The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, on June 17, 2021.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
One begins to see what the Trudeau government was so scared of – why it went to such lengths to conceal documents related to the firing of two scientists from the top-security National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, stonewalling a parliamentary committee and even calling an early election rather than hand them over.
Because as the documents make clear, this was no ordinary national security breach. This was a national security disaster. How it happened, how it went undiscovered for so long, with how serious consequences, must await further investigation. But what we know already – what the government has known for at least three years, and did its best to suppress – is staggering.
Put simply, the documents reveal the NML, a “Level 4″ facility that conducts research on some of the deadliest pathogens known to man, was infiltrated by agents of the government of China. Over the course of several years, in the assessment of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, head of vaccine development Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, used the NML “as a base” in support of China’s biomedical research efforts, passing confidential information, restricted genetic material and even lethal viruses back to China.
According to the documents, Dr. Qiu met, frequently and clandestinely, with Chinese government officials. While working at the NML, she collaborated with top medical researchers in the People’s Liberation Army, made surreptitious trips to China, took money from a Chinese government fund set up to acquire Western technology, and was in the employ of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab from which it is widely suspected the coronavirus leaked.
She and her husband also brought a number of researchers from China into the NML, the documents reveal, including PLA officers, who were subsequently found to have been given access to confidential data, or to have taken materials out of the lab, without authorization.
When questioned, according to CSIS reports, both lied repeatedly, portraying themselves as simple scientists, wholly naive about geopolitics and ignorant of basic security procedures. And when it all blew up, they disappeared. Their whereabouts remain unknown.
As remarkable as the pair’s success was in gaining access to what is supposed to be a top-security facility, what is even more remarkable is the slow-witted response of the authorities at the Public Health Agency of Canada. Suspicions were first raised about Dr. Qiu in September, 2018, when her name appeared on a Chinese patent for an Ebola virus inhibitor – just the sort of thing she was researching at the lab. She claimed her name had been put on the patent without her knowledge.
Further revelations emerged in subsequent months: of students and visitors allowed the run of the lab unescorted, of unauthorized shipments of antibodies, including to China’s National Institute for Food and Drug Control, and more. Yet it was not until July of 2019 that they were removed from the lab and suspended (with pay).
As late as March, 2019, Dr. Qiu was permitted to arrange for samples of the Ebola virus to be shipped to the Wuhan institute. Appearing before a parliamentary committee in 2021, an NML official insisted the shipment followed proper protocols. How’s that? Well, the institute sent a letter requesting them.
CSIS itself seems to have been remarkably trusting, at first. In April, 2020, the worst the agency would say of Dr. Qiu was that she was “susceptible to influence by a foreign state” – not because she “would willingly cooperate with a foreign power knowing that harm would come to Canada,” but merely out of an “overriding faith in the good intentions of other scientists.”
Only on closer inspection did it revise its assessment, after it discovered the couple maintained an undisclosed account at a Chinese bank, and after it discovered Dr. Qiu had applied and been accepted to China’s Thousand Talents Program, set up to recruit researchers in Western countries in the service of China’s technological ambitions, which CSIS warned risked “incentivizing economic espionage and theft of intellectual property.”
Among the other institutions of the People’s Republic of China with which Dr. Qiu was found to have worked was the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), the PLA’s medical research wing, whose areas of interest include, in addition to vaccines and other biodefences, bioweapons. A top AMMS researcher, Feihu Yan, is known to have worked with her at the Winnipeg lab.
Her other research partners include Major-General Chen Wei, the PLA’s top epidemiologist and virologist, and Shi Zhengli, vice-director at the Wuhan Institute. Indeed, CSIS found Dr. Qiu worked with Dr. Shi as head of “overall planning” on an “animal infection” project at the WIV – something about a “synthetic bat filovirus” – at the WIV between June, 2019, and May, 2021.
Another contact, not named in the documents: a research assistant at AMMS, who lived at the Qiu-Cheng home while working as a “restricted visitor” at the NML. CSIS even uncovered a photo of her doing research in her PLA uniform.
Any one of these incidents and connections might be waved away. But the ties are so many, and so suspicious, that they defy innocent explanation. Dr. Qiu is without doubt a world-class research scientist. But what seems to have made her especially valuable to the Chinese government was her access to the Winnipeg lab – believed to be the only Western Level 4 facility China has been able to penetrate.
Over all, CSIS found, “Ms. Qiu developed deep, cooperative relationships with a variety of People’s Republic of China (PRC) institutions and has intentionally transferred scientific knowledge and materials to China in order to benefit the PRC Government, and herself, without regard for the implications to her employer or to Canada’s interests.”
If we are lucky, we may find that the potential for damage from this appalling security breach was never realized, or remained limited. Perhaps China only used the information thus gleaned to develop its own defences against deadly diseases, or to purchase influence in the Third World. But the worst-case scenarios are obvious, and frightening.
And yet we are scarcely closer to knowing how this could have happened than we were three years ago. The government that first claimed it could not release the documents because of privacy concerns, then claimed their release could compromise national security, is even now playing down the severity of what they reveal.
Health Minister Mark Holland dismissed the whole thing as little more than “lax adherence to security protocols” or even a “human resources” matter. “At no time,” he told reporters this week, “did national secrets or information that threatened the security of Canada leave the lab.”
And besides, 2019 was a long, long time ago. China’s effort to influence Canada’s research institutions, Mr. Holland claimed, “was not known to the extent it is today.” It was a simpler age.
Meanwhile, the air is thick with the sounds of stable doors being locked against the exit of horses already flown. PHAC says it has taken steps to tighten security. International research collaborations will be reviewed; partnerships must be vetted. The NML has instituted a “proactive security posture,” requiring that visitors “be accompanied at all times and without exception.”
For its part, the government says it will stop sharing deadly pathogens with China, part of a strict new federal policy on Sensitive Technology Research and Affiliations of Concern. Granting agencies will be barred from funding any research that will be shared with military or security agencies of hostile foreign powers. Which I guess is progress.
But as for holding anybody to account, you can forget about that. Oh, the RCMP is still investigating, as it has been for the past several years, and as it will probably still be doing several years from now. Hands up all those who think the Mounties will ever arrest anyone.
In any event, the more pressing issue, as far as the public interest is concerned, is political accountability. The sort of lax security that appears to have been in force at the NML, like the lax accounting at the Canada Border Services Agency that gave us the ArriveCan debacle, does not come to us out of nowhere. They emerge from a culture.
The existence of such a culture, in turn, is not accidental. It is set by those at the top: by the directors of the agencies in question, to be sure, but more importantly by the minister of the responsible department, and ultimately the Prime Minister. Holding them to account is not a matter for the RCMP, except in the worst cases – and we have seen how far the RCMP has gotten in the matter of SNC-Lavalin.
It is for Parliament, and for Parliament’s committees, to establish political accountability. And yet, as we have seen so often in the past, they lack the institutional power to do so. That is certainly true in a majority government. But it is no less true in a minority, at least when one of the notional opposition parties is prepared to look the other way at government mistakes and misdeeds.
At the time the NDP signed its supply-and-confidence agreement with the Liberals, the party swore up and down it was only about legislation. It would vote to support the government’s agenda, but it would still hold it to account on matters of ethics or abuse of power. On the evidence of this week’s vote by Liberal and NDP members of the Commons committee on ethics and access to information, refusing emergency hearings on the Winnipeg lab mess, that commitment has been abandoned.
But there are other committees. Perhaps the NDP will rediscover its backbone, and its conscience, in time for the next election. Or will it let the Liberals skate through, yet again, without getting answers to what went so very wrong at the NML?