Madam Speaker, I will split my time with the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes.
The most recent report of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians confirmed what security officials, academics, activists, dissidents and many elected representatives have been warning for years, that China is one of the “most significant long-term threats to Canada's sovereignty and prosperity” and is increasingly targeting Canada's health, science and technology sector.
In the U.S. in January last year, the chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University was charged in relation to his activities as a so-called strategic scientist at the Wuhan University of Technology in China and as a contractual participant in the Thousand Talents Plan, China's massive attraction, recruitment and cultivation program of high-level scientific talent to the benefit of China's scientific development, economic prosperity and national security. It lures Chinese talent overseas and foreign experts to China for their knowledge and experience and offers rewards for stealing proprietary information. The Canadian NSICOP report says China transfers intellectual property and technologies like AI, quantum technology, 5G, biopharma from other countries for China's military in particular.
Last summer, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service cautioned Canada's universities and research institutions that China uses academic recruitment programs to obtain cutting-edge science, research and technology capacity for the regime's economic and military advantage. A CSIS spokesperson said it is “at the expense of Canada's national interest” and intellectual property capacity “including lost jobs, revenue for public services and a diminished competitive global advantage”.
A Carleton University professor says CSIS has reported 400 companies and research organizations comprising 2,000 individuals in universities, the private sector and research fields including 40 universities across Canada, all 15 main research universities among them about this threat.
In January, here in Canada just four months ago and a year after the charges of the Harvard professor and two Chinese nationals in the U.S., Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the head of vaccine development and anti-viral therapies and her husband, biologist, Dr. Keding Cheng, were fired from the Public Health Agency of Canada having been removed from their work in a special pathogens section of the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg in the summer of 2019.
CSIS had urged PHAC to revoke the scientists' clearances along with an unknown number of Dr. Qiu's students because of national security concerns around their work with China's Wuhan Institute of Virology. Winnipeg's lab is not an ordinary one; it is Canada's top infectious disease facility. The Winnipeg and the Wuhan labs have level 4 scientific designations equipped to deal with the world's deadliest and most dangerous viruses.
It is important to consider the level of the Canadian security clearances held by the government-funded researchers and students who were escorted out of Winnipeg's lab in 2019. Canadian security clearance is granted under three categories: reliability status, secret clearance and top secret clearance, all of which require identity verification and assessments of personal backgrounds, educational and professional credentials, personal and professional references, and credit and criminal record checks.
Due to the top-level information to which secret and top secret clearances enable access, subjects undergo more extensive examination of the previous decade of their activity and a meticulous assessment of reliability and/or loyalty to Canada by CSIS. Secret clearances are valid for 10 years and top secret for only five. What is known without doubt is that a number of scientists from the Winnipeg lab collaborated with scientists from China over several years. Close work between scientists in the Winnipeg and Wuhan labs have resulted in co-published papers and involved trips of scientists from the Winnipeg lab to China and to Wuhan in particular.
There has been association and collaboration with Chinese military scientists, including their access to the Winnipeg lab. It is clear that it is fair to say that the Winnipeg lab did help to build the capacity of the Wuhan lab and it is known that the Winnipeg lab did ship Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Virology Institute four months before the couple was expelled from the lab.
Other than those facts, there are a whole lot more questions than answers. The Public Health Agency of Canada, which has had an outsized role and extraordinary impact on everyday Canadians' lives during the past year and a half, has withheld hundreds of pages of documents related to the information and reasons for firing the two scientists despite repeated requests from MPs.
PHAC says it is “obligated to safeguard sensitive information, particularly in the context of national security and...employee privacy”, but Conservatives are asking for transparency because Canadians must be able to have confidence that the federal government has protected Canada's national security and the safety and security of all Canadians. This disclosure will both help assure Canadians it has done so and allow elected representatives to ensure accountability and determine any policy or legislative gaps where improvement is required.
The Conservative proposal for the House of Commons law clerk to review the material, meet confidentially with MPs on the special Canada-China committee and redact anything that might harm national security or interfere with a criminal investigation before it is made public is responsible, prudent and conscientious.
I have to say personally, having questioned PHAC representatives about the disastrous, unfounded and costly hotel quarantine debacle, and the alleged sexual assault, that I am very concerned with what has evolved to be the wide scope and scale of PHAC's power over the lives, livelihoods, families and businesses of everyday Canadians without much transparency, accountability, checks or scrutiny. Their committee responses were as prepared, repeated, evasive and slick as any skilled politician. On at least one occasion, answers given to a different question later in the meeting directly contradicted earlier responses on the same subject. Requests for information were obfuscated. There were half-hearted claims that additional material, such as the actual evidence and facts to justify and perpetuate a particular policy, would be forthcoming, but they were never delivered.
Canadians, rightfully, want answers. They are reasonably skeptical about what appears to be an opaque institution that has remarkable influence and authority over them and in which it seems turmoil and challenges have been obscured. The head of the lab, the president and two executives have also quit during the past several months. That is why MPs should enable transparency and clarity for all Canadians by compelling PHAC to release the information it is withholding.
Some might question whether this issue merits all this attention, being elevated for debate for an entire day after months of work at a dedicated committee. The warnings in NSICOP reports, from CSIS, the RCMP and media reporting about China's growing and complicated influence and intimidation campaigns around the world explain the gravity. The Conservatives are trying to get answers for Canadians about what has happened here, but the top lab and PHAC officials report to the health minister.
Experts are pleading for legislators, especially in free democracies, to recognize and combat the ever-increasing reach of China's Communist regime. China manipulates and basically secures ownership of poor countries by building critical infrastructure they cannot afford. It victimizes its own citizens and threatens, coerces and bullies expats for the economic knowledge and military benefit of the regime.
In one year, China coerced 680 people worldwide with a stark option: return or kill themselves. Families in China are harassed, threatened and arrested to enforce compliance. Canada's intelligence has said this operation is even carried out here in RCMP offices. The U.S. has made several arrests, while Canadian cabinet ministers and officials simply say that more must be done.
China engages in influence campaigns on politicians worldwide and in economic warfare against developed countries that implement policies to protect their own sovereignty and security. China derides free media and infiltrates social media with millions of state-sponsored actors to spread disinformation for the regime and against detractors.
China methodically carries out foreign interference and espionage, and infiltrates free democracies, threatening the cyber, economic, intellectual and personal security and liberty of citizens. China expands its state-owned companies into the IT and communications networks of countries worldwide, violates privacy, mandates the reporting of information back to China's regime and military, and uses apps and online services for surveillance and monitoring.
Last year in the U.S., more than 1,000 “high-risk graduate students and research scholars” were expelled from universities to counter what it referred to as a “wide-ranging and heavily resourced campaign to acquire sensitive United States technologies and intellectual property, in part to bolster the modernization and capability of its military”.
In 2018, an Australia think tank studied co-authored, peer-reviewed papers by China's military scientists and overseas researchers. Three Canadian universities are in the top 10. That year the former director of CSIS warned that China views Canada as an “easier target”. This clearly should get the attention of Canadians, and serious urgency from Canadian MPs, because Canadians are vulnerable.
The current Prime Minister admires China's basic dictatorship, will not name the genocide of the Uighurs, had an ambassador hold a retreat near concentration camps, gave tens of millions of dollars to China for vaccine research and Huawei research projects, has not banned Huawei like all of Canada's allies, had a foreign affairs minister financed by the state-run Bank of China, and calls anyone who asks questions conspiracy theorists and racists, all while China literally detains Canadians.
Parliament must do its job since the Prime Minister will not.
