Health Minister Mark Holland gestures to reporters as he takes questions in the lobby of the House of Commons in Ottawa on February 28.Adrian Wilde/Canadian Press
It seems careless to let foreign researchers roam unattended in high-security microbiology laboratories, as one of the scientists fired in 2020, Keding Chen, did. It seems to me.
Even more careless and suspicious to Canada’s Security Intelligence Service was that his wife and colleague, Qiu Xiangguo, had not told his employer that he had detoured to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Or that she applied to a Chinese “talent program” that Canada’s spy agency suspects has links to commercial espionage.
In a broader sense, here in Canada, the whole thing was an example of carelessness.
How did that happen? No one was looking, not really. Indeed, small things such as violations of email protocols went unnoticed. But the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg was not alert to espionage. In some ways, neither was the Canadian government. It was not aligned with the Chinese government’s broader efforts to profit from scientific and academic research.
Health Minister Mark Holland echoed similar sentiments on Wednesday, telling reporters that security at the institute was unnecessarily lax, but that no one should be fired. Mr Holland said that when Dr Chen first returned in 2019, people did not have as much awareness of potential interference from China.
He’s also right. The Canadian government was not fully aware. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party was not enthused by it. They were unable to utilize all of the major institutions of government. It was certainly late. Let’s hope it’s here now.
To be fair, hundreds of pages released Wednesday show that in this case, even the professionally dubious people at CSIS who were called in to investigate the two respected scientists initially The inspection found nothing more sinister than sloppy compliance with regulations.
It took more work before the spies discovered a series of connections to institutions of the People’s Republic, unreported contacts in China, and a connection to a scientist who was a major general in the People’s Liberation Army. Documents show that when asked for clarification, CSIS interviewers deemed the two Chinese-born Canadian scientists, who had been in the country since the 1990s, not to be trusted. .
It is not yet clear what information the two men leaked to foreigners. The document includes CSIS’s assessment that scientific knowledge has been provided to China, but also suggests the concerns are about intellectual property and commercial espionage. CSIS also warned that Dr. Qiu was working with entities linked to the Chinese military for “potentially lethal military uses.”
All of this is embarrassing for the lab, for the Public Health Agency of Canada, and for the Canadian government.
And it turns out that the national security concerns that kept the government resisting releasing the documents for years were primarily about their embarrassment.
We don’t know exactly what was edited under the supervision of an all-party group of MPs and judges, but we now know for sure that almost everything that was previously censored went too far. know.
The publication of a CSIS assessment that concluded two Canadian scientists posed a risk but found no evidence of criminal activity was unusual. However, it was clear from what was made public that information could be disclosed without jeopardizing the government’s claims of danger to national security and international relations. The Chinese government certainly knows that CSIS has some suspicions regarding its activities.
Perhaps the only thing that could really hurt Canada’s international relations is that, even in 2019, allies might find Canada’s naivety a little uneasy.
The document suggests a bit of unquestioning trust in transferring pathogens and inviting people into high-security labs, which is very Canadian. There is little sense that the government as a whole could have been more careless.
Holland’s claim that people weren’t into espionage in 2019 is probably true, and not very reassuring. There were certainly signs of widespread Chinese espionage even before then. Since then, it has made headlines and now there is a public inquiry into foreign interference. Carelessness has consequences.