At least they are consistent
In shutting down an ethics committee probe into just how it came to pass that two Beijing-linked scientists managed to get away with dangerously compromising security at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, at least the Trudeau government is being consistent.
Ever since coming to power in 2015, the Liberals have chosen to hide the scope and extent of Beijing’s ever-expanding influence, interference and infiltration operations in Canada. By acts of obstruction, distraction and filibuster, the pattern is by now easily predictable. There’s nothing surprising about it anymore. The pattern played out exactly as you would imagine in the Winnipeg lab case.
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In their zeal to keep the public in the dark about the goings-on at the top-security national infections diseases laboratory, the Liberals went to extraordinary lengths, not least an historic defiance of the convention of Parliamentary supremacy to the point of mounting a court challenge to thwart an order from the Speaker of the House of Commons to release documents relating to the affair.
It was only because a panel of judges eventually found that contrary to the Trudeau government’s claims about the too-sensitive nature of the documents — 600 pages in all — the barricade it built was mostly to protect itself from public embarrassment.
And it was only by releasing those documents that Canadians were permitted last week to learn that four years ago, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service had determined that research scientist Xiangguo Qiu, a Public Health Canada employee at the lab, had been engaging in clandestine activity to the benefit of Xi Jinping’s regime by secretly sending scientific findings and materials to China.
As far back as 2018, Qiu’s husband Keding Cheng, also a Public Health Canada employee, was found to have allowed access to the Canadian Science Centre for Human and Animal Health by students he was supposed to be supervising. The students were observed trying to remove laboratory materials. Until they were both fired in 2021, Qiu and Cheng routinely violated security protocols and ethical conduct codes, and consistently lied about their unauthorized intimacies with sketchy Chinese state institutions and agencies.
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CSIS determined that Cheng was stubbornly untruthful when subjected to questioning, and his responses to CSIS queries were “simply not credible, which reflects adversely on his personal trustworthiness and therefore his basic reliability, the primary building block of security clearance.” As for Qiu, her disregard for basic security protocols posed “a very serious and credible danger to the government of Canada as a whole,” CSIS found.
Just how these two managed to acquire security clearances in the first place is just one question that remains unanswered.
You’d think the Trudeau government would want the public to be well aware of this scandal, illustrating as it does the extreme national-security peril involved in any collaboration with the shadowy world of Chinese state agencies. These collaborations pose a threat to Canada’s national interests that Ottawa claims it wants Canadians — particularly Canadian scientists and university researchers — to better understand, and to guard against.
Instead, the Liberal government persists even now in keeping the public in the dark, by way of teaming with the New Democrats to roadblock an ethics committee probe into the Winnipeg lab affair.
It was only because of its minority position in the House of Commons back in 2019 that the Liberals failed in their efforts to block the establishment of a special standing committee to inquire into the weirdly opaque Canada-China relationship that Trudeau had cultivated and nurtured in the lead-up to Beijing’s hostage-diplomacy abduction of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
Until then, the matter of Beijing’s vastly expanding shadow over Liberal fundraising, candidate-selection, trade policy and diplomatic priorities was held to be best left to the “experts” from Dominic Barton’s disgraced McKinsey empire and the palm-greasers at the Canada-China Business Council. The pattern seemed to break, but the Canada-China relations committee quickly found itself mired in gridlocks by Liberal members determined to turn the subject back to more parochial matters, and to make excuses based on the presumed implications for the Kovrig-Spavor kidnapping, and to level insinuations that it was “racist” merely to inquire too closely into Beijing’s proxies and their rumoured election shenanigans.
It took years of Liberal ambuscades and transparently bogus pretexts before Canada’s Five Eyes partners finally managed to arm-twist Ottawa to get with the program and at least bar China’s “national champion” telecom Huawei from the core structure of Canada’s fifth-generation (5G) internet rollout.
It took several months of explosive revelations about warnings from CSIS and other agencies to the effect that Beijing really was actively involved in monkey wrenching the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the Liberals’ benefit before Trudeau decided for appearances’ sake to conjure something to impede calls for a public inquiry. The gambit was a “independent special rapporteur” whitewash undertaken by David Johnston, an old Trudeau family friend, and an especially solicitous and high-profile Canadian friend of China.
When that didn’t work, faced with the demands of several majority votes in the House of Commons, Team Trudeau managed to construct a public inquiry that so far shows every sign that it will extend as much in the way of protection to Beijing’s Liberal-friendly mandarin bloc proxies in Canada as to the Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, expatriate Chinese democrats and Falun Gong practitioners those same well-to-do proxies have been bullying, browbeating and intimidating all these years.
So best of luck to any Parliamentarians who would want an Ethics Committee probe or any other such open inquiry into how the hell the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg ended up a sieve of intellectual-property patents for Beijing’s benefit, and an open buffet for Beijing’s ravenous appetite for top-secret information about infectious diseases.
Any such initiative would allow Canadians to know things the Liberal government does not want any of us to know, and the pattern with these things is so predictable it’s becoming downright boring.
National Post
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