Canada's Prime Minister's Unreciprocated Love Affair With China

"Threats, censorship and intimidation will continue as long as companies, not-for-profits academia, politicians, media and other institutions with vested interests are fearful of angering Beijing."

"Beijing is effectively exporting their authoritarianism overseas."

"Dissidents are not safe. Not at work, not in their homes, not in civil societies, and not in Canada."

"[There is a] persistent lack of knowledge and understanding of these networks of influence within Canadian institutions, politics and society [which permits Chinese infiltration to influence Canada to go under the radar]."

Cherie Wong, executive director, Alliance Canada Hong Kong 

"[China has also expanded its influence through academia, particularly in the area of research and development, often through] ludicrous funding opportunities that trap academics and researchers into long-term coercive relationships [funded by foreign actors]."

"Inadequate federal regulations [have allowed such partnerships to continue]."

"Beijing aims to influence the next generation of technologies to disrupt, dominate, and silence democratic nations, making it clear they do not intend to follow the international order or be a fair and transparent global partner."

Report, Alliance Canada Hong Kong

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of COVID-19, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China on Feb. 3, 2021. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

 

The most recent egregious Canada-China interaction has a sinister air of confidence, marked top secret in a country whose prime minister once infamously and naively stated his admiration for the Chinese Communist Party, able to 'turn on a dime'. Justin Trudeau recalls fondly when as a child he accompanied his father, then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to China, opening Canada up to the CCP, just as he had taken the current prime minister Justin Trudeau in those long-ago days to Cuba to meet with 'Uncle Castro' for whom he long retained a fondness.

As prime minister, Justin Trudeau makes decisions that impact the entire country. As he did, when the novel coronavirus escaped China's borders to make deadly inroads globally, by making the decision that Canada would seek a vaccine in collaboration with a Chinese pharmaceutical company, CanSino, whose CEO and founder had attended a Canadian university and worked for a Canadian pharmaceutical enterprise before returning to China.

Prime Minister Trudeau in tandem with the National Research Council underwrote CanSino Biologics by providing it with Canadian intellectual property on which to base its vaccine for Ebola and SARS-CoV-2. Under the agreement reached with CanSino, Canadian technology would be used as a scaffold on which to build a successful COVID vaccine which was meant to be tested at Dalhousie University, with the NRC helping to produce it in Canada if successful. Beijing decided,  however, to block the vaccine from being shipped to Canada.

Leaving Canada in a vacuum of vaccine acquisition, since no contracts had been signed with reliable pharmaceutical companies capable of producing vaccines. Scrambling, in a late start to acquire vaccines, Canada was late in their use since it was back-of-the-line in contracting for doses to inoculate Canadians against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. But there is far, far more to the Canada-China 'collaboration'. A connection between Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, both high-security labs involved in research with highly lethal pathogens.

 

The head scientist at Winnipeg's Vaccine Development and Antiviral Therapies section in the Special Pathogens Program lab was Xiangguo Qiu, a Chinese virologist. In July of 2019, she and her husband Keding Cheng, as well as several of her Chinese students were escorted out of the lab by the RCMP. No explanation was given while officials stated only that a procedural investigation was underway. There were rumours in circulation of unauthorized shipment of deadly viruses from the laboratory to China; otherwise known as purloined intellectual property.

The two top scientists were eventually fired when the Canadian Security Intelligence Service called for revocation on national security grounds of their security clearance. Another Chinese scientist, Feihu Yan involved in the Winnipeg lab as a researcher with the Chinese military's Academy of Military Medical Sciences, made heads swivel. Andy Ellis, formerly with CSIS noted it was "madness" for the Public Health Agency of Canada, responsible for the Winnipeg laboratory, to cooperate with the People's Liberation Army.

"It is ill-advised. It is the top lab in Canada. It is just incredible naivete on their part", he emphasized. The Public Health Agency of Canada refuses to disclose anything relating to the firing of the two Chinese scientists much less about the lab research or the relationship of the National Microbiology Laboratory with the Wuhan Virology Laboratory, much less the third skeleton in the closet, the involvement of the Chinese military.

In this 2017 file photo, Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli works with other researchers in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory postulates that researchers may have been studying or even modifying such viruses to better understand them, and that a lab accident allowed the virus to escape. (Associated Press)

New life has lately been breathed into the theory of the Wuhan Laboratory studying bat viruses, its close geographical proximity to the fresh wild animal market in Wuhan where suspicion was that the strange new pneumonia-causing virus that had surfaced in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, later identified as a novel coronavirus that moved swiftly to infect large swaths of people in Wuhan, in China, and gradually but quickly the rest of the world, emerged. And COVID-19 was born. Was it a rare virus that crossed the species barrier from animal to human? Or a lab-escapee?

 

Prominent scientists are now insisting that the theory is no longer in the realm of conspiracy, that it is a feasible explanation for the presence of a new and deadly SARS virus. That the Wuhan Virology Laboratory was insufficiently secure and a virus that had been synthesized in the laboratory had somehow escaped, an escape with horrendous consequences -- and that Beijing was irresponsible in trying to hide its noxious presence and in so doing introduced a global threat to human existence.

 

The problem for Canada now, is its links with the laboratory and its obviously compromised position. While U.S. President Biden has authorized a deep investigation of the matter which Beijing most certainly will not cooperate with, in permitting access to the laboratory, to the market confines, to witnesses, to its scientists, to the records that it refused the WHO investigative team access to, the truth will somehow emerge, and Canada's role in the disaster will also emerge, damning its reputation, thanks to a prime minister with ambitions for a robust trade agreement with Beijing and a lack of common sense.

Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, have promoted the theory that the virus emerged from the Wuhan lab rather than naturally through human contact with an infected animal. While initially dismissed by some as a conspiracy theory, now credible scientists are saying a proper investigation needs to be done. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)