THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 29, Season 7
Sunday, March 25, 2018
Host: David Akin
Guest Interviews: Parliamentary Secretary Mark Holland, Scott Jones, Hugh Segal
Location: Ottawa
On this Sunday, the government’s pot bill was in danger of being snuffed out, as some senators push back with concerns over testing, policing, health impacts and more. Will the government accept any changes to their bill?
Then, from Russia, to Facebook, to everything we click on every day, just how secure is our data? And do we want our government doing more or less? We’ll ask the government cyber security chief about protection and privacy in a world of increasing cyber attacks and manipulation.
And the powers of unelected independent senators: should they be allowed to kill legislation at the heart of an elected government’s mandate?
It’s Sunday, March 25th. I’m David Akin, and you’re in The West Block.
Late last week, the Senate nearly struck down the government’s pot bill over concerns ranging from moving too quickly, to not going far enough to curb black market sales. The Trudeau government wants cannabis legalized by this summer, but critics say the bill and the timeline need changing. Is the government listening? For those answers, we interviewed Mark Holland, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety and we interviewed him on Friday from Parliament Hill.
Alright we’re here in Parliament Hill because of an extraordinary parliamentary procedure going on in the House of Commons, which was on the floor right above me. It’s a filibuster essentially by the Conservative Party and actually that’s where we want to start with, Mark Holland, before we start with some pot news.
Essentially, I’ve had a briefing from one of these government officials, a security official. I have had this briefing on background and been told some information about Canada-India security, the Atwal affair. And the Conservatives are making what I think is a reasonable point: why can’t they have the same briefing as well? That’s, I guess, what this is all about.
Mark Holland: Well, I mean I don’t think that’s what it’s all about. I mean we’ve already voted on that matter. We’re currently voting on the budget, but the reality is look, Mr. Atwal when we discovered his background, his invitation was rescinded. The MP who made the invitation has apologized and we have enormous respect for the public servants and the information that they give to us and the advice that they give us, and we rely on that each and every day. So I think we’ve answered those questions. We want to move forward. There are a lot of issues to talk about, including a public safety committee where we have the firearms legislation and many other things to be doing.
David Akin: Alright, so I just want to set the context in because you’ve been up now for pretty much a day straight.
Mark Holland: Yeah.
David Akin: An hour’s sleep in the last 18 hours. So I had a good night’s sleep before we had a chance to tape this. Let’s talk about pot.
Mark Holland: Sure.
David Akin: Let’s talk about cannabis. That’s a big item on the government’s agenda and this week we learned there are some regulations about how the actual pot will be marketed and packaged. And there’s some reaction from the industry that says this is going to limit their ability to market their products and more importantly, it will work against a key public policy goal, which is get the black market out. What do you say to those folks in the industry now who say this is the wrong way to go about marketing it?
Mark Holland: Well sure, two points broadly. 1) We have just a terrible problem when it comes to cannabis today. We have really it’s been stated one of, if not the highest use of cannabis by young people in the world. We have a$7 billion thriving criminal enterprise that is booming as a result of selling cannabis and so we need to change our approach. It hasn’t been working. It’s been a total failure. And I look to, and not just I, the entire government look, to the success of jurisdictions on tobacco controls example where they started with the plain packaging. And if we look at tobacco and we look at that hard arduous journey to drive down the use of tobacco, if we could have started at day one with plain packaging, started at day one with tight regulations on marketing, sure I understand that folks are going to be perturbed by that because it is going to limit how they can sell to young people or be attractive to young people, but that’s the very point of what we’re doing. We’re standardizing the packaging. We’re making sure that it isn’t attractive to young people. We’re making sure the warnings are present there and that they can’t use marketing as a tool in the way that tobacco had.
David Akin: So I mean that seems to be where the public policy goals are a bit at odds with each other. You want to get rid of the black market, which means it’s got to be convenient and easy for me, the consumer, to buy what I was buying on the black market, while at the same time you don’t really want people to buy this stuff.
Mark Holland: Well, I think what we’re saying is, and again tobacco is a really great example, there are a lot of people using cannabis today.
David Akin: Just on that, why not more like wine or beer or spirits? Why–?
Mark Holland: Well because again, I think that if you look at where we are today, which is that we have a prevalence rate of youth smoking cannabis that’s not only in double digits, it’s double what tobacco is. The only way that we’re going to drive that down is not by making it more attractive and marketing it to kids, but by doing the opposite by saying look, if there are those that are already using it or make the choice to use it, then it’s going to be legally available. But the idea of allowing it to be marketed in a sexy way or in a way that’s going to be appealing to children, you know, didn’t we learn our lesson from tobacco on that? Where when those tactics were applied, we didn’t see a stabilization of tobacco, we saw it leap up and most certainly what we do not want with cannabis is to have the problem intensify. We want it to go the other direction. For those that are doing it currently and who are adults, fine they can make that choice, but we certainly don’t want to be marketing to children. We want to go after the predators that sell to children, the multi-billion dollars that are made on the backs of children in alleyways because a thug doesn’t care that they’re selling to a kid. And we certainly don’t want, once we legalize that market, to have products like we did with tobacco, that are attractive for children, that market children and try to get them on that product.
David Akin: Let’s talk about the legislative track here. The bill has cleared the House of Commons and this week, a bit nervous, but it did get into second reading in the Senate. What’s your sense as to where, if any, there’s flexibility for amendments by senators on the legislation?
Mark Holland: Well let me just say that I think the Senate has done very good work thus far. We just had the vote coming out of the Senate. I think there’s been a lot of great debate there and we took a lot of time consulting with Canadians, consulting in the House of Commons and now you’re seeing that consultation happen in the Senate, and we’re deeply respectful of that. And we’re also confident in the way that it’s moving forward that the points are being heard, the need to control and regulate cannabis to keep it out of the hands of young people, to bring in that $274 million for law enforcement to make sure we go after high driving because look, David, the reality is today, there are more people killed as a result of driving high than alcohol, and that’s today. That’s before a legalized regime. We want to see that plummet. We want to drop that as low as possible. So that’s why we’re applying those resources, and we’re making those arguments and working closely with the Senate.
David Akin: Timeline, originally the government was shooting for July 1st of next year. We’ve heard the Health minister say the provinces will need some time. It could be the fall. If the Senate tends to delay it, is the government worried that this is going to be in place this year? Could it be next spring? When do you expect pot to be legal?
Mark Holland: Well we’re working closely with the Senate and we feel at this point in time confident in that timeline by the end of summer that we’re going to see a regime that will control and legalize cannabis.
David Akin: There’ll be people who say the police just aren’t ready yet. We should not go until they’re ready.
Mark Holland: Well David, the problem is it’s happening right now. There are, as I already have said, more people killed high than through alcohol. It is a massive problem on our streets and our police are absolutely ill-equipped to handle it. Our cannabis rates are among the highest in the world. And so we can put our head in the sand and pretend the problem doesn’t exist or we can turn the corner and finally start doing something about it.
David Akin: Mark Holland, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety. It’s back to the House of Commons and more filibuster for you, for several more hours. Thank you so much for joining us.
Mark Holland: Thanks so much, David.
David Akin: Alright, still to come, what role should the Senate play when it comes to government legislation? But first, what is keeping the government’s top cyber security expert awake at night? That’s next.
David Akin: Welcome back. Being proactive against cyber attacks is a top priority these days to the Canadian government, especially in recent weeks, recent news. But what is the threat? And where does it come from? And how vulnerable is our federal information technology infrastructure? Well joining me now is Scott Jones. He’s the Assistant Deputy Minister at the Communications Security Establishment, CSE, and he is the person in charge of government cyber security. This is what you think about 365 x 7. The rest of us just come in from time to time.
One of the issues we’ve been talking about in the last week is our federal elections. And I know the CSE did a report after the 2015 election and asked was there any foreign interference? And found not really, low level, I think, hacker activism. Would we expect it’s going to be like that in 2019 at this point?
Scott Jones: So I think we predicted that you’ll see an increasingly level of influence. Certainly the technology is evolving and we’re seeing more and more use of social media, for example, to shape our opinions and actually to drive some of that content. But one of the things that’s important is increasing the resiliency, so starting these discussions, talking about it and then also looking across the three different spectrums. So the election itself is quite robust in terms of how it’s run, but politicians and political parties themselves, and media, we’re the ones that we judge more vulnerable to this type of influence operation.
David Akin: I want to pick up on political parties because of course in the United States, in 2016, it was the Democratic Chairman John Podesta who got fished or whatever and had his e-mails compromised. Does CSE consult with parties or is it available for some advice on what parties themselves can do to harden their systems?
Scott Jones: Certainly we’ve made our advice available. We have briefed all political parties in Canada and given a general cyber security briefing and the government has indicated that we would be available to provide assistance, if requested.
David Akin: And are you able to give a general sense of how you might feel our political parties are ready and battle hardened?
Scott Jones: Well I think just like every other organization, cyber security is always balanced against every other priority in terms of affordability, cost, etc. It’s certainly become the issue of the day and how to deal with it. I wouldn’t have the information to judge as in individual parties. Certainly, the need to be more vigilant is there.
David Akin: Well and speaking of resources, the government in the last budget, as you know, set aside $750 million over five years specifically for cyber security. Would you have some rough ideas where you think that those resources might be deployed and sort of what areas?
Scott Jones: Well I think we’ve seen some of the key initiatives, one being a renewed cyber security strategy that will be announced by Mr. Goodale coming forward. But other elements, for example, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS), to be housed within my organization, CSE, to consolidate federal government expertise.
David Akin: And that’s mostly research and trying to figure out what new threats are out there and things like that?
Scott Jones: Well also working with critical infrastructure, working with vendors, providing advice and guidance to Canadians that we can all use in our day to day lives. That’s the goal of the cyber centre is to really unify the voice of the federal government so that there is a single trusted place to go for that type of advice.
David Akin: And that work now is happening in various different departments? Maybe RCMP, Defence, Public Safety, is that the idea of what’s going on now?
Scott Jones: It is and so you see this right now, we do work well together.
David Akin: Right.
Scott Jones: But to bring that together to form that centre, it’s really critical that we have one voice that we’re able to go forward. So that’s Public Safety, for example, the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre does a pretty phenomenal job of reaching out to Canadian critical infrastructure, so marrying that with the capabilities that we have at CSE as an example and bringing it together to form this new entity is what we’re heading towards.
David Akin: Right now the House of Commons Defence Committee is studying Canada and NATO and as part of those hearings, many defence and intelligence officials have testified that the number one threat to NATO and to Canada: China and Russia. I wonder from a cyber security standpoint, would state actors from those countries be the top two threats?
Scott Jones: So when you’re looking at it from the intelligence perspective, you concentrate on countries. When you’re looking at it from the defence perspective, you concentrate on how do I protect against everything and everyone. And so for us, we really don’t look at country specific. We look at how to protect against the majority of the threats, what type of vectors they would use. Any organization could use because for us, any compromise is significant.
David Akin: Well let me rephrase it slightly then. Would the capabilities of state sponsored actors to engage in offensive cyber warfare, whatever you want to call it, be better than non-state sponsored, I say commercial actors or individuals?
Scott Jones: The issue with cyber, it’s not about the capabilities that the adversary has, it’s about your capability to defend. So if you haven’t taken the steps you need to make yourself more resilient, you really make yourself an easy target. So you don’t need to be that sophisticated as an offensive actor, for example, if the defences are low. And so for us it’s really about how do you raise the level of defence so that you take out all of that low level cyber activity, that unsophisticated activity and that’s really what this is about. And that’s actually one of the goals of the centre is to really raise that bar.
David Akin: One of the things I’m curious about as well is, CSE, the headcount I think is roughly 2,300 or something like that.
Scott Jones: That’s right.
David Akin: I understand the Chinese have about 200,000 in the CSE equivalent in China. Is it a fair fight in terms of being able to defend from threats wherever they’re going to be coming knowing that there’s literally an army of people that are knocking on our door?
Scott Jones: One of key things we’ve talked about is it’s important to take a team approach to this. Cyber security isn’t just the responsibility of the federal government or it’s certainly not just CSE, they need to work with academia, industry, critical infrastructure and individual citizens, given the information they need to make us all more cyber resilient. And that’s one of the key things. We can be a group of a million or 36 million if we work together and we find new ways of working together on that.
David Akin: The big thing in the news this week, of course, was the Cambridge Analytica Facebook story. Our privacy commissioner has launched an investigation. That’s a privacy issue. Was there anything in that whole story that raised some cyber security issues?
Scott Jones: Well for me, cyber security and privacy aren’t really mutually exclusive anymore, as the technology is evolving so quickly and there is so much of our private lives that are now being collected and looked at by private companies. That’s starting to become cyber security issue because there are no targets and also how do you manage that? And the technology is so sophisticated that you really can’t separate the two. So we certainly do have cyber security issues, for example, as we’re looking at the next election in terms of influence, influence in terms of targeting or micro-targeting. So how do those techniques start to impact the cyber security realm?
David Akin: Just quickly, our civil infrastructure, power grids, stuff outside the federal realm, perhaps provincial, municipal. Does that keep you up at night in terms of the vulnerabilities there?
Scott Jones: So I think if you worry about all the threats and the possibilities. That would keep you up at night. What gives me comfort and lets me sleep is that people are taking this seriously. Organizations are investing. Organizations are really looking to try to make our infrastructure more resilient and that’s one of the things that actually we’ve seen through the partnership model. It’s really critical that we do that. They’re experts. We want to support them.
David Akin: Excellent. Scott Jones, thank you so much and good luck with your work keeping us safe.
Scott Jones: Great, thank you.
David Akin: Cyber-safe.
Scott Jones: Thank you very much.
David Akin: Alright, up next: how independent are the new senators on the Hill? And should they be able to kill government bills?
Conservative Senator-Manitoba Don Plett: “The loyal Opposition at that time did exactly what the Opposition was supposed to do, and that is work towards defeating government legislation.”
Senate Government Representative Peter Harder: “That contradicts the mandate of the Senate to provide sober review. And that review is best done in committees. That’s where it historically has taken place, and let’s get on with it.”
David Akin: Welcome back: A couple of senators talking about their role during the recent showdown over the government’s cannabis legalization bill. Should senators have the power to kill government legislation? And how independent are the senators who have been appointed by the prime minister? Hugh Segal spent nine years in the upper chamber. He worked for Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and has long advocated for reforms to the Senate.
Joining me now from Toronto, Hugh Segal. Hugh, great to have you on the program, and I guess the first question is: is it really appropriate to call these independent senators independent given the events of the week?
Hugh Segal: Well I would say that they are because they were appointed in a very different way, from the way in which prime ministers have normally appointed senators in the past. They have not been appointed with regard to any formal partisan affiliation where that used to be one of the requirements in the past for either Liberal or Conservative senators, which is all we used to have in the Senate. And when you look at the fact that since the inception of the new system, there have been 23 pieces of legislation which the present Senate has amended, in previous cycles you’d have maybe three or four pieces of legislation over a five-year period, where amendments have been made. Not all the amendments in the present circumstance have been accepted by the government, but many amendments have been. I think it is a very different place and we don’t have traditional whips except for the Conservatives. The other sides are basically organizing themselves as crossbenchers, which is the tradition in the British House of Lords. Although I’m not sure they’re quite as they need to be, but they are making independent decisions and there is no control over how they vote, so I think that does constitute a measure of independence we did not heretofore have. And remember, that our Constitution, the British North America Act, really sees the Senate not as a body to stand in opposition to the duly elected House of Commons because in our system, it’s the ballot box that is the source of legitimacy. It is a complimentary body which is supposed to look at bills after second reading to see if they can be improved, whether there should be some changes made, amendments considered. But the old tradition, which has gone on both in the British system and in our own, that if a government campaigns on a program and the government gets elected, that program, when presented and passed by the Democratic House of Commons, should be at least debated and voted upon in the Senate and not stopped on principle but taken to committee and that is what the Senate, to its credit, decided to do on the marijuana legislation the other day.
David Akin: And of course the cannabis legislation was absolutely central to the Liberal election platform. Canadians knew what they were voting for and presumably wanted the government to proceed with that. One of the things that I found fascinating this week covering the discussion of senators outside the chambers, particularly senators like Andre Pratt, the former journalist, an independent senator. It was almost Hamlet-like ‘to kill or not to kill’. They’re still trying to see how far up the ladder they can go. What are the boundaries of the powers of these independent senators and I wonder about your opinion. Should they and they do under the act of course, be allowed to kill such legislation?
Hugh Segal: So my view is that in the Salisbury Convention, which is what governs the relationship between a duly elected House and an appointed House, which is what we have in both the United Kingdom and Canada, means that the democratic side always has to win. It always has to prevail. So in principle, if the democratic side passes a piece of legislation that was part of the platform of the government that got elected with a majority, then I do not think it is constitutionally appropriate for the members of the Senate to stop that legislation before second reading and not let it go to committee for careful examination in a complimentary way. But a lot can be done in that process. Important legislation has come through the present process on national security and other issues, where amendments were made, where ministers went and appeared before the committees and were prepared to accept amendments. The same thing was true with respect to the legislation on assisted death and dying. So one cannot make the case that this present system isn’t working, even though, I think it’s fair to say that my former colleagues in the Conservative caucus wish the new system wasn’t there, wished the old system was in place. And what’s really interesting in terms of their desire to help Mr. Scheer form a government someday, which is completely understandable, is this hard reality. If the present prime minister fills the present vacancies on the independent vetted basis that he’s been doing so far and does nothing more, then the majority of independents will be in the Senate for nine years after the next government is elected in 2019. Should that government be re-elected from the present administration, and they continue to fill vacancies just as they come up, that will keep an independent majority in the Senate for an entire generation. So, I would suggest to my Conservative friends, careful what you wish for because if you want Mr. Scheer to be prime minister, and that’s completely understandable, should he be successful, do you want to really establish a tradition that the independents in the Senate who will be in the majority for some time to come, have no obligation to respect the promises made by Mr. Scheer in good faith, for which he may get elected and which he will then try to implement through a democratically elected House of Commons. So there are some risks here that are not just checkerboard risks, but chess board risks, and I would hope that all sides give that some consideration.
David Akin: I’ve only got about 30 seconds, but let me get your thoughts. Has the experiment worked about independent senators or too soon to tell?
Hugh Segal: Well if 10 out of 10 and one out of 10 is a failure, I’d say it’s a six. But I think it’s heading in the right direction.
David Akin: Hugh Segal joining us from Toronto today. Hugh, always great to chat with you. Thank you so much.
Hugh Segal: Thank you.
David Akin: That is our show for today and if you’re interested in the kind of issues that Scott Jones is talking about, well Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale will be in front of two Senate committees next week and we’ll have all the news on Global National every now. Now we’re always eager to hear from you about this program. You can find us online at http://www.thewestblock.ca. You can also reach us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Thanks for joining us. I’m David Akin. Have a great week.
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