Mr. Speaker, Winston Churchill once said, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile—hoping it will eat him last.”
Appeasement is the diplomatic policy of making concessions to an aggressive power hoping to avoid a conflict. In Churchill’s time, he was referring to Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement to Nazi Germany. Chamberlain’s ultimate act of appeasement was in ceding parts of Czechoslovakia to Germany under the 1938 Munich agreement in exchange for Hitler’s promise not to invade the rest of that country. However, in 1939, Hitler did just that.
In 1940, Chamberlain lost the confidence of the house, leading to the prime ministership of Winston Churchill.
Chamberlain emerged from history viewed as a weak, vacillating, indecisive and failed leader, so much so that Churchill quipped, “Poor Neville will come badly out of history.”
Today, as a matter of foreign policy, there can be no bigger challenge than our relationship with China. The litany of foreign policy errors when it comes to China by the Prime Minister is truly astonishing.
First, we had the national embarrassment in the aftermath of the arrest of Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou. Following the arrest, Canada’s ambassador to China and former Liberal cabinet minister John McCallum was unceremoniously fired. His embarrassing remarks included, among other things, how great it would be for Canada if the U.S. extradition request was just simply dropped, alleging that the intent of her arrest was to attempt to leverage trade concessions from China.
These statements completely undermined Canada’s defence of the arrest, namely that Canada is a rule of law country and politicians do not meddle in these sorts of things.
It is clear that when it comes to meddling in cases before the justice system, the Liberal government picks and chooses where it thinks it is appropriate to do so. That was evident when the Prime Minister tried to strong arm his then-minister of justice, the current member for Vancouver Granville, into interfering with the independent prosecutors over charges against SNC Lavalin.
It is no wonder that when we said that Canada was a rule of law nation and that there was nothing the Prime Minister could do in the Wanzhou case, that the Chinese government simply did not believe us.
The actions of the Prime Minister and the then ambassador seriously weakened our credibility. In retaliation for the arrest of Wanzhou, China did two things. It blocked imports of Canadian canola, pork and beef, hurting our farmers and our agriculture industry, and it arbitrarily arrested and detained Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. Those two Canadians remain imprisoned still today.
Jonathan Manthorpe, author of Claws of the Panda, said:
I think this has to be a lesson that you can’t deal with China like any other country that abides by the law and diplomatic norms. And in that respect, we’ve been a bit naive in the past.
The reality is that China is not a friendly regime. Frankly, no better evidence of this exists than the arbitrary detention and trials of the two Michaels. Canada has been completely unable thus far to bring this matter to a positive conclusion in part because our credibility as a nation of laws was weakened by the actions of the Prime Minister in the SNC Lavalin affair.
Then came the revelation that our military had decided to cancel training with the Chinese People's Liberation Army in 2019. I am really not sure who thought this was a good idea in the first place. In retrospect, this seems to be the obvious decision, and yet Global Affairs Canada actually pushed back against the military decision to cancel this in an apparent act of appeasement regarding the two Michaels.
Additionally, while most countries have recognized the perils of doing business with Huawei, the Prime Minister simply will not rule it out.
As well, serious concerns have been expressed about Canadian universities’ co-operation with the Chinese government on research projects. These concerns range from potential disclosure of intellectual property to national security concerns. Again, no action has been take by the Liberal government.
As if this were not all enough for the Prime Minister to be on the highest alert in looking out for Canada's national security interests, now comes the issue at hand in today’s motion.
In a May 20, Globe and Mail article, there was the revelation that scientists working in Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Lab had been collaborating with Chinese military researchers to study and experiment on deadly pathogens.
This is a lab that works with some of the most infectious diseases on the planet. The security of not only the dangerous physical contents of the lab, but the highly sensitive information regarding its activities should be paramount and of the utmost importance. One of the scientists who co-authored some of the studies on this collaboration was reportedly from the People's Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, an obvious red flag, to be sure, if there ever was one.
Even the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has stated that the risk of collaboration with the People's Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences is a “very high risk”.
As if that were not enough, in January of this year, two of the scientists at the Winnipeg lab were fired and escorted out of work by the RCMP after CSIS recommended that their security clearances be revoked on “national security grounds”. CSIS expressed concern over the nature of information being passed on to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Andy Ellis, a former CSIS assistant director, has called all this “madness”, saying it is “ill-advised” and classified the actions of the Public Health Agency of Canada for co-operating with the People's Liberation Army as “incredible naïvete”.
It is incredibly alarming to see the Minister of Foreign Affairs continuously stonewalling questions on this matter. When asked in question period, we kept hearing answers from the minister stating “we are not at liberty to provide any more details at this point.” That just does not cut it. Canadians deserve answers, especially when it comes to matters as serious as these, matters that affect our country's national security.
It should go without saying that Canadians should be rightly concerned when scientists at the top lab in the country are being fired for national security reasons and escorted out by the RCMP. We have government scientists closely collaborating with scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and China’s military, including shipping dangerous Ebola and Henipah viruses to Wuhan. Does the Canadian public not have a right to know what the extent of that co-operation was?
How does a military scientist from the People’s Liberation Army’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences get granted access to work at Canada's National Microbiology Lab anyway?
I have received many questions from members of my community about these issues, as I am sure other members have, and we are trying to get them answers.
It is the duty of the federal government to protect national security and the safety and security of Canadians. By refusing to be transparent and provide answers to these important questions, the government has failed to assure Canadians that it has upheld this duty.
It is the duty of members of the House of Commons and its committees to hold the government to account by investigating and ordering the production of documents. The Special Committee on Canada-China Relations has tried to get this information, but the Public Health Agency of Canada heavily redacted documents and failed to comply with the request of the committee.
That is why we have introduced this motion today, to order the government to produce these documents. Members of that committee have sought to use this power responsibly and in a way that protects national security. This is evident in the motions adopted by the committee on March 31 and May 10, as well as today’s motion, which have been worded to protect national security by having the law clerk review them first.
The government’s repeated refusal to comply with the committee’s orders to produce documents is troubling and continues to raise very serious questions.
The optimistic heady days of “sunny ways” have quickly given way to a cloudy haze. I recall when the Prime Minister proudly proclaimed, “We will make information more accessible requiring transparency to be a fundamental principle.” Apparently when it comes to the Prime Minister’s well-known admiration for China’s dictatorship, transparency becomes invisible.
Given the Prime Minister’s naive and appeasing posture toward the Chinese government, it appears, as Churchill said, that the crocodile may eat us last.
