Science and Research Committee on Sept. 20th, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Welcome to meeting number 53 of the Standing Committee on Science and Research.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the Standing Orders. Members are in person in this room, and we have a witness via Zoom.

I will make a few comments for the benefit of the witness. Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. Click on the microphone icon to activate your mike. When speaking, speak slowly and clearly for the interpreters. Also, when you're not speaking, your mike should be on mute. You also have the option of interpretation for your convenience. You can choose floor, English or French.

Although this room is equipped with a powerful audio system, feedback can occur, so be very careful with your earphone and the microphone. Keep them apart so we can prevent injuries to our interpreters. It's great to see our witness using a House of Commons-approved device, which is now mandatory. The sound checks have been done, so we should be good to go on that front. In accordance with the committee's routine motion concerning connection tests for witnesses, I can let you know that the witness has completed all the checks that are needed.

To the members, I remind you to address your comments through the chair.

Welcome to Larry Maguire. It's good to have you joining us as a substitute on the committee. We also have Heath MacDonald joining us as a sub.

Thank you to our witnesses for preparing to be here, both in person and virtually, to help us with the study we're working on.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(i) and the motion adopted by the committee on Tuesday, June 6, 2023, the committee will commence its study on the use of federal government research and development grants, funds and contributions by Canadian universities and research institutions in partnerships with entities connected to the People's Republic of China. I wish we had a short version of that, but even taking one letter would take me a while.

It's my pleasure to welcome our witnesses today. From Alliance Canada Hong Kong, we have Cherie Wong, who is the executive director. Welcome back to the House of Commons as a witness. Benjamin Fung, welcome to the House of Commons for your first time. Benjamin is a Canada research chair and a professor at McGill University.

We also have, joining us from the University of Alberta—and I think I heard you say you are in British Columbia right now—Gordon Houlden, who is a professor and also works with the China Institute.

You will each have five minutes for your opening remarks. I believe the five minutes are going to be split between our first witnesses.

You can start with your presentation.

[Benjamin Fung, Canada Research Chair and Professor, McGill University, Alliance Canada Hong Kong]

Good afternoon, Chair and committee members.

I am a professor and Canada research chair at McGill University. My research interests include AI, cybersecurity, and malware analysis.

The CCP and Chinese state-affiliated companies have expressed strong interest in my research. In the past years, a large Chinese 5G company repeatedly approached me for different collaborations.

In 2018, a Chinese company attempted to recruit me as a consultant for their AI team. That company offered three times—yes, three times—my salary to work for them as a consultant while remaining a professor at McGill. Out of curiosity, I asked them, “What do you want me to do?” Their response was, “You just need to reply to our emails.”

In Chinese, this recruitment strategy is called “feed, trap and kill”. They first use lucrative offers to attract their targets. Once a professor relies on their funding, they will start making unreasonable requests, including transferring IP rights, getting sensitive data or asking the professor to say something that may not be true.

After I rejected their offer, they contacted me every one or two years to offer different types of collaborations. They also started to approach my graduate students. Fortunately, none of my students have joined the company.

Through the China Scholarship Council, CSC, many international students from China are fully funded to study and participate in research in Canada. Not many people understand that international students face undue pressure in funding agreements with the Chinese government. If the students violate a rule or refuse to follow instructions, the Chinese government will ask their family to pay back the scholarship.

As a professor, I fully understand and respect the importance of academic freedom, but universities have the responsibility to explain the risks to professors who take CSC-sponsored students into their research teams. Some of the risks can be mitigated if university research officers are educated in identifying foreign interference and foreign state entities. I'm happy to share other CCP infiltrations in the academic community. Thank you.

Now I will pass the floor to Cherie.

[Cherie Wong, Executive Director, Alliance Canada Hong Kong]

Mr. Chair, I have witnessed Beijing's influence in Canadian academia and the research sector, having heard through ACHK from these concerned community members, and also through my own observations as a graduate student in the sociology and anthropology department at Carleton University.

On the surface, the soft sciences may not directly contribute to Beijing's technological and military ambitions, but what we're seeing is the Chinese party state weaving other regime security objectives such as elite capture, censorship, disinformation and narrative discursion into these areas.

I'd like to stress this important point: While Chinese interference is gaining significant scrutiny in Canada, Beijing will not be the only foreign principal interested in Canadian research. We must create country-agnostic solutions to address vulnerabilities in academia.

Whether they are domestic or international students, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kongers are experiencing transnational surveillance and fear of reprisal on university campuses. International students have also expressed their concerns that embassies, consulates and their home governments might revoke study permits or scholarships for unfavourable views, actions or inactions.

Academic freedom requires ongoing work to proactively adapt to and meet new challenges as they arise. Canada must strengthen its academic and research environment, which will require whole-of-society collaboration with universities, research institutions, the private sector and student unions. When collaborating with individuals outside of Canada, we must also consider the risk and the intention of our international partners.

Stronger privacy and data protection laws can prevent Canadians' sensitive data from being transferred, exported or sold to foreign actors, and can encourage Canadian universities and research institutions to keep university servers and research data in Canada, as well as to implement stronger cybersecurity measures and policies on campus.

I strongly encourage the committee to review Alliance Canada Hong Kong's previous report, “In Plain Sight”, particularly the chapter “Academic Influence and Vulnerability of Intellectual Property Transfer”.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you very much. You might want to include that and send it to the clerk so we can have it on file.

We'll go to Professor Houlden, from the University of Alberta, for five minutes, please.

[Gordon Houlden, Professor and Director Emeritus, University of Alberta - China Institute]

Thank you very much.

Chair, I intend to use my full five minutes, if that's possible. Don't hesitate to cut me off, of course.

I wish to thank the chair and the members of the committee for this opportunity. It's always an honour to speak to our House of Commons.

The topic of research security has gained in profile and significance in pace with the rise of the PRC to global status as a near peer to the United States in terms of national power. The reality that China is a potential adversary to Canada, combined with China's sharply different political system, requires that attention be paid to risks that may arise from the leakage of Canadian intellectual property and know-how from our leading post-secondary institutions and corporate research laboratories.

In May of this year, I presented to the Government of Alberta a comprehensive confidential report on academic research security, which they had commissioned and which took several months of research. The subject, as you know and as you've already heard this morning, is complex, as is often the case in international relations, and our G7 allies have also paid much closer attention to this issue as well.

However, a policy response requires careful examination and thought in order to avoid unintended consequences. In academic relationships with China, the emphasis should be on the protection but also the promotion of Canadian interests. These interests include advancing Canada's S and T prowess, while protecting and safeguarding our research accomplishments.

Now in my 37th year of full-time work on China as both a diplomat and an academic, I am wary of simplistic approaches towards a state as complex as China.

China now graduates roughly twice the number of university graduates as the United States, but approximately eight times as many STEM graduates—science, technology, engineering and mathematics. These numbers, projected over several years, have given the PRC a world-class research capacity, further bolstered by the network of private high-tech firms and state and corporate research laboratories. That advantage will grow.

Chinese universities and research labs are lavishly supported with state funds. We see the PRC's S and T development perhaps most dramatically in the Chinese space program, with a planned lunar base, a permanent earth-orbiting space station and Mars missions, but Chinese health research is also one of the factors behind the reality that China's life expectancy now exceeds that of the United States. Several decades ago, in Hong Kong, where I was serving in our mission, my son's use of his hand was restored after an injury by an application of the early PRC development of microsurgery techniques, which are now in broad international application.

The point is that we need to draw from China as much advanced knowledge as possible while minimizing risks associated with sensitive technologies that either involve security risks to Canada or are needed to protect our own accomplishments from theft. My premise is that cutting off all federal funding to co-operative research with China risks isolating Canadian researchers from key S and T developments within China to the detriment of our own research, particularly if we are not in alignment with our allies.

The tricky part is not whether we should fund projects in co-operation with Chinese researchers, but whether the co-operation is, in each case, in Canada's net interest. In my opinion, the Canadian government, led by ISED, has the capacity to lead on the evaluation of funding proposals with the involvement of CSIS, GAC, DND and other agencies and also taking outside advice from our own researchers and our allies as necessary.

What is urgently needed, I believe, is the development within ISED of a list of problematic PRC entities—and this may already be in process—such as the PLA-dominated national University of Science and Technology, where research collaboration carries clear risks. This list of problematic research should be paired with a list of problematic research topics that would exclude any shared research on those topics no matter the Chinese partner.

Our allies are doing this. When I called on the U.S. State Department in Washington in late 2022, I was told that the overarching U.S. government approach to scientific co-operation with China was to “promote and protect”: that is, to continue to promote academic research with the PRC, but to be vigilant in protecting U.S. research and researchers.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of medical research in the world, has not cut off funding of joint U.S.-China medical research. What they have done instead is implement controls on the nature of research and administrative measures to ensure that U.S. and PRC researchers comply with NIH regulations, because there have been cases where this has not been the case.

In Europe, Germany, France, the U.K. and the EU itself have not stopped research co-operation with China. They have, rather, proposed or implemented measures to reduce risks involving sensitive technologies that are key to either European security or the health of European research institutions and high-tech companies.

I commend to you the excellent—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

I'm sorry. I'm going to have to cut you off right there.

[Gordon Houlden]

Absolutely. I'll stop right there.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

We almost got to the end of your presentation. Hopefully, we can work that into some of your answers. Thank you.

Thank you to all of our witnesses for getting us going on this.

Now I'll turn it over to Corey Tochor from the Conservatives for six minutes, please.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

To the presenters, thank you for being here today.

I'm going to ask a series of questions. Everyone is welcome to provide their answers in a written brief if they don't get a chance to answer the questions here today.

Benjamin Fung, do you think we need a foreign agent registry in Canada, yes or no?

[Benjamin Fung]

Yes, definitely. A foreign registry would help.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Given the obvious urgency of this issue, do you think the federal government is moving quickly enough to establish a foreign agent registry?

[Benjamin Fung]

I believe it is already being actively discussed at different levels. Whether it's fast enough, I'm not sure.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

In your testimony, you talked about the analogy of “feed, trap and kill”. You experienced a bit of this when there was an offer of financial compensation three times your salary. Is that the “feed” part?

[Benjamin Fung]

That's the “feed” part. I see other professors falling to the other two steps.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Talk about the next two steps in a bit more detail.

[Benjamin Fung]

It's a typical strategy that the Chinese government often uses to recruit researchers. Once a professor has the funding, they will start expanding their team. Let's say they will hire more Ph.D. students and more graduate students. A Ph.D. student typically takes four to five years to complete their degree. After one or two years, as professors, we rely on that funding. We rely on that company to keep providing that funding; otherwise, we cannot support the Ph.D. students. That's the moment. That is the trap. That's the moment when the company or the CCP government may ask the professor to do something that may go against their own will.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Now, unfortunately, the last term was “kill”.

[Benjamin Fung]

I don't really mean harming the professor, but basically saying something that is not true or ruining the reputation of the professor by saying something that is not true.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Former CSIS counter-intelligence officer Michel Juneau-Katsuya said that if the national counterinterference office promised in the budget this spring ever gets off the ground, it should report directly to the House of Commons rather than to a minister. It's a bit of inside baseball, but the difference is that the House of Commons represents all 338 ridings and all of Canada. A minister will be tied to reporting to his or her boss: the Prime Minister.

Would you agree that if this gets off the ground, it should report to all members of Parliament, not just to the minister and the party of the day?

[Benjamin Fung]

I'm not familiar with the internal process, so I cannot really comment on that. However, for CSIS, I would like to see more action, not just a one-way direction of collecting information.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

During the last election, we heard a lot about WeChat and some of the communications going on in that platform.

Are you on that social media platform?

[Benjamin Fung]

I don't use WeChat, but I have looked into it. Some of my research is working on that direction of disinformation.

We see that during election times, some of the WeChat groups are very active. Many WeChat groups are just ordinary WeChat groups. They talk about going to dinner, going to a barbeque or other leisure activities. During election times, sometimes a different group of people will emerge and start talking about, promoting or going against specific candidates. That's what we have observed in the group.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

I understand that you're an expert in cybersecurity and data mining is one of your areas of expertise.

Are there risks to students' academic privacy from a PRC presence on campus?

[Benjamin Fung]

It depends. When students arrive in Canada.... It depends on where they get their funding. If they are CSC-sponsored, then I would say the risk is higher.

It depends on the topic they're working on. For example, I sometimes do take students from China. I have an array of projects that I can choose from. I can carefully assign a topic to different types of students. This is what I'm doing. For other professors, I'm not sure. When they have CSC-sponsored students, some of those students work like regular graduate students from Canada. I don't see the difference between them.

[Corey Tochor, Conservative, Saskatoon—University, SK]

Have you seen agents or employees of Huawei on campus, interacting with staff or students on different research projects?