The Liberal government has reached an agreement with the opposition to set up a task force linked to the dismissal of two scientists at the top security lab in Winnipeg, Canada and the shipment of the deadly virus to China. and gave MPs full access to previously withheld documents.
Government House Speaker Mark Holland says his Conservative, NDP and Bloc Quebec counterparts are behind the eviction of Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng from the National Institute of Microbiology. (NML) January 2021.
The couple were first escorted from the NML facility in July 2019 and stripped of their security clearance.controversy later arose documents obtained Qiu was responsible for transporting the deadly Ebola and Henipa viruses to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2019, according to CBC News via Access to Information Request.
Holland said globe and mail On November 1, the task force’s MPs also planned to refer to documents on virus movement, sparking public speculation that the two scientists were engaged in espionage, but Canadian Public Health The agency (PHAC) previously denied any connection with the shipment. Qiu’s eviction from the lab.
Former PHAC President Ian Stewart testified before the House Canada-China Committee, refusing to disclose why the two scientists were fired, and the Liberal government said: Speaker of the House Anthony Rota I will sue the court for trying to obtain relevant information. Efforts to get courts to ban disclosure of the documents were later dropped after Congress was dissolved when federal elections were called last year.
“What they have access to is all the documents that have not been completely redacted. They will be able to see behind the curtain on all sides,” Holland said. Members of parliament on the special committee must sign an oath of confidentiality and must view classified documents in a secure facility, he added.
The Conservatives initially rejected a proposal last December to set up a special committee to review the documents, instead turning to a regular committee of parliamentarians to decide which material to release in order to preserve the Liberal government. wanted to hand over. Be accountable. The NDP has accepted the proposal, the Netherlands said in April this year.
Under the special committee, any dispute over what to reveal to Canadians will be decided by a panel of three retired judges who have not yet been elected, Grove reported.
Conservative foreign policy commentator Michael Chong says his party still wants it to go through regular committees and has tried to revive efforts in the 43rd Congress before the 2021 elections. However, the government refused.
“Liberals have left us with no choice but to pursue this route,” he told The Globe.
Collaboration with China
In a June 2021 interview with the NTD, Chong said he knows seven federal scientists at NML who are working with Chinese scientists on “some of the world’s most dangerous viruses and pathogens.” said.
“There has been a clear violation of national security and military researchers from the People’s Republic of China were allowed into the lab by the government. We need to understand why it happened and prevent it from happening again. There is,” he told The Globe.
“This was a serious security breach.”
Dismissed scientist Qiu said, Ebola research, was first published in December 2018, three months after she began exporting the virus to China. This research has received grants from a number of Chinese state institutions, including the Ministry of Science and Technology of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The lead author of the study, Wang Hua Li, is affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a Chinese military medical institution based in Beijing, CBC reported.
Qiu came to Canada in 1996 for postgraduate studies, but she remained affiliated with a university in Tianjin, China, where she worked as a physician and virologist. She visited China at least her five times between her 2017 and her 2018. That includes her one time to train Chinese scientists and engineers at her CBC, a newly accredited Level 4 lab. report October 2019.
Prior to his dismissal, he was head of the Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies Section of NML’s Special Pathogen Program. She is known for developing her ZMapp, a drug used to treat depression. Ebola virus It killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa between 2014 and 2016.
follow
Andrew Chen is a reporter for the Epoch Times based in Toronto.