A pair of Chinese scientists who worked in a Canadian biological laboratory were marched out of the lab in 2019 and fired in 2021. The pair, who are married, claimed they were being targeted because they are Chinese but an investigations by Canada’s intelligence agency found they were sharing information with China including at one point with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Trudeau government has sat on the information related to the case ever since but finally this week some unredacted documents were released.
On Wednesday, the government released hundreds of pages related to the firing of Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng from the national microbiology lab in Winnipeg…
The hundreds of pages of documents include CSIS assessments created after the pair were marched out of the labs. The spy agency recommended the Public Health Agency of Canada revoke the security clearances of both scientists…
“The Service assess that Ms. Qiu developed deep, cooperative relationships with a variety of People’s Republic of China institutions and has intentionally transferred scientific knowledge and materials to China in order to benefit the PRC government,” reads a letter from January 2021 recommending her security clearance be revoked.
Qiu is believed to have been another beneficiary of China’s Thousand Talents Program which pays scientists at foreign universities to partner with Chinese universities to share their knowledge. When questioned about these connections, Qiu repeatedly lied to investigators.
CSIS, Canada’s intelligence agency, concluded that in security-screening interviews, Qiu repeatedly lied about about her relationship with research institutions linked to the Chinese government. Even when confronted with contradictory evidence, “Ms Qiu continued to make blanket denials, feign ignorance or tell outright lies.”
In one instance, Qiu told investigators a 2018 trip to China was a personal vacation. But she eventually admitted the trip was paid for by Wuhan Institute for Virology and that she met the a senior member of the organization during the trip. Investigators also found evidence of application from Qiu agreeing to work for the Wuhan Virology Institute for at least two months each year, with the aim of augmenting China’s “biosecurity platform for new and potent infectious disease research”, according to the CSIS report.
Qiu admitted she sent an Ebola sample to China’s national institute for food and drug control, which was attempting to develop an inhibitor to the virus. But she did so without a material transfer agreement or collaboration agreement.
Qiu also allowed two employees of a Chinese institution, “whose work is not aligned with Canadian interests” access to the lab.
All of this is a scandal but as you can probably imagine it would have had an even greater impact if this had been released two years ago when the pandemic was still ongoing. But the Trudeau government did everything it could to prevent that from happening.
In the last Parliament, the Liberals fought efforts to have these documents revealed including at one point taking the Speaker of the House of Commons to court to prevent them from being released.
Last fall, the Liberals agreed to have an ad-hoc committee of opposition MPs review the documents with any disputes over redactions being sorted out by a panel of judges. In an introduction to the hundreds of pages, the MPs on that committee said the recommendations were not necessary.
“The information appears to be mostly about protecting the organization from embarrassment for failures in policy and implementation, not legitimate national security concerns, and its release is essential to hold the government to account,” the MPs wrote.
Here’s Pierre Poilievre making hay out of this long delayed scandal.
LIVE: Shocking documents reveal Trudeau covered up massive PRC infiltration of his government’s top virology lab https://t.co/CfZLHci67U
— Pierre Poilievre (@PierrePoilievre) February 29, 2024