The Riddle Within a Mystery Encapsulated in a Puzzle

"If her contract permitted it, that would be a scandal. If the contract didn't permit and they ignored the contract, that would be a scandal."

"If the contract didn't even turn its attention to this, that would be a scandal, too."

Mark Warner, trade lawyer, former legal director, Ontario Research and Innovation Ministry

"We cannot comment on this matter."

"The National Microbiology Laboratory has policies and processes that allow for scientific collaboration and these are reviewed periodically as part of the Science Excellence initiative to adapt them as needed."

Mark Johnson, spokesman, Public Health Agency of Canada

Xiangguo Qiu's ouster from the National Microbiology Laboratory remains cloaked in mystery and has been the subject of ongoing debate in Parliament. Photo by MCpl Vincent Carbonneau, Rideau Hall/File

The plot sickens as it thickens. That the Government of Canada is shielding documents from the Parliament of Canada that would shed light on the strange and rather awkward dismissal of two Chinese scientists long employed by Canada's topmost secret biology laboratory, biologists of distinction who had links both with the Wuhan Virology Institute and scientists working directly for the CCP's People's Liberation Army laboratories, defies logic. 

The dismissal of scientists Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng in January following their having been escorted out of Winnipeg's National Microbiology Laboratory a year and a half earlier along with Chinese biology students that Dr. Qiu had brought into the NML, is an event of great interest to parliamentarians and to the Canadian public. Particularly at this time of a global pandemic when a viral pathogen erupted in Wuhan, China and there are suspicions whether it was a natural event or whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been involved.

The head of the Winnipeg laboratory was called before Parliament and given instructions to produce documents to clarify the reason behind the scientists' escort from the laboratory and their consequential firing. Public Health Agency of Canada chief Iain Stewart adamantly, despite being reprimanded, continues to refuse to provide unredacted documents to Members of Parliament sitting on the Canada-China relations committee.

It has now been made clear that it is the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau which has instructed Mr. Stewart to refuse to surrender the documents in question. The Liberal government has filed an application to the Federal Court asking it to prohibit disclosure of the requested documents, challenging the principle of the House of Commons' supreme position to demand documents be produced regardless of privacy or national security laws.

Yet the government that has imperilled national security through its continued positions on allowing Beijing access to Canadian academic circles, corporate interests, government infiltration, scientific and technical inventions and production has filed an application requesting an order confirming the documents should remain undisclosed; the disputed material being "information which if disclosed would be injurious to international relations or national defence or national security". 

Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, a prominent virologist at the forefront of an ongoing RCMP investigation, is seen in an undated screengrab at the Winnipeg-based National Microbiology Laboratory. She was fired from her post in January, but officials won't say why.  Photo:  CBC

It would, in the sense that such disclosures have the potential to demonstrate the extent of this government's lax attention to securing its own intelligence, linked to that of its G7 and Five Eyes partnerships. News that Xiangguo Qiu, currently under investigation by the RCMP, is listed as an inventor on two patents filed by official agencies in China is another unsavoury revelation. As a long-time Canadian civil servant her obligation is to Canada, not China.

It is, in fact, illegal for any employee of the Microbiology Laboratory to patent anything discovered at the Lab; it is the property of the Lab and of Canada.While her escort out of the Microbiology Lab continues to shrouded in mystery, the subject of Parliamentary debate, these new revelations serve to deepen the conundrum.

One patent listing her as a co-inventor with others was filed with the Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration by China's National Institutes for Food and Drug Control, describing an 'inhibitor for Ebola virus'. Ms.Qiu had been celebrated in Canada for her work in helping to develop a treatment for Ebola. In the other patent registered by the Inspection and Quarantine Technology Centre of Fujian province a "detection method" for Marburg a hemorrhagic fever, is involved.

Just coincidentally, Dr.Qui had been involved in an unauthorized shipment of NML materials involving those same biological inventions out of the Winnipeg laboratory to the Wuhan Virology Institute. Dr.Qiu, it seems apparent, was either in violation of the inventions law or had received permission from the minister to proceed as she had, which seems unlikely, given its illegality and the strange potential decision to provide such highly classified and protected material and research to a hostile country.

It had been revealed by a journalistic investigation that Professors Qiu and Cheng had failed to pass security screening by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, somewhat after the fact. They had been known to work alongside Chinese scientists as  well as a PLA military researcher who had also been employed by the Winnipeg Laboratory. None of this inspires confidence in the Public Health Agency of Canada, nor the Government of Canada in this hugely unsavoury event.

The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg where scientists Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng worked until they were escorted out in July 2019, and finally fired in January 2021. Photo by Michel Comte/AFP via Getty Images/File