Canada-China Relations Committee on April 29th, 2024

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here, and to Mr. Vigneault for being here again.

I have a bit of a dilemma in my mind. You know, we've talked at this committee about how things were different before the incident at the national microbiology lab. We've also said that things have changed at the national microbiology lab. I guess my contention is that when I look at a report....

Mr. Vigneault, I'm sure you're familiar with the report called “China and the Age of Strategic Rivalry”. It was produced by CSIS in May 2018. It goes on to talk about a report by CSIS that concluded that China was engaging in “Targeted efforts to co-opt the New Zealand business, political and intellectual elite”.

My contention, then, is that things were really not different when this incident started, at least in August 2018, so why do we say that they weren't? Things were not great then. We knew that the PRC was out there looking for secrets from other countries like New Zealand. Why would we think Canada was any different?

[David Vigneault]

Mr. Chair, I'll go back down memory lane here. I believe the report that Mr. Ellis is referring to is a document that was sponsored by CSIS but was produced by academics under Chatham House Rule. The conclusions about New Zealand were conclusions that were made public by CSIS through this academic report.

I remember those details, because, as you can imagine, New Zealand reacted to this report. However, I think it's fair to say that even back then, the academic community and the national security community in Canada and across a number of countries were indeed very worried about the PRC's activity. I believe I mentioned in this committee that one of the most significant moments of that change was when the PRC proactively, not even waiting for the final report of the international court on the jurisdiction of the sovereignty of the South China Sea, pre-emptively said that they would not respect the ruling. I think there were some moments, some of them public and some of them known through intelligence, when we started to see a shift. That shift is important, I think, to put it into perspective.

Madame Drouin said something that I think is very important. It is sometimes in our own national interest to collaborate with Chinese entities, but we need to do it with our eyes wide open and make sure that we protect our own base. I think this is why it's important; if it's good for Canada to collaborate because we can get something good out of it, we must do it, but we must do it while protecting the base.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Thanks.

I'll interrupt you there, Mr. Vigneault.

You know that things were not in great shape. Then we had information from the PHAC to CSIS to say that there might be threatening actors at the national microbiology lab, and it still took more than 10 months to secure the lab—more than two and a half years. Your contention, sir, has always been that they were Canadian citizens and that we had to give them the benefit of the doubt. However, as my colleague easily pointed out, we can get rid of a senior bank person here in Canada much more quickly. This is national security.

I guess the other question, then, is this: If things were great, then, with regard to security at the national microbiology lab, why have they had to change so radically now? Clearly, they were not. Clearly, the situation was not as rosy as you have tried to paint to the committee, sir.

[Nathalie Drouin]

Mr. Chair, if I may, I'll respond to that.

I have a couple of things here.

The nature of research and scientists, their DNA, is that you need to share the result, that you need to work with others. This is how they work. When I say that a shift happened, it's that now they understand that the desire to put their results out there, to share their outcomes with others, comes with an important security component.

[Stephen Ellis, Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Ma'am, with all due respect, what we're talking about here is the security. I'm not talking about scientists. I understand that the scientists want to share their work, but the security was lax at the lab, and now it is different. That falls squarely on the Prime Minister's shoulders—on your office, ma'am.

I guess the other thing is.... It took so long to secure the lab that my only conclusion is that there was political interference to slow down the investigation.

Ma'am, you can roll your eyes at that all you want, but what other conclusion can we possibly have when we can get rid of a senior bank executive more quickly than we can get rid of potential espionage-creating scientists at a national lab with secret facilities?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Give a very quick response, Ms. Drouin.

[Nathalie Drouin]

I have, maybe, one thing. As I said, yes, in retrospect, we can always say that things could have been faster. However, at the beginning, it was not even clear that it was a national security issue. It was more a case of lax administrative procedures. It took some time—after the fact-finding, after the reference to CSIS—to identify that we were in front of national security.

I think that now those reflexes would be much faster. Yes, we can say that it should have been faster at the time, but going forward, the reflexes will be faster in terms of making the links between those deficiencies and conducts and national security.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Thank you.

We'll now go to Mr. Erskine-Smith for the final five minutes of this panel.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

To you both, thanks for attending today.

Mr. Vigneault, you've attended a couple of times.

I think I've canvassed all of the questions that I'm interested in canvassing with respect to Ms. Drouin specifically, but I am interested.... Paragraph 21 of the June 2020 security assessment stood out only because we've just lived through a pandemic. It says, “QIU...and other [Wuhan Institute of Virology] employees were approved by a Chinese evaluation committee to conduct a 'CAS High-end User Nurturing Project'”. That was “from June 2019 to May 2021”—ostensibly, the time period for that project. The project “planned to use reverse genetics in order to create synthetic virus strains. This was to assess cross-species infection and pathogenic risks of bat filoviruses for future vaccine development purposes, which suggests that gain-of-function (GOF) studies were possibly to take place.”

I don't want to go down a conspiracy rabbit hole here, but American agencies have said that a lab leak is low...limited evidence, all things considered, but that is the most plausible reality here. What should I make of this? When I read this, paragraph 21 certainly stands out in the context of having just lived through a pandemic. What should I make of it? What should parliamentarians make of it?

[David Vigneault]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

For the record, I will say that I did not write this paragraph. That's why we employ people at CSIS who are much more intelligent than I am to make sense of this information.

Seriously, Mr. Chair, what I think is important here is understanding that the cutting-edge research being done at the national microbiology lab, as mentioned by my colleague, is absolutely essential for Canada. The fact that we have scientists working on these issues is in our own national interest. The problem—and the committee has been very clear on this issue—is that there were two individuals who lied to their employer and engaged in activities that were against Canada's national interest.

I think this is where principles of the complexity of the world's national security and international collaboration in science will sometimes clash with each other. It is only by having a very sophisticated approach—and, I think, a better understanding of how these different relationships interact, depending on the issue—that these can be assessed and more weight be put on national security versus international scientific collaboration.

Perhaps the last thing I will say to Mr. Erskine-Smith, through you, Mr. Chair, is that Canada and CSIS have not concluded that the virus jumped out of a lab, as others have said. I think our intelligence community friends in the U.S. have a different perspective on this issue.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I have a last question, but I only have about a minute and a half left.

You mentioned other security agencies in other parts of the world. Did you read this morning's explosive Washington Post story covering the global efforts by the security agency out of India?

[David Vigneault]

Yes, Mr. Chair, I have.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

For all of the time we spend examining the events that took place at the national microbiology lab in Winnipeg—and it's valuable time—don't you think we should spend, as parliamentarians, at least as much time on an international effort? I'm reading here that the operation was approved by India's security agency's chief at the time. Modi's national security adviser was probably aware of it. It was related to an assassination attempt in the U.S. and a successful assassination here in Canada, on Canadian soil.

Should we not spend at least as much time on an issue like that?

[David Vigneault]

Mr. Chair, I will not be so presumptuous as to tell parliamentarians what they should do, but I can tell you, as the director of CSIS, that we and our colleagues in the national security and intelligence community are just as concerned about many files.

The threat environment evolving in Canada right now is probably the worst we've ever seen. I think it is important that all venues we can find in which to discuss threats to Canada and what we can do about them.... It is probably time well spent.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Maybe—just maybe—Conservatives tripped over themselves a little too quickly in accusing the Prime Minister of misstating the facts, when the facts are obviously clear as we sit here today.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Thank you.

Madame Drouin and Monsieur Vigneault, thank you for your time today.

We will now pause briefly, then begin our next panel in a few moments.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

We resume.

I'd like to welcome our witness for the second panel: Dr. Matthew Gilmour, research scientist.

Dr. Gilmour, you have up to five minutes for an opening statement.

[Matthew Gilmour, Research Scientist, As an Individual]

Good evening.

Mr. Chair, I really appreciate the invitation to meet with the committee this evening. I'm quite hopeful to share our perspective and to help the committee in their goal to advance the management of this interface between national security and scientific research.

I'm now based in the U.K., and even just as early as last week, the same issue was in the news. It's a discussion over this elevating expectation on national security, and how that sits alongside the challenges that a lot of scientific institutions face to put that into place based upon their own expertise and the processes that they would feel more comfortable with.

That particular example is with MI5 working across the board with all U.K. universities, trying to find that balance point between the values and practices that would be in place in universities and those expectations on national security. There's a lot of discussion on the balance and how you still pursue things like the values of research integrity, open science, fair access to education and, in the case of universities, income generation in the form of tuition that has been collected from international students.

For me, I think to achieve both, to have this interface between security and scientific innovation, it's essential that there be coordination between these authorities in working together. The scientists have the tools to recognize and then act when these threats are present while still working to keep world-class research occurring within their facilities.

Another U.K. example from 2021 is with the funders of the institute that I'm now at, UK Research and Innovation. They produce guidance called the "trusted research and innovation principles". That team holds an office and actively counsels U.K. research institutes on matters such as data security, protection of intellectual property and consideration of the different values of the nations that they might be working with.

Going back in time, I had the extreme honour from 2015 to 2020 of serving as the scientific director general of Canada's microbiology lab. That team is an exceptional team, one that has, in collaboration with their partners across this country and across the world, faced and tackled a lot of very challenging and complex public health issues. To have these roles, to work at this interface of public health challenges at the global level, the team at the NML has to demonstrate their expertise and allow different scientific disciplines such as infectious disease, but they also have to have a commitment to actively want to lead these particular responses.

It's not just the scientists at the NML; it's a very large team of hundreds of individuals. They're blessed with an engineering team that helps maintain the containment fields and makes sure, when they have mobile labs that go out into the field, that those are well-equipped teams. It's the engineers and it's administrative team as well. Again, I make sure that the resources and materials are available to those teams.

We had activities like working in the Ebola outbreak in west Africa, working on aspects like the chikungunya virus that appeared shortly after the end of the Ebola outbreak and then the COVID-19 response, where the NML worked hand in hand with the Canadian provincial public health laboratories, including Ontario's, to diagnose the first case within Canada. It takes a large degree of coordination amongst all those different disciplines within the building. This is a team that's very expert in consolidating around a particular position.

I know one thing that's really dear to the team at the NML is their placement as a category 4 lab within a downtown urban setting within Winnipeg. They've spent a lot of time to earn the respect and the pride of the city of Winnipeg, because that's part of the community they operate in. I know that, for the team, biosafety is one of their top values, and they have a profound understanding of the risks for both themselves as scientists who are working on these viruses and the risks for the community they're in.

Going towards 2018, to its credit, CSIS was increasing the awareness of these foreign interference risks. They've been working with frontline actors like us at the national microbiology lab to make sure that we had awareness of these different risks, because, certainly for us, the focus that we would have would be effective public health responses. It would have been things like biosafety and, much less so at that time, it would have been awareness of foreign interference risks. We were getting help from CSIS, and I can comfortably say that scientists probably still need help to manage those risks, so I'm appreciative of the committee's work in that regard.

Going back to the U.K., there's a lot of active work between lawmakers and policy-makers to find that balance of that coordination and collaboration between national security and scientific interests. It takes expertise and the practices from both of those fields—security and science—to find that balance and harmony, whereby you still have productive and inspired, yet safe, science.

I'm pleased to be here tonight. How can I help?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ken Hardie]

Thank you very much, Dr. Gilmour.

We'll now go to Mr. Chong for six minutes or less.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Dr. Gilmour, for appearing here.

In the documents that we received from the government, you expressed concerns in some of them about the transfer of the Ebola virus and henipavirus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Those viruses were actually shipped out in late March 2019.

Why were you concerned about the shipments to the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

[Matthew Gilmour]

The basis of my concern wasn't the scientist within the NML. The basis of my concern was actually the recipient laboratory.

I had the privilege over the course of my five-year term at the NML to co-chair the global health security action group laboratory network. That was a G7-plus-Mexico network. All the directors of the different high-containment laboratories came together for it. For the most part, it was a network of trust and awareness that you needed to have people whom you could work with when issues and crises arose. It was so that you had someone at the other end of the phone whom you could talk to.

We met at least twice per year at these different institutes around the world. That was a major component of my own awareness of how other laboratories operated.

Obviously, this particular laboratory was not within that network, so I had very little awareness of the activities in that particular lab. That's why I put the question back to my team to make sure that they went through all of the processes and all of their due diligence to ensure a safe transfer.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

In this network of labs in the G7-plus-one—as you call it, the G7-plus-Mexico—I take it that they are all level 4 labs.

[Matthew Gilmour]

They are, for the most part. Not all of them have active, functional level 4 labs.

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

I would assume it's a network of at least a dozen or so labs, because I assume there are at least two or three level 4 labs in the United States. Collectively, we're talking about a dozen or so level 4 labs whose heads would come together to collaborate and work on—

[Matthew Gilmour]

These were the public health laboratories. There's a similar network for the animal health category 4 laboratories.