The Liberal government has reached an agreement with opposition parties to create a special committee, giving MPs complete access to previously withheld documents in relation to the firing of two scientists from Canada’s highest-security laboratory in Winnipeg and shipments of deadly viruses to China.
Government House Leader Speaker Mark Holland said his Conservative, NDP, and Bloc Québécois counterparts have signed a memorandum of understanding that will allow MPs on the special committee to learn the reasons behind the eviction of Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng from the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in January 2021.
The couple was first escorted out of the NML facilities in July 2019 and were
stripped of their security clearances. Controversies were raised after
documents obtained by CBC News through an Access to Information request showed Qiu was in charge of shipping the deadly Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in 2019.
Holland told
The Globe and Mail on Nov. 1 that MPs on the special committee will also see documents involving the virus transfers, which raised public speculations that the two scientists were engaged in espionage activities, though the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) previously denied connections of the shipment and Qiu’s eviction from the lab.
Former
PHAC President Iain Stewart, testifying before the House Canada-China committee, had refused to disclose why the two scientists were fired, and the Liberal government even took
House Speaker Anthony Rota to court for trying to obtain relevant information. The effort to have the court prohibit the disclosure of the documents was later dropped after the Parliament was dissolved when the federal election was called last year.
“What they will have access to is all documents unredacted in their totality. They will be able to see behind the curtain on every aspect,” Holland said. MPs on the special committee must sign an oath of secrecy and will be required to view the classified documents at a secure facility, he added.
The Conservatives had
initially rejected the proposal of forming an ad hoc committee to review the documents last December, preferring that they be turned over to a regular committee of MPs who would decide what material would be released publicly, in an attempt to hold the Liberal government accountable. The NDP had accepted the proposal, Holland said this April.
Under the special committee, any disputes about what is to be released to Canadians will be decided by a panel of three retired judges, who have yet to be selected, reported the Globe.
Conservative foreign affairs critic
Michael Chong said his party still prefers going through a regular committee, and sought to revive their efforts in the 43rd Parliament—before the 2021 election—but the government refused.
“The Liberals left us no other option but to pursue this route,” he told the Globe.
Collaborations With China
In a June 2021 interview with NTD, Chong said he was aware of seven federal scientists at the NML who worked with Chinese scientists on “some of the world’s most dangerous viruses and pathogens.”
“Clearly there were national security breaches and military researchers from the People’s Republic of China were given admittance to the lab by the government, and we need to understand why that happened and ensure it doesn’t happen again,” he told the Globe.
“It was a major security breach.”
The dismissed scientist Qiu had co-authored an
Ebola study, first published in December 2018, three months after she began exporting the viruses to China. The study received grants from a number of Chinese state bodies, including the Ministry of Science and Technology of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The lead author of the study, Hualei Wang, is affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a Chinese military medical institute based in Beijing, CBC reported.
Qiu came to Canada for graduate studies in 1996, but she remains affiliated with the universities in Tianjin, China, where she had worked as a medical doctor and virologist. She made at least five trips to China between 2017 and 2018, including one time to train Chinese scientists and technicians at a newly certified Level 4 lab, CBC
reported in October 2019.
Prior to her dismissal, Qiu was the head of the Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies Section in the Special Pathogens Program at the NML. She is known for the development of ZMapp, a drug used for the treatment of the
Ebola virus that caused the death of over 11,000 people in West Africa between 2014 and 2016.
