MPs to meet to consider hearings on Winnipeg lab revelations

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Opposition parties have called a parliamentary committee meeting for Tuesday to consider hearings that would probe revelations about two Canadian scientists fired from the country’s top infectious disease lab in 2021.

Declassified documents tabled in the House of Commons in late February showed Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng provided confidential scientific information to China and that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service found Dr. Qiu’s association with multiple talent-recruitment programs run by Chinese authorities.

Investigators for the government ultimately concluded that Dr. Qiu represented “a realistic and credible threat to Canada’s economic security” and that Mr. Cheng posed “a very serious and credible security danger to the government of Canada.”

The Globe and Mail revealed this past week that the pair are now working in China, and Dr. Qiu is collaborating with researchers from the People’s Liberation Army. The couple are now using pseudonyms Sandra Chiu and Kaiting Cheng, different from the names they used at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

A motion by Conservative foreign-affairs critic Michael Chong will be debated at a meeting of the Canada-China committee Tuesday. A number of Conservative MPs, as well as NDP foreign-affairs critic Heather McPherson and Bloc Québécois foreign-affairs critic Stéphane Bergeron, signed a letter requesting that the committee be convened. They will be meeting despite a break week for the Commons next week.

NDP director of communications Alana Cahill said Ms. McPherson intends to support the Chong motion.

Property records show Dr. Qiu and Mr. Cheng still co-own two houses in Winnipeg’s South Pointe neighbourhood, a wealthy suburban area surrounded by parks and interconnecting creeks, about a 30-minute drive from the city’s downtown. They also own an undeveloped property in cottage country in Gimli, Man. They are listed as co-owners as of a title search on March 6.

The two scientists were escorted out of the National Microbiology Laboratory in July, 2019, and later had their security clearances revoked. They were fired in January, 2021.

They have been under an RCMP national-security investigation since May, 2019.

Online records indicate that the two former Winnipeg scientists have begun to work and publish under new names, conducting research at prestigious institutions in China and alongside some of that country’s most noted scientists.

At China’s University of Science and Technology, a school with close ties to the People’s Liberation Army, Sandra Chiu uses an e-mail address that includes the name “qiu” and first initial “x.”

Internet archives show that somewhere between January, 2020, and June, 2023, a one-paragraph biography of Dr. Qiu at Virologica Sinica, a scientific journal where she was on the editorial board, becomes a biography of Sandra Chiu, with no change to the wording.