Canada's Liberal Government in Contempt of Parliament

"There's a lot of politics going on by both the Liberals and the Conservatives but in parallel to that, there is zero doubt in my mind that there are very good reasons to protect at least some of the information here."

"It's very hard to know where the line is between government efforts to actually legitimately protect classified information, which is very real, and government attempts to protect itself against embarrassment."

"NSICOP [the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians] has done and said things that were independent, that were autonomous, and that did not make the intelligence community happy, that did not make the government happy."

"Any time you set up new institutions, there's always a process of two steps forward one step back, two steps sideways; This is multiple steps back."

Thomas Juneau, associate professor, security issues, espionage, University of Ottawa

"My understanding is that parliamentary privilege is absolute. So how to convince a judge otherwise, what would be the rationale for that is really something that is quite puzzling to me."

"I think it's dangerous if we start to play that game and try to limit access like that, using courts to limit access to documents."

Daniel Beland, director, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada

"The research community goes where the best science and opportunity is taking place."

"I think it would be short-sighted to heavily restrict research partnerships. After all, science is a global enterprise and one never knows where and when a breakthrough or major discovery can emerge."

Paul Dufour, adjunct professor, Institutute for Science, Society and Policy, University of Ottawa

"This is our future."

"Good relations with China means our future scientists and theirs will be in constant communication, visiting back and forth and trading information."

"The freer they are to do so, the better for all of us."

James Robert Brown, professor emeritus, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto

Xiangguo Qiu, her biologist husband and her students have not returned to work at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, after being escorted out in July 2019. The RCMP is still investigating a possible 'policy breach' reported by the Public Health Agency of Canada. (CBC)

 

The Parliamentary Committee of the House of Commons Canada-China relations committee had censured Iaian Stewart, President of the Public Health Agency, for having ignored their calls for documents to be presented for their scrutiny to answer the mystery of the firing of two Chinese bioscientists from the high-security Winnipeg-based National Microbiology Laboratory. Two scientists with professional links to research and scientists linked to the People's Liberation Army laboratories. 

Questions surrounding the two scientists' escort from the high-security bioresearch laboratory along with Chinese bioscience students studying in Canada and recruited by Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng to work alongside them at the Winnipeg laboratory have gone stonily unanswered. Both the President of the Public Health Agency, which oversees the Winnipeg laboratory, and the Liberal government have refused to release the requested documents. The Liberal government has now filed with the Federal Court to give legal impetus to its refusal to release the documents.

Michael Juneau-Katsuya, formerly head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Asia-Pacific section reminds that CSIS consistently gave warning of China's vast intelligence gathering network and that it poses a grave threat to Canadian intellectual property. He had commissioned a report in mid-1990 while still with the service, estimating that Canada had experienced a loss in excess of $10 billion annually as a result of economic espionage carried on by China. He criticizes the government for its lax approach in protection of Canada's science breakthroughs.

Mr.Juneau-Katsuya points to the cost associated with a 2014 cyber attack on the National Research Council, despite which Canada's cooperation with China went on unabated. "CSIS has identified a lot of threats and knows a lot about the threats, but the government does not warn its employees. The only defence is prevention. When they steal your stuff, it's too late", he said. An internal document produced in 2016 revealed that rebuilding the ransacked system would take years at an estimated cost of breach repair in the hundreds of millions. Still, the agency continued to collaborate with China.

 

One of the scientists escorted from the National Microbiology Lab last year amidst an RCMP investigation was responsible for a shipment of Ebola and Henipah virus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology four months earlier - although the Public Health Agency of Canada still maintains the two are not connected.  CBC

 

It was at the National Research Council where an Ebola vaccine was developed in 2018 alongside the Chinese Academy of Military, Medical Sciences and CanSino Biologics. China's Ministry of Science and Technology issued a joint call with the National Research Council in 2019 for proposals for collaborative industrial research and development projects. A number of additional ventures were conducted by the National Research Council, along with annual meetings with the China National Biotec Group.

A research-council employee from China who had been employed in the People's Republic's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation had conducted much of the work involved in setting up partnerships and guiding Canadian technology companies to enter the Chinese market. Council researchers had developed a cell line as a scaffolding for virus research which they provided to CanSino for use in the Chinese company's COVID-19 vaccine. That was followed by an agreement for the NRC to help in testing the vaccine and to manufacture it at an NRC facility.

By August of last year, when the CanSino vaccine candidate was prepared for shipping as per agreement to Canada, Beijing stepped in to refuse to allow the vaccine to be exported to Canada. Viewed by those knowledgeable as yet more retribution, aside from the arrest on charges of 'espionage' of two innocent Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, for the arrest in Vancouver on a warrant from the U.S. of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou.