular business as well. It's a little bit of a side hustle and congratulations to Lord and Lady Coffee for your three year anniversary. Started in the middle of the pandemic. I mean, that's a man when you can do that, that's something.
Meet Rick Perkins: MP and Longtime Friend
00:02:05
Speaker
Our guest today is none other than Rick Perkins, member of parliament.
00:02:09
Speaker
He was elected to be the MP for the riding of South Shore St. Margaret's in the province of Nova Scotia in the 2021 federal election. He is currently the shadow minister for innovation, science and industry, formerly the shadow minister of fisheries, oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard. Rick, welcome to the program. Thrilled to be here, Tony. So before we get to the serious stuff,
00:02:38
Speaker
I think we go back, I know this is crazy, but I think we go back like 41 years. Is that possible? 1980, I think we finished that. Okay, well that's even more.
00:02:56
Speaker
81. I was first year university in 80 and got elected to student council, I guess, at the end of that first year. That's when I met you. And I supported you in that election. You were part of the same ticket rather than the communists. And so that was one of my first instances of getting involved on campus politics versus party politics. And you served as vice president of the U of T student council and we got to know one another and really
00:03:27
Speaker
I mean, I mean, maybe there's been a little bit of a break here and there, uh, because I know obviously you moved out to Nova Scotia and you had a whole career there, but we we've been more or less in contact since then, right? Oh, we've been friends. I think, uh, uh, fair to say for my end anyway, Tony, we've been friends ever since, uh, uh, you know, we worked on lots of, cut our teeth on lots of campaigns back in university. You led the, uh,
00:03:54
Speaker
the charge to pull out of the Canadian, well, technically it wasn't to pull out of the Canadian Federation of Students, but it wasn't to. Just not fund them. It was not to accept a doubling of their fees. Yes, yes. The lot always wants to double their taxes. They want to keep those taxes rising. That's right. You led the charge on that on the campus and I think the result at the end was overwhelmingly no, which meant that something like a third
00:04:22
Speaker
of the Canadian Federation of Students funding was pulled because U of T was so huge. Yes, we had a very strong campaign. And I remember the editorials kept coming out from the same campus newspapers in favor of not funding them. And they would go around in a van and pick up literally hundreds and thousands of newspapers and put it in this cube van so that students wouldn't be able to read how horrible they were.
00:04:51
Speaker
So, you know. That was unique, you know. At that time, I don't think it exists anymore at U of T. You had the student financed paper from our fees, the varsity, which probably still exists, but you had the newspaper. Right. Yeah, the newspaper was called the newspaper. And believe it or not, it was a student university newspaper for all those listeners who don't know, funded on advertising with no fees from students.
00:05:19
Speaker
Well, why aren't they listening to that model when it comes to Bill C-18? That's what I want to know.
Debate on Canadian Content Regulation
00:05:26
Speaker
Oh, isn't that a C-18 and C-11? And C-11, yeah. C-11, C-18 imposes fees and C-11 is where the government, the Liberal government this time says, you know what?
00:05:41
Speaker
We're going to try and impose some arbitrary definition of what Canadian content is on the internet. Unlike their last attempt to do this, this time they say they're not requiring the algorithms of the
00:05:56
Speaker
internet providers to give that to the CRTC, but they just want to make sure that the algorithms they write ensure that the Canadian content, however the CRTC defines it, floats to the top. You wouldn't ever want it to be the things on your search engine that float to the top being the things that are the most popular and interesting and most commonly sought after by users of social media. It's got to be driven by the CRTC.
00:06:27
Speaker
It's more government overreach, of course. And there are amazing Canadian content providers. I mean, you're on a show right now. We are a Canadian content provider. And as Jodi would say, we set the bar. But in all seriousness, you know, there's all these Canadians doing
00:06:45
Speaker
great work in terms of news and entertainment and sports. And no, government is going to decide what people listen to. That C18 bill is the partner bill to C11. So what C18 does is C18 says that social media providers have to pay a fee to a Canadian government fund
00:07:12
Speaker
every time you and I and our friends post a media article. Yeah. So if you say, you know, I really liked an article I saw on the national post of the global mail or an opinion piece and you repost it, uh, uh, Facebook, Twitter, they're going to have to pay the government a fee and that fee
00:07:37
Speaker
will go to fund arts in Canada, run by a government-appointed agency, of course, because that fund in the past had been driven by fees off of advertising on traditional broadcast media. Right. We did have this fund in the past, but they dramatically- But it's diminishing, right? Yes. As traditional broadcast media has diminished and the world has moved over to get
00:08:05
Speaker
their information from things like your podcast. And and and so that fund diminishes. So you wouldn't be a liberal government if you said, blah, let's find a way to tax that and get that money back so we can help fund all those CBC programs that nobody watches. Now, have you been you've been part of the I guess in your role as shadow minister? It's mostly, I guess, Heritage Canada. But you play a role as the shadow minister for industry, too, on this.
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, one of the problems we have, obviously, in many of our industries in Canada that over the years we've now developed so many oligopolistic industries, which is why we rank last in productivity and our Western counterparts in the OECD. But that aside, when C11 was before the parliamentary committee studying it last May and June,
00:09:02
Speaker
We were using every parliamentary tool that we could to delay and amend it. And so I don't sit on the Heritage Committee, but I had done a little filibustering in another committee. So they brought me in to help filibuster on that committee to try and delay it. When your listeners may think, well, this is kind of silly stuff.
00:09:32
Speaker
I'll sit there in a committee on this and talk about my deep, dark past on things or somebody's going to read newspaper articles to prevent them from doing business. But in the opposition, and particularly when the NDP and the Liberals are in a costly coalition,
00:09:47
Speaker
The only way we have to try and slow things down, the currency of the house is time. And our only tool is to utilize that time as much as we can to prevent them from doing these things and hope that we can run out the parliamentary calendar on them and they don't get passed. And so I helped out a bit on that, but ultimately,
00:10:14
Speaker
They had done something, Tony, I don't know in your parliamentary career, both at Queen's Park and in Ottawa, if you had ever seen this, the Liberals actually imposed closure at committee. Yeah, that's very rare.
Concerns Over Election Interference
00:10:27
Speaker
That's very rare, for sure. So closure in the House is one thing, but closure in the committee. And they did that by basically saying when we got to the 400 amendments that we proposed to the bill, that the amendment could not be read out and it could not be debated.
00:10:43
Speaker
And they use the majority with the NDP and the House to pass that rule and enforce it on the committee. Now, it's interesting you're talking about filibuster because of course the Liberals who are in power, of course, are doing their own filibuster at committee to do with the Chinese Communist Party interference issue. Because you, by that I mean the Conservative Party wanted the Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister to testify.
00:11:13
Speaker
about what was known and what was done about reports of Chinese Communist Party interference. And the Liberals are doing everything they can to filibuster so that that is not going to happen. They don't want Katie Telford to testify. So tell us a little bit about that. I know we're speaking at a point in time and there's going to be a vote in the House of Commons very, very soon on this, but let's just sort of set the scene for our listeners.
00:11:43
Speaker
Sure. Now, I'll just do the tie and then maybe take it back a bit to the beginning of that case. So the tie, obviously, consistency of argument, Tony, as you well know, has never been a strong point of liberals. They're okay to, on one hand, suck and say, you know, you shouldn't be filibustering the bills that they want. And on the other hand,
00:12:06
Speaker
filibuster themselves when it's not going their way and when it's not going their way on a fairly, not fairly, a really fundamental element of our entire democratic system.
00:12:20
Speaker
And that is the interference in our election by a foreign government is bad enough, but by a foreign government that is inserting itself into all aspects of our life from influencing votes in ridings in the last election, the last two elections, 2019 and 2021, right down to their control and ownership of many, their growing control of many of our important companies in Canada. It's a very long-term and strategic role
00:12:50
Speaker
that the Communist Party of China has. They take a very much longer view of everything. And they are, frankly, under the current regime, you just got elected to the third term, have an expansionist world domination type of
00:13:15
Speaker
uh philosophy of the the chinese communist regime uh that they want to control what's going on in other countries and they're they make no bones about it the the council general for china and vancouver has bragged multiple times about defeating conservative candidates in the last election and we talk a bit about how you do that because i've talked to some of them you may know some of the former MPs like kenny chiu yeah and alice wong
00:13:43
Speaker
Alice Wong, but even in Toronto, Tony, like Leona Alsef, right? When you look at what happened in writings around Toronto where conservative MPs lost in the last election, Liberals won those writings, but they won it with the same amount of vote that they got in 2019 when they lost, not a percentage, the actual same number of votes.
00:14:08
Speaker
So why did the Tories lose? In Leona's case, for example, 7,000 conservative votes from 2019 disappeared. They just didn't show up. And that's called voter suppression. And we should make the point that that was not common or usual for the 2021 election. We, in fact, gained votes in that election compared to 2019. So this is very unusual.
00:14:37
Speaker
Well, and we won, we won seats like mine, which we hadn't won since 2011 in Atlantic Canada. So we picked up seats. And in the post analysis that the conservative campaign did, and I remember having, uh, many discussions with our leader then Aaron O'Toole and the, an internal allow shows showed somewhere. Fairly certain that 10 conservative MPs lost in 2021 as a result of that.
00:15:05
Speaker
Chinese interference by our campaign teams look at what happened in the ridings and what the spore of the breakup, the makeup of the riding was. And it may have been as high as 20. But so when the prime minister and the liberals get up and say, well, we're confident that the election wasn't impacted, well,
00:15:30
Speaker
you ask the people in Kenny Chu's writing and Leon Alsop's writing whether their representation was impacted by Chinese interference. And yes, even if you look at 10, you say, well, 10 more Tories at one and 10 less Liberals at one, the Liberals would have still been in government. That's sort of their point. They might've been in government with the coalition, with the NDP. But the point is,
00:15:55
Speaker
The fundamental element of how we elect people to represent us in Ottawa in at least 10 communities was impacted by foreign hostile state interference. And for some reason, the Liberal governments don't think that's worthy of an inquiry. Well, and I think the other thing, too, and you touched on this, is that, you know, we're dealing with Canadian citizens, Chinese Canadian citizens who are being bullied and manipulated by a foreign power.
00:16:23
Speaker
Uh, and that isn't good for democracy. So, you know, you can say, well, you know, uh, we're, we would, we would still be the government, but you know, what about the Chinese Canadian diaspora that, uh, you know, are, uh, you know, it's very clear that the Chinese communist party is trying to bully them and to, uh, threaten them and maybe threaten their family members back in China, whatever tools they're using.
00:16:50
Speaker
to get a desired result. That's exactly what happened. You remember, Tony, you know, I tried a few times myself to get in Parliament. A lot of those occasions, every campaign I ran in, and I think everyone you ran in, we helped each other and knocked on doors. And in 1997, you were called, Tony, when you were provincial, you offered and came out and helped me when I ran in Scarborough, Agent Court in Toronto. That's right.
00:17:17
Speaker
and went door to door. Now, it was a different time in terms of where the party was at, but I can tell you in a highly populated writing like Scarborough Agent Court of Chinese population, a lot at that time from Hong Kong, my experience at the door was that there was a great fear of government for those Chinese Canadians who have come here
00:17:47
Speaker
from that regime and escaped it, but still harbor a great fear of the government. And so when I would knock on doors, I was running against a member of the government of Helen A. J. Kerry Janus. And there was a great fear of being seen to do anything against the government. They weren't used to sort of our version of party politics.
00:18:14
Speaker
And so it's a community that, because of the dictatorship that they've had to the authoritarian rules they've had to live under, is very fearful of government. And so when, what's happened, a couple of other things, what the candidates told me was happening was that, you referenced it, Tony, that things like out and out to everybody,
00:18:44
Speaker
The Chinese government and Chinese operatives, including the people who operate these police stations in Toronto for the Chinese Communist Party, have been saying, we know how you vote. We will know how you vote. And that was an intimidation on top of that. They could target individuals and say, you still have family here in China, you have business interests, a lot of
00:19:13
Speaker
people that were in a global economy and a lot of very successful entrepreneurial Chinese immigrants and citizens now in Canada have strong business ties back to one of the world's largest markets and economies. And the threat to what might happen to their family, what might happen to the business was huge. And I think some of the most outrageous things
00:19:41
Speaker
that I was told by some of our candidates is that they were being told that if you vote for conservatives and the conservatives win, conservatives will throw you into an internment camp and take away your assets. So this is how you vote or suppress, particularly with a community that is fearful of government, in particular, that will escape the Chinese government, but is still being intimidated by them on our own soil. And so the puzzling thing is,
00:20:11
Speaker
And there was a thesis report, which is where some of this started a few months ago. It actually came out on, I think, the last day of the sitting in June. A thesis report came out that said there were 11 candidates in the Toronto area that had been significantly influenced in the federal election
00:20:35
Speaker
20, I think it was 2019. They weren't dealing, it wasn't about 2021, but it happened in 2021. Yeah, the first reports were about 2019. Right. And there were about 11 candidates that were under the strong influence through the nomination process, through the money that flowed to the campaigns, and through volunteers. So it might say, well, how does somebody
00:21:04
Speaker
or some country influence a candidate with volunteers. One, they were paying, the accusation is they were paying, the Consul General here was paying two families of sympathetic Communist Party of China families, paying their children
00:21:25
Speaker
and their relatives to go and volunteer in campaigns. Yeah, which is illegal under the Elections Act, right? Totally illegal. And the candidates may not have known they were being paid. I'll give them that because, you know, it's so hard to find volunteers for anything these days, let alone campaigns. And you embrace campaigns and volunteers that come into your campaign. And you've been elected a lot more than I have been so far, Tony.
00:21:54
Speaker
But you know how important you treat volunteers after you're elected. 100%. We are to you, right? So, you know, general people out there who've never been involved in a campaign and don't understand necessarily how important a volunteer is, because we're not the US. We don't have multi-gazillion million dollar budgets. We don't spend $50 million to get elected. We spend $100,000.
00:22:22
Speaker
sure sure
00:22:25
Speaker
But here's, and you've said it out extremely well about what the reports from our spy agency are about election interference. But the key, one of the key things is that these reports were created and were given to the government and nothing was done. And then when a few weeks ago, when Justin Trudeau, our prime minister was asked, well, did you ever see these reports? He flat out denied.
00:22:53
Speaker
And so this is why the conservative opposition has been trying to get his chief of staff before a committee so that they can find out, you know, what did the prime minister know? When did he know it? And what did he do about it? These are important questions. A hundred percent. Some of the media reports, the great work that the Globe and Mail has actually done on this that came out showed that some of these briefings were actually requested by the prime minister's chief of staff.
00:23:22
Speaker
after the 2015 election. So between the 2015 and the 2019 election, the Chief of Staff of the Prime Minister had gotten and received briefs on potential interference going back that far. And it would be beyond irresponsible for a Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister not to share those results with their boss. And the Prime Minister has stood up
00:23:52
Speaker
countless times we might have been sitting in the house over the last six months and said he was never briefed. It's just not believable. It's not believable that his Chief of Staff was getting all this intelligence, that his Minister of Public Safety was getting all of this intelligence, and that nobody told the Prime Minister. That doesn't seem to fit the pattern with the way this Prime Minister operates in terms of how
00:24:18
Speaker
strict and stringent and control that PMO is on every word that comes out of a minister's mouth.
00:24:25
Speaker
I mean, and the other thing is, how does this look? This is not the main issue, but it is an issue. How does this look to our our allies? You know, when these are national security threats that are not just to Canada, but they're there to all Western democracies and, you know, there's a new security infrastructure that is being built before our eyes for the 21st century, AUKUS and Kansuk and so on. And we're just not a part of it.
Chinese Influence in Canadian Industries
00:24:53
Speaker
All of that is going on because obviously we're a security threat. There were reports last week in the media that the US had raised Canada's exposure to influence from the Chinese Communist Party as a security risk for the United States.
00:25:18
Speaker
I can understand that we have the largest independent board in the world. We share intelligence. We are there our closest ally. But you're going to be concerned that they're operating here. And I'll give you an example in the world of the industry world that you mentioned that I'm responsible for Tony. One of the one of the things that's come up in the last couple of months and and it's going to receive more study is there's a bill bill seat 34.
00:25:46
Speaker
which was tabled before Christmas, so it just changes to the Investment Canada Act. Now, I'll go into the details of that bill, but under this government, under the Investment Canada Act, the government has the ability to ask for a full national security review when a state-owned enterprise, a company owned or significantly controlled and influenced by a foreign government, is buying a Canadian company.
00:26:16
Speaker
During the Trudeau era, they had been approving the sale of many strategic companies in Canada without requesting a national security review, being acquired by Chinese state-owned enterprises. And some of this came to light, again, just before Christmas. One particular one is that the RCMP and the Canadian Border Services, two important security organizations for this country,
00:26:47
Speaker
had awarded tender contracts for equipment, telecommunications equipment, to a company based in Canada that is ultimately owned by a Chinese state-owned, a Chinese entity out of Beijing called Hitera, which is state-owned and has never made any money. It bids and wins telecommunications contracts around the world and underbids and takes advantage
00:27:15
Speaker
of our open market to underbid companies that have to operate on a profitable basis, undercuts them in the government bidding process to put telecommunications equipment in Chinese controlled and access to the RCMP's communication system. Incredible. It's incredible. A couple of weeks ago, I had the RCMP before the industry committee,
00:27:43
Speaker
And I asked the senior RCMP officers, I said in January, 2022, Hyterra was charged with 21 crimes of espionage in the United States. And President Biden banned Hyterra and any of its companies from doing business in the United States as a result. Incredible. Eight months later, the RCMP
00:28:12
Speaker
gives a contract to high terror. And I asked, so did you know, did you know that they had been charged with 21 counts of espionage in the United States eight months later? And you know what the RCMP said? No. Oh, my word. So that's just a small piece of what's going on. So there's the influence of the elections. And why would they, Tony, why would they want to pick one candidate over another?
00:28:43
Speaker
Why would they favor the Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau over Stephen Harper in 2015, Andrew Scheer in 2019, Aaron O'Toole in 2021? They have a motivation, obviously. Yeah, that serves their interest. Yeah, that serves their interest, right? They want to have a friendlier government. This is a prime minister who said when he was leading the Liberal Party in an opposition,
00:29:11
Speaker
that the country he admired most was China. And so they've had an incredibly soft on China approach that has been obviously noticed by the senior operatives in the Chinese Communist Party. And they want to get those people elected versus, in particular in 2021, Erno Tool had a fairly hard policy against the Communist Party of China.
00:29:41
Speaker
Yes, he did. Yes, I remember. Yeah. And he wanted a registry of foreign agents. Right. And that's why they went after Kenny Chu in Vancouver, because Kenny Chu put a private members building to put a registry of foreign agents together, which does exist in some of our other allied countries, but doesn't intend it.
Call for Public Inquiry and Conclusion
00:30:01
Speaker
So we've got just a couple of minutes left. Obviously, the liberal approach to this, Justin Trudeau appointed as a special rapporteur
00:30:10
Speaker
the right honorable David Johnston, former governor general. But that really hasn't gone over as well as I think that Mr. Trudeau thought it would. It was obviously a very politically motivated choice. David Johnson is, without question, a man with an impressive contribution to our country and an impressive
00:30:37
Speaker
a very decent fellow, an honorable fellow. But this isn't about David Johnson. There is the rule of law and what a conflict of interest, but what is really important is not having the appearance of a conflict of interest. It's an individual who's going to advise the Prime Minister about whether or not there should be a public inquiry. Now, he sat on the foundation
00:31:06
Speaker
of the Trudeau family, the Trudeau Foundation. He has had a cottage next to the Trudeau family cottage where Pierre-Elia Trudeau and the kids played. His kids and Justin Trudeau and Pierre Trudeau's kids and Justin Trudeau as a child, they played together, they waterski together, they are close family friends. Can David Johnson operate and separate that?
00:31:33
Speaker
That's not really the issue. The issue is, no matter what he does or does or recommends, it's going to be tainted because he's not independent. Surely in a country of 38 to 40 million people, there was an eminent person that he could find that was not connected to the Liberal Party. Drew, we have lots of former Supreme Court judges he could have picked. Well, at least he didn't appoint Beverly McLaughlin, thank you.
00:32:03
Speaker
And what her current career is. And what her current career making sure that the people of Hong Kong are oppressed. Well, but the fundamental issue is what do we need this rapporteur for anyway? The mandate apparently is to help the to decide for the prime minister since he can't seem to make a decision. The prime minister said he'll do whatever the rapporteur says, whatever David Jones says.
00:32:30
Speaker
on the issue of whether or not there should be a public inquiry. Well, that's the prime minister's job. The prime minister should be making that decision and the cabinet should be making that decision. And if they truly wanted and believed that they wanted a person that was above any kind of appearance of conflict, they should have consulted in that and gotten approval of the opposition party before they made the appointment.
00:33:00
Speaker
in order to ensure that it was, seemed to be, not only was free of conflict, but seemed to be absolutely beyond reproach, which this isn't. And they chose not to do that because David Johnson was appointed by Stephen Harper, so they thought they used that as a political tool to politicize the investigation on Chinese interference. What they say in Nova Scotia when these things happen is they were too clever by a half. Exactly, 100%.
00:33:28
Speaker
Rick Perkins, we got to leave it at that for now. Obviously, this is a massively developing story and I know you're right. Goes to Parliament tomorrow. We have the opposition day debate on it today. Yeah, exactly. So we'll find out what happens there. But regardless, this story ain't going away. So thanks for giving your perspective and the Conservative Party of Canada's perspective on it.
00:33:55
Speaker
I guess we'll have to have you back for an update at some point. I do want to thank our sponsor again, municipalsolutions.ca and John Mutton and the gang. And of course, this podcast will be rebroadcast by Hunter's Bay radio. Thanks for listening. And hopefully Jodi will be around and back and we can have our usual banter. Thanks for listening today, though.