The Blueprint: Canada's Conservative Podcast - June 14, 2017


National security takes a backseat

Topics
Chinese investment and national security review national security review objections
Hosted by
Jamie Schmal
Mentioned
Conservative Podcast Speaker Norsat
Conservatives united： Andrew Scheer’s victory speech in Toronto Justin Trudeau’s payout to a terrorist

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

148.44

Word count

1,216

Sentence count

62

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A Chinese company is trying to take over a Canadian satellite company, and the government is not doing a proper and full national security review of the deal. This has caused outrage in the House of Commons, and questions have been asked in the media.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative Podcast.
00:00:08.960 Well, they thought they were going to have an easy day over there today, but not so fast, Mr. Speaker.
00:00:16.600 What is it going to take for the Prime Minister to have any respect for any laws in this country that may curb his out-of-control behaviour?
00:00:25.320 And now, here's your host, Tony Clement.
00:00:31.680 You're listening to The Blueprint, Canada's official Conservative Podcast.
00:00:36.360 I am Tony Clement, your host, Member of Parliament for Paris-Saint-Maskocca.
00:00:40.240 I want to talk a little bit about the curious case of a Chinese investment supported by the Chinese government
00:00:49.380 into a Canadian company called Norsat Technologies in British Columbia.
00:00:54.480 This has been occupying a lot of time in the House of Commons because what the Liberals did
00:01:00.460 when they approved this deal going forward is that they did not do a proper and full national security review.
00:01:10.380 Here's the background.
00:01:11.700 Usually when there is a foreign takeover bid, a takeover bid by a foreign company,
00:01:17.800 particularly one that has strong ties to state-owned enterprises or a government,
00:01:24.920 that bid is reviewed on national security grounds when the target company, the Canadian company,
00:01:31.400 is involved in Canadian military or is involved in high information technology
00:01:39.200 that will perhaps deal with national security issues and privacy issues for Canadians.
00:01:45.060 In this case, Norsat is a technology company, a satellite company that has a number of Department of Defense contracts
00:01:53.540 with the United States, does a lot of contracting with the Department of National Defense here in Canada, and so forth.
00:02:00.280 So the usual process would be that you would review that through a full national security review.
00:02:05.800 The Liberal government did an analysis of the situation and told the target company, the Canadian company,
00:02:12.480 that no national security review was necessary.
00:02:16.040 As soon as this got out into the media, we started asking questions,
00:02:19.760 and the Liberals are denying what they, in fact, have done.
00:02:23.880 They're denying that they did not do a review when they haven't done a review.
00:02:28.200 They're denying that they told the company that no review was necessary when, in fact,
00:02:32.380 we have the memo from the target company to their investors or potential investors that no review was necessary.
00:02:38.800 So the first issue is the Liberals are trying to talk out of both sides of their mouth at the same time.
00:02:43.880 The second issue, which I think is probably the more important issue,
00:02:46.920 is there should be a genuine and full national security review when you have an investing company
00:02:54.200 company from the People's Republic of China that is obviously supported by the Chinese government.
00:03:01.240 This company also has been picking up companies all over the world, this Chinese company, including in the UK.
00:03:08.480 When they sought to invest in a UK company, the British government, in that situation,
00:03:15.920 did something that they've only done several times in the last 15 years.
00:03:18.960 They did a full national security review on the situation, and they appended five pages of conditions
00:03:25.460 before the deal could go through to protect the national security of the UK,
00:03:30.000 to make sure that there was no transfer of very important technology, military technology or IT technology,
00:03:37.540 to Chinese interests or Chinese state-owned enterprises.
00:03:41.920 That's how the UK handled it.
00:03:43.240 In the contrast, the Canadian government isn't even going through that process at all.
00:03:49.200 It's not having the review.
00:03:50.340 It's not attaching any conditions.
00:03:52.180 This has been an outrage in the House of Commons.
00:03:55.060 And just recently, the U.S. Congressional Committee is now coming on board,
00:04:01.000 saying that they have concerns because this target company that is being taken over by the Chinese state-owned interests
00:04:07.740 is also involved in the Department of National Defense in Washington, D.C.
00:04:13.520 So that's the situation that we face in the House of Commons.
00:04:17.880 It is something that we are going to continue to raise and continue to object to.
00:04:22.000 This story is not going away.
00:04:24.020 Reporters are continuing to find new information about how this company is involved in our national security needs,
00:04:34.840 how the investing company, the company that wants to take over,
00:04:39.120 has been involved in numerous situations where they have pilfered information technology and have been caught at it
00:04:47.000 and so is not considered a good actor when it comes to protection of information technology.
00:04:53.380 And so, listeners, we're going to keep asking these questions because it is very important.
00:04:59.000 I was at a committee, the National Security Committee, very recently.
00:05:05.040 We had before us the acting director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, CSIS,
00:05:14.320 and I asked him, you know, how are these decisions made?
00:05:17.980 When is it, what sort of evidence is used to decide not to do a national security review?
00:05:24.520 His answer was very telling.
00:05:25.940 He said, look, all we do is provide the evidence.
00:05:28.780 It's the government that makes the decision.
00:05:30.400 It's the cabinet that makes the decision.
00:05:33.200 So when the minister responsible, Navdeep Bains, stands up in the House of Commons,
00:05:41.120 says without batting an eye that he is merely taking the direction from the experts,
00:05:47.580 and yet the experts are the ones saying, hey, don't look at us.
00:05:51.640 This was a cabinet decision.
00:05:54.040 You know something is afoot.
00:05:55.520 You know something is up.
00:05:56.980 And that's the situation we face in the House of Commons day in, day out on this particular issue.
00:06:02.220 So, yes, we are going to continue to ask questions.
00:06:04.640 We think it's important that the national security interests of our country, Canada,
00:06:09.780 are the ones that should be paramount.
00:06:11.980 We should not be having a situation where the interests of the Chinese government, 0.95
00:06:16.780 and by the way, this has nothing to do with the people of China,
00:06:19.440 and has everything to do with the government of the People's Republic of China,
00:06:22.520 the communist government of China.
00:06:25.740 We should not have a situation where their interests and their desires in some way overpower our national security interests.
00:06:37.020 That is the issue before the House of Commons.
00:06:39.480 That is the issue that is being played out in Canadian media,
00:06:43.300 and we will continue to ensure that our voice is heard,
00:06:48.640 and that we continue to demand that we have a full national security review in this context.
00:06:54.280 So, stay tuned.
00:06:55.440 This issue is not going to go away.
00:06:57.380 I suspect there will be some more revelations in the future as well.
00:07:01.080 It looks like the target company, Norsat, may have another suitor, an American suitor.
00:07:06.940 So, it will be interesting to see how the government responds to that.
00:07:09.940 But I've also heard through the media discussions that I've had that the Hytera,
00:07:16.120 which is the Chinese company, has very deep pockets, probably buttressed by Chinese government support,
00:07:22.180 and I suspect that we'll hear from them as well,
00:07:25.360 because they are on an acquisition binge that can only be related to Chinese security and national interests.
00:07:32.440 So, stay tuned as we continue to ask the right questions and protect Canadian interests,
00:07:39.060 including Canadian national security interests.
00:07:41.820 This is Tony Clement signing off from The Blueprint, Conservative Canada's official podcast.
00:07:58.760 Thank you for listening to The Blueprint, Canada's Conservative podcast.
00:08:02.440 To find more episodes, interviews, and in-depth discussions of politics in Canada,
00:08:07.140 search for The Blueprint on iTunes or visit podcast.conservative.ca.