Finally, Locking The Barn Door ...

"The agencies will form a view, and for the partnerships that are deemed high risk, they will not be funded."

"The bottom line is that [research projects] that are found to be high-risk will not be funded and those which come with a low-to-medium risk assessment will be required to have risk-mitigation measures put in place."

Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne

 

"Money is no object in Chinese R&D, and the Chinese partner in most cases would be happy to step in to fund what would otherwise have been the NSERC [Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council] portion."

"This would still have Canadian researchers contributing to projects that hold a national security risk for Canada."

"The guidelines seem to be limited to areas where there is federal funding. National security threats are hardly limited to areas receiving federal funding and these guidelines should cover all university research in a way that reflects federal responsibility for all aspect of national security."

Richard Fadden, former CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) director

A view by drone of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg on Wednesday, June 9, 2021. (Trevor Lyons/Radio-Canada)

 

The Liberal government was recently on the embarrassing political hot seat with opposition parties insisting on assessing information in Parliament relating to the situation that took place at Canada's high-security microbiology laboratory when two Chinese scientific investigators, a husband and wife, were summarily escorted out of the laboratory in 2019 and a year later when their high security credentials were revoked, fired from the lab. Escorted out of the lab at the time was a number of Chinese biology students working alongside them at the National Microbiology Laboratory.

An unauthorized shipment of Ebola and Henipah viruses left the laboratory, sent to the Wuhan Institute of Microbiology with which the two scientists collaborated. It was also revealed that a microbiology specialist who worked for the People's Liberation Army biology laboratory was employed for a while at the Winnipeg laboratory. China has long had a habit of exploiting secret data, the intellectual property of other countries, lifting it and treating it as their own, providing useful short-cuts to refine their own scientific investigations.

Xiangguo Qiu, her biologist husband and her students were escorted out of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg in July 2019. The RCMP have been investigating a possible 'policy breach' reported by the Public Health Agency of Canada. (CBC)

The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fought to deny the opposition Conservatives in the House of Commons access to revelatory documents and it has now seen fit to resort to protecting future federal government-funded research projects from the sticky hands of foreign governments. Without naming China specifically, the federal innovation minister announced new guidelines for scientific research granting to avoid as much as possible in future the kleptocratic inroads that Beijing has made into Canadian research property.

The head of the Public Health Agency of Canada defied a Parliamentary order to present the documents requested that would reveal the explanatory background of the two fired Chinese biologists who worked at the Winnipeg laboratory. The situation surrounding the two and the mystery of specific details aroused attention and gave rise to the urgent matter of security related to scientific research, with Canadian intelligence property falling into the wrong hands. Henceforth, researchers applying for grants through NSERC must complete a comprehensive security risk assessment.

Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were escorted from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg on July 5, 2019. After that, the University of Manitoba ended their appointments and reassigned her graduate students. (Governor General's Innovation Awards)

A national-security review conducted by Canadian security agencies and a team of scientists will be called for any project assessed as "higher risk". Any project judged to fall into the category of high risk will not be eligible for government funding. Roughly $1.3-billion is granted each year by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council to fund research and training. It is not the only funding source, however since the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities including most of Canada's research-intensive universities lays claim to funding $8.5-billion of annual research.

Last year the Canadian Security Intelligence Service repeatedly gave warning of Canada targeted by sophisticated state-sponsored infiltrators whose function it is in service to their countries of origin to purloin information and intelligence from Canadian companies and researchers. NSERC grants for the present involving researchers and private-sector partner organizations will require inspection and clearance to qualify for federal financial support for their projects. In time the process is meant to be expanded to cover all federal granting councils along with the Canadian Foundation for Innovation.

Grants are to be scrutinized to determine research that could be of potential benefit to other countries' military, police or intelligence agencies, or that would focus on critical minerals, nuclear power, critical infrastructure or technology and software subject to restrictions under the Export and Import Permits Act. All those categories neatly sum up the interests of the People's Republic of China in securing data and rights of all kinds, as well as its focus on monopolizing critical minerals and software and other areas of technological advances.

Criticism has come the way of the federal government for its obvious willingness to trust cooperative ventures with China-based corporations which then have the opportunity to cyber-access highly secret information. Such as the federal government partnering with Huawei Technologies in the funding of computer and electrical engineering research at Canadian universities. NSERC announced in February its collaboration with the Canadian arm of Huawei to fund studies, in contrast to top universities in the U.S. and Britain which have halted further research funding from Huawei over intellectual property and national security concerns.

A 2018 investigation revealed Huawei to have established a vast network of relationships with leading research-focused universities in Canada in the creation of a steady pipeline of intellectual property (theft) the company uses to underpin its own mobile technology market position. Western countries have assumed growing concerns over efforts by China to scour the world for technology with both civilian and military value -- characterized by Richard Fisher, senior fellow on Asian military affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center as a global "intelligence vacuum cleaner".

The logo of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies is pictured next to a statue on top of a building in Copenhagen, Denmark, June 23, 2021. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay/File Photo