Introduction

Startling revelations that foreign adversaries saw Canada a weak link in the Western alliance rippled through Ottawa after secret intelligence came to light implicating a sitting member of the House of Commons as a double agent who violated the Official Secrets Act by passing on classified information to a foreign communist power. Initially, these claims caught Official Ottawa off guard. But the claims were true, and the MP implicated ultimately faced prosecution and expulsion from the House of Commons.

I am, of course, referring to a series of events which took place at the beginning of the Cold War from 1945 to 1947. In September 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, defected to and sought protection from Canada. He revealed that the Soviets had established as network of espionage across Canada and had penetrated many of our institutions. Gouzenko also showed that Fred Rose, a communist activist from 1924 onward and the Member of Parliament for Cartier in Montreal from 1943 to 1947, passed on secret information to the Soviets. Rose’s conviction of having conspired to violate the Official Secrets Act by passing on classified scientific research to the Russians caused his seat in the House of Commons to become vacant automatically under the Criminal Code in January 1947.

This case cries out to become the subject of Ben MacIntyre’s next non-fiction best-seller on Cold War espionage. But for now, I would like to present it in terms of parliamentary privilege and the expulsion of MPs from the House of Commons.    

Parliamentary Privilege

The well-established principles of parliamentary privilege mean that any legislative body (i.e., a house of parliament) like the House of Commons, the Senate, or a legislative assembly in the provinces and territories possesses the authority to discipline or even expel its members. At the federal level, this authority flows from section 18 of the Constitution Act, 1867, section 4 of the Parliament of Canada Act (which itself derives from section 18 of the Constitution Act, 1867), as well as centuries of recognition in the courts and parliamentary precedent and practice.

In the Vaid case, the Supreme Court of Canada defined parliamentary privilege as such: “Parliamentary privilege in the Canadian context is the sum of the privileges, immunities and powers enjoyed by the Senate, the House of Commons and provincial legislative assemblies, and by each member individually, without which they could not discharge their functions.”[1]

Parliamentary privilege applies both to a chamber collectively and to members individually.[2] Ultimately, the individual member’s privilege derives from, and is therefore subordinate to, the collective privilege of the chamber in which he sits.[3] Undoubtedly, one of a legislative body’s collective privileges is the discipline or expulsion of its members.[4]

House of Commons Procedure and Practices affirms that the House of Commons “may expel a Member for offences committed outside his or her role as an elected representative or committed outside a session of Parliament.”[5]  Other Canadian and British parliamentary authorities make similar affirmations. For instance, Maingot argues that the authority to expel members “extends to all cases where the offence is such as, in the judgement of the House, to render the Member unfit for parliamentary duties.”[6] The venerable Erskine-May in the United Kingdom argued that “expulsion is not so much disciplinary as remedial, not so much to punish Members as to rid the House of persons who are unfit for membership.”[7]

Precedents and Procedure for Expulsion of Members

The Canadian House of Commons has exercised its collective privilege to expel members on three occasions, followed by one precedent of automatic statutory expulsion:

1. Louis Riel in 1874;
2. Louis Riel once more in 1875;
3. Thomas McGreevy in 1891; and,
4. Fred Rose in 1947.[8]

MPs are either expelled automatically under statute, or the House of Commons can expel its members discretionarily under collective parliamentary privilege.[9] The first three precedents fall under the first category, while the fourth and so far most recent precedent falls under the second category.

The expulsion of a member would occur automatically pursuant to section 750(1) of the Criminal Code if a member has been convicted of a criminal offence; in the House of Commons, the chamber would adopt a motion calling for a writ of election for the affected riding. A by-election would then be held in accordance with the Canada Elections Act.

Section 750(1) reads as follows:

“750 (1) Where a person is convicted of an indictable offence for which the person is sentenced to imprisonment for two years or more and holds, at the time that person is convicted, an office under the Crown or other public employment, the office or employment forthwith becomes vacant.”

Cases which would not result in automatic expulsion would follow a longer process. First, a members would vote on a motion to refer the allegations against the member to a committee, which would then examine the charge. If the committee’s report upholds the charge, then a member (usually a Minister of the Crown) would move a separate motion for the expulsion of the offending member. If that motion passes by simple majority, then it promulgates the expulsion of the offending member into force, and his seat is thereby vacated. A by-election would then be held in accordance with the Parliament of Canada Act and the Canada Elections Act.

Louis Riel holds the singular distinction of having been expelled from the House of Commons twice. After his first expulsion, he ran in the by-election held in his riding, and the voters of Provencher, Manitoba re-elected him. The House of Commons then expelled him for the second and final time. As Bourinot noted:

The right of a legislative body to suspend or expel a member for what is sufficient cause in its own judgement is undoubted. Such a power is absolutely necessary to the conservation of the dignity and usefulness of a body. Yet expulsion, though it vacates the seat of a member, does not create any disability to serve again in Parliament.[10]

Thomas McGreevy was expelled for having refused summons to the Commons. Fred Rose, a Communist who passed Canadian state secrets to the Soviet Union, was expelled after having been convicted of treason.

The Automatic Expulsion of Fred Rose in 1947

According to Canadian historian David Levy, who wrote Stalin’s Man in Canada: Fred Rose and Soviet Espionage, Fred Rose became an active communist in 1925 and wrote various pamphlets in the 1920s and 1930s agitating for a Leninist revolution in which the workers would establish a communist dictatorship in Canada rather like that of the Soviet Union. The Soviet NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, recruited Rose at some point in the 1930s; Rose worked for two handlers during this period, first under Badalovich Ovakimyan, the Soviet Consul in New York City, and later Yasha Raisin, also known as Jacob Golos. The GRU, the Soviet Union’s military intelligence agency, took over the handling of Rose from the NKVD in 1942, one year before he first got elected to the House of Commons in a by-election for the riding of Cartier in Montreal. Rose ran under the Labour-Progressive Party, a transparent front for the Communist Party of Canada. The Soviets tasked Rose with leading a spy ring in Montreal which gave the Soviets “information on war materials.” Rose specialized in recruiting scientists, most famously Raymond Boyer, a professor of chemistry at McGill, involved in atomic research.[11]

Igor Gouzenko defected to Canada in September 1945 and passed along despatches from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa in exchange for asylum. These documents revealed that the Soviets had established a vast penetration network in Canada. As Levy states: “the major virtues of Canada for Soviet schemers was its proximity to the United States, making it an invaluable jumping off point for Soviet agents.”[12] Not much has changed. Gouzenko’s documentation implicated Fred Rose and Raymond Boyer, and in 1946, the courts found Rose guilty of conspiring to supply the Soviets with classified scientific research in violation of the Official Secrets Act (now the Security of Information Act). The courts could not prove that he had succeeded in passing on this information.

Upon the opening of the third session of the 20^th Parliament on 30 January 1947, Prime Minister King moved a motion seconded by External Affairs Minister Louis St. Laurent to declare the seat for Cartier vacant:

REPRESENTATION – ELECTORAL DISTRICT OF CARTIER

Mr. SPEAKER: I have the honour to lay before the house court judgments in connection with the imprisonment of Fred Rose. M.P., namely
(1) a true copy of the verdict and sentence in the case of Fred Rose;
(2) copy of the certificate of the clerk of the court attesting the said verdict and sentence;
(3) copy of the judgment of the court of King’s Bench, Appeal side, rejecting the appeal and maintaining the verdict;
(4) copy of the judgement of the court of King’s Bench, Appeal side, rejecting the appeal and confirming the sentence.

WRIT ORDERED FOR ELECTION OF NEW MEMBER

Mr. Speaker, I beg to move, seconded by Mr. St. Laurent:

That Fred Rose, member for Cartier, having been adjudged guilty of an indictable offence and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment and not having served the punishment to which he was adjudged, bas become and continues incapable of sitting or voting in this house, and it is ordered that Mr. Speaker do issue his warrant to the chief electoral officer to make out a new writ for the election of a new member to serve in the present parliament for the county of Cartier in the room of said Fred Rose adjudged and sentenced as aforesaid.[13]

King then declared: “This resolution speaks for itself. I have nothing to add.” The Hansard then indicates “Motion agreed to” but does not record any debate or any other remarks.

In the debate on the Address-in-Reply to the Speech from the Throne on 4 February 1947, John Warner Muphy, the Conservative MP for Lambton West in Ontario, expressed his shock that the House allowed Fred Rose’s automatic statutory expulsion to go unremarked. He then provided the only other comment that Hansard records about Rose’s statutory expulsion by conviction.

[…] What impressed me, as I believe it impressed most members present on that day, was the incident which we find recorded on page 2 of Hansard when the Prime Minister (Mr. Mackenzie King) rose and begged leave to move, seconded by the Secretary of State for External Affairs (Mr. St. Laurent), a motion concerning a man whom we may now simply call Fred Rose.

I will not read the motion, but after it was made by the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister added these words: This resolution speaks for itself. I have nothing to add. Then Hansard adds: Motion agreed to.

And then deadly silence. Never within my memory bas silence registered such contempt. I have no hesitation in saying that there is no room in Canada for those who would destroy Canada. There is no room in our legislative halls for anyone who prefers the communistic system to our Canadian system. Those who do not believe in the way of life which has made us the nation we are today should not be permitted, to occupy positions of trust or of power in any part of our government, dominion, provincial or municipal. They should, they must be removed, and one was Liberty, freedom of speech, of assembly and of press does not and must not be permitted to mean that the enemies of this country conspiring to overthrow by violence our governmental economies and social system shall have licence so to conspire under the protection of our constitution. Let the echo of their doctrines be beard only by themselves within the confines of prison cells.[14]

Conclusion

If a member of the House of Commons of Canada had, for instance, spied on behalf of a foreign power today, and therefore had de facto committed treason against Canada, but had not been charged with a criminal offence, the case for the expelling him could hinge upon his having committed a contempt of parliament rather than having breached a specified privilege, because “a contempt is any conduct which offends the authority or dignity” of the legislative body.[15] The House of Commons would then strike up a special committee to investigate the case against the MP, and the House of Commons would then vote on whether to accept the findings of that committee’s report. If the committee found that an MP had committed an offence against the House of Commons as an institution, and if the House of Commons accepted that finding, then MPs could move a motion to declare his seat vacant, which would trigger a by-election in that riding.   

Similar Posts: 

• Stripping Disgraced Former Senators of Their Honorific Titles (December 2022)
• Senator Meredith Must Trigger Section 30 to Resign (May 2017)
• The Senate Acknowledges (Relying On But Not Citing My Reasoning) That It Could Expel Meredith (May 2017)
• Collective Parliamentary Privilege Includes the Expulsion of Members of Parliament (March 2017)

Notes

[1] Canada (House of Commons) v. Vaid [2005] 1 SCR 667, at para 29(2).

[2] House of Commons, Privilege in the Modern Context (Ottawa: Table Research Branch, June 1990), 2.

[3] House of Commons, Privilege in the Modern Context (Ottawa: Table Research Branch, June 1990), 7.

[4] House of Commons, Privilege in the Modern Context (Ottawa: Table Research Branch, June 1990), 11; Joseph Maignot, Parliamentary Privilege in Canada, 2nd Edition (Ottawa: House of Commons, 1997), 180.

[5] Audrey O’Brien and Marc Bosc, House of Commons Procedure and Practice, 2^nd Edition (Ottawa: House of Commons, 2009), 134.

[6] Audrey O’Brien and Marc Bosc, House of Commons Procedure and Practice, 2^nd Edition (Ottawa: House of Commons, 2009), 134-135.

[7] Audrey O’Brien and Marc Bosc, House of Commons Procedure and Practice, 2^nd Edition (Ottawa: House of Commons, 2009), 134.

[8]  Privy Council Office, Manual of Official Procedure of the Government of Canada, Henry F. Davis and André Millar. (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 1968): 239-242.

[9] Privy Council Office, Manual of Official Procedure of the Government of Canada, Henry F. Davis and André Millar. (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 1968): 239-242.

[10] Audrey O’Brien and Marc Bosc, House of Commons Procedure and Practice, 2^nd Edition (Ottawa: House of Commons, 2009), 134.

[11] David Levy, “Espionage in the True North: The Fred Rose Affair,” The Montreal Review, March 2012.

[12] David Levy, “Espionage in the True North: The Fred Rose Affair,” The Montreal Review, March 2012.

[13] William Lyon Mackenzie King (Prime Minister of Canada), “Representation – Electoral District of Cartier” and “Writ Ordered for Election of New Member,” House of Commons Debates, 20^th Parliament, 3^rd Session, 11 George VI, 1947, Volume I, Thursday, 30 January 1947, at pages 3-4.

[14] John Warner Murphy, “The Address – Mr. Murphy”, House of Commons Debates, 20^th Parliament, 3^rd Session, 11 George VI, 1947, Volume I, Thursday, 30 January 1947, at page 105.

[15] House of Commons, Privilege in the Modern Context (Ottawa: Table Research Branch, June 1990), 6.