An image of Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory. Photo by Photo Courtesy of the National Microbiology Laboratory
Canadian public health authorities didn’t have to let the Wuhan Institute of Virology infiltrate and co-opt our country’s highest-security biolab. The warning signs had been there for years, and no one to our knowledge was holding a gun to the heads of the rubber-stampers who authorized a security-threat-flagged scientist’s shipment of live Ebola back to the motherland.
That’s part of why the latest report from the House of Commons committee on China, released Tuesday (conveniently, on the day of the American presidential election), is such a puzzling read. Though a lot of the information contained within has previously trickled into public knowledge, through reporting, committee hearings and released records, the Commons committee’s synthesis shows how Canadian authorities reacted with the haste of a slug — and continue to leave gaping holes in the security of research that can literally be weaponized against human health.
The report sets out a comedy of errors that preceded the 2019 expulsion of scientists Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng, both Canadian citizens from China working at the Winnipeg National Microbiology Lab, who were ousted for “administrative” reasons.
The husband-wife pair was hired back in 2003 and 2006, respectively, but a decade later began showing suspicious links to Chinese research programs. In 2012, wife Qiu began collaborating with a Chinese military virologist specializing in “bio-defence and bio-terrorism.”
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In 2016, she was nominated by a Chinese military official for an “International Cooperation Award,” which nodded to her work with the military bioweapons expert and stated that she “used Canada’s Level 4 Biosecurity Laboratory as a base to assist China to improve its capability to fight highly pathogenic pathogens … and achieved brilliant results.” She published a paper with military-linked colleagues sometime afterward, and became a visiting professor at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences working on infectious disease — a position that she left out of her English CV.
In 2017, PHAC greenlit Qiu to travel to Beijing for a conference — but from there, unbeknownst to PHAC, she travelled to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to present on Ebola vaccines. Later that year, PHAC approved Qiu to train others at the Wuhan lab. Around this time or later, via the Wuhan lab, she applied for the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents Program which incentivizes members to clandestinely send overseas research back to China.
After Qiu signed up, the suspicious activity accelerated. In February 2018, she brought over an employee from the Wuhan lab to join her at the Winnipeg lab. In April, she returned to China to “visit family,” with travel expenses paid for by a Chinese biotech firm. In May, Cheung received protein samples from China labelled “kitchen utensils.”
In April 2018, Qiu and Cheung were finally flagged as possible insider threats after CSIS briefed PHAC on foreign interference.
The warning made its way up the chain at a snail’s pace: PHAC’s national security found a suspicious Chinese patent including Qiu in September; the PHAC president was briefed in December, and ordered a private firm to investigate. The private firm tasked with the job concluded in March 2019 that more investigations were needed (duh). PHAC leadership contemplated an internal investigation and finally called the RCMP in May. CSIS began investigations in June.
In July, the scientists were finally kicked out of the lab.
During the entire time that authorities were groggily waking up to the idea that these top scientists might be working as agents for a foreign government, the scientists accelerated their pace. Qiu flew back to the Wuhan lab — with PHAC’s approval — where she was now a “visiting research scientist.” Qiu’s staff recruit from Wuhun was caught trying to sneak tubes out of the Winnipeg lab. The Winnipeg security began noticing a suspicious number of visitors walking around the lab unattended. Cheng tried to enter the lab with another employee’s passcode. Qiu shipped a live sample of Ebola back to the Wuhan lab — again, with PHAC’s approval.
The final stages of a fatal Ebola infection (that is, about half of all Ebola infections) involve profusely bleeding from one’s eyes, nose, mouth and rectum. It’s absolutely not the kind of virus you want getting into the wrong hands, say, those of an unfriendly government whose modified virus experiments have been “credibly suggested” to have escaped from its labs.
Nevertheless, it was only after the scientists’ exile that a CSIS investigation determined that their continued presence at the Winnipeg lab would pose a national security threat. They were formally fired in 2021, and have since disappeared to who knows where — yes, they were permitted to leave the country after the debacle.
The entire period of infiltration was lined with an attitude of nonchalance by government officials who appeared at the China committee. The Winnipeg lab director at the time defended the lab’s slow response by stating that neither CSIS nor PHAC advised him to kick the scientists out; he handwaved approving the Ebola-by-mail. The PHAC president justified the long timeline with the thoroughness of the investigation.
Only former CSIS director Richard Fadden was the voice of reason: “too long,” was his assessment of the kicking-out.
On the health and research side, the passive attitude seems to go all the way up to the top. Security-wise, Canada brought in a new research policy in January 2024 restricting government funding from supporting research on “sensitive technology” (weapons, surveillance, AI, space, etc.) with any connection to certain suspicious research organizations.
The list of collaborators banned from receiving Canadian funding includes only Chinese, Russian and Iranian schools and military units. Not on the list, however, is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has already benefitted from exploited Canadian research once. It’s also known for possibly being the place that accidentally started a pandemic by letting COVID out of the lab, which doesn’t inspire confidence when it comes to handling our mail-in Ebola.
The House of Commons China committee is wisely recommending that the Wuhan lab be added to the list of research collaborators ineligible for Canadian taxpayer support, and, more wisely, the end to all government research teamwork with China on sensitive matters.
It’s further recommended that Canada come up with a list of “trusted” countries which will be the sole permitted recipients of highly dangerous live viruses that could kill millions if unleashed. Because, it turns out, we didn’t have one.
But under all this is a problem that’s going to take more than a committee to solve. Careless lab directors can still allow suspicious lab staff to send live pathogen samples to unfriendly countries. Research dollars can be siphoned off to support places like the Wuhan lab. Half-measures and painstakingly laggy responses are endemic to this government, and this weakness will continue to make us a prime target.
Xiangguo Qiu’s ouster from the National Microbiology Laboratory in 2019 remained cloaked in mystery until a few days ago. Photo by MCpl Vincent Carbonneau, Rideau Hall/File
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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.
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.
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.
How the investigation and firing of two high-security virus scientists over leaks to China unfolded
Trudeau and the Ottawa elite, in general, have been blind as to Red China’s aggressive hostility and acquisitiveness. The Sidewinder Report, disowned and shredded in a panic by Jean Chretien, gave us fair warning. In this case there may well have been a huge transfer to lethal knowledge by these two Chinese scientists. Of course, the RCMP is “still investigating” — the pyramids were built faster — and we are kept substantially in the dark. — Paul Fromm
Canadians now know why Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng were fired from Canada’s highest security lab more than three years ago
Published Mar 02, 2024 • Last updated 11 hours ago • 10 minute read
Xiangguo Qiu’s ouster from the National Microbiology Laboratory in 2019 remained cloaked in mystery until a few days ago. Photo by MCpl Vincent Carbonneau, Rideau Hall/File
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OTTAWA — After being kept in the dark for years, we now know why Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng were fired from Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Lab (NML), Canada’s highest security lab and the country’s only facility authorized to handle deadly viruses such as Ebola.
The federal government released on Wednesday more than 600 pages of documents, including top-secret CSIS assessments, investigations and internal emails detailing the reasons why the scientists were fired, why the process took so long and why it was shielded in opacity for national security reasons.
Qiu was a prominent scientist educated in China whose research at the NML included pathogens that posed significant risk. She was credited with research breakthroughs on the deadly Ebola virus and awarded a Governor General’s Innovation Award.
Then one day in July 2019, she was suddenly escorted out of the lab and subsequently fired, along with her husband, Keding Cheng, who also worked at the lab. For nearly five years, Canadians were in the dark as to what had happened.
At one point, in 2021, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) was even found in contempt of Parliament for refusing to hand over documents related to the mystery, despite a majority of MPs (not including the Liberals) demanding to see them.
This week, we found out what was being kept so secret: the Canadian Security Intelligence Service alleges that Qiu “developed deep, cooperative relationships with a variety of People’s Republic of China institutions and has intentionally transferred scientific knowledge and materials to China in order to benefit the PRC government.”
She had shipped sensitive materials outside of the national microbiology lab without approval to foreign countries, they alleged. And they accused her of actively covering up, or outright lying, about her affiliations with Chinese institutions. And they allege that Cheng, her husband, participated in leaking secure information and the deception around it.
The National Post reviewed the 600 pages of investigations, assessments and emails, to put together a timeline of how the suspicions first arose, and how the security procedures subsequently played out.
Based on the documents, here’s how it all went down:
September 27, 2018
PHAC is advised that Qiu appeared as a listed inventor of a Chinese patent that may contain scientific information produced at the Canadian Sciences Centre for Human and Animal Health (CSCHAH) in Winnipeg, and that she shared the scientific data without permission. The patent was for an “inhibitor for Ebola virus.”
October 12 and 31, 2018
Allegations surface that Cheng potentially breached security policies regarding students under his supervision who tried to improperly remove laboratory materials from the CSCHAH.
One instance on Oct. 12, 2018, saw an attempted removal of two clear plastic bags, containing 10 vials each, by people known as “restricted visitors.” The incident on Oct. 31, 2018, saw other visitors accompanied by Cheng attempt to leave the CSCHAH with two empty Styrofoam containers.
PHAC’s National Security Management Division contracts a private firm, Presidia Security Consulting, to conduct a fact-finding investigation into allegations involving Qiu and Cheng.
January 27, 2019
Cheng creates a security incident by entering an incorrect passcode when he entered the CSCHAH. The code, it turned out, belonged to someone else.
The National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were escorted out of the lab in July 2019, and later fired. Photo by John Woods/The Canadian Press/File
March 23, 2019
The fact-finding report conducted by Presidia Security Consulting finds that there were “numerous violations” of the IT policy in the labs, including staff signing into computers and then allowing “restricted visitors” to download experimental data onto private Gmail accounts, emailing it to their homes.
The report also reveals that in May 2018, Cheng was sent vials of mouse protein via courier from China marked as “kitchen utensils”. Cheng’s explanation that the broker deliberately mislabelled the package shipped from China for ease of shipping satisfied the investigator.
Regarding Qiu’s name appearing on the Chinese patent, the report found that top PHAC officials said that the likelihood of a researcher’s name appearing on a patent without the researcher being aware of it was “highly improbable” and that misstating a researcher’s name on a patent could rule it as invalid.
Qiu admitted that she had collaborated with the China National Institute for Food and Drug Control, which is attempting to develop an inhibitor to the Ebola virus, and sent them antibodies without an authorization, thus violating rules on intellectual property and material transfer agreement.
The report also indicates that the investigator later learned that other antibodies were transferred to Thomas Jefferson University, a private postsecondary institution in Philadelphia.
“The current situation has the potential to tarnish the reputation of the CSCHAH, the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Minister of Health and is recommended for further investigation to determine the breadth of any breaches of policy,” the report said.
July 5, 2019
Qiu and Cheng are each informed by the vice-president of the Infectious Disease Prevention and Control Branch at PHAC that an administrative investigation into their actions is being launched and that they are to remain home with pay pending the results of the investigation.
“Should it be determined that the allegations against you are founded, administrative and/or disciplinary measures, up to and including termination of employment, may be taken,” the letter said.
The administrative investigation report on Qiu finds that she violated numerous intellectual-property policies set out by PHAC. While she did have permission to provide small amounts of antibodies to trusted people and organizations, she had been doing so without authorization for at least two years.
Qiu was found to have her name on not one, but two Chinese patents, the second being a “detection method,” or test, for Marburg, a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola.
She claimed she had been listed without her knowledge, which made her “angry,” and she believed her research was not patentable because it was too weak.
Management at the National Microbiology Lab was not aware of the work she conducted on the two Chinese projects, the report said.
The report also shows that she “inappropriately disseminated, facilitated or authorized the dissemination of scientific data and other information” including to her personal computer and stored and shared data using unauthorized USB keys, despite being told not to use personal emails and data sharing multiple times.
A separate administrative investigation on Cheng found that he too violated directives on email management and gave access to unauthorized individuals to PHAC’s IT system.
Furthermore, Cheng admitted to conducting work with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in China for a tick virus, which is outside of his scope of work, but said he did it out of his own self-interest, as the virus is deadly in his home province in China. The work was unknown to his supervisors.
The report determined that Cheng had also been “less than honest” about the package labelled kitchen utensils, and the incident “calls into question his honesty and integrity.”
A secret CSIS Act security assessment sent to PHAC’s executive director of security reveals that Qiu and Cheng were listed as co-authors on an NML research paper that included individuals linked to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) in China.
“Online information states AMMS is the highest medical research institution of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and has offensive Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) capabilities,” the document said.
The CSIS assessment of Qiu and Cheng found that, although the service has no reason to suggest that both individuals would “willingly” co-operate with a foreign power, they are both “susceptible to influence by a foreign state” that could result in information or materials leaving the lab.
CSIS assessed that there was a “strong possibility” that both individuals would continue to violate policies and procedures should they regain access to the National Microbiology Lab.
June 30, 2020
CSIS sends another security assessment to PHAC revealing that it has uncovered new information which “strongly calls into question” Qiu’s loyalty to Canada.
Qiu was “associated to multiple ‘talent programs’ administered and funded by various PRC entities, the most prominent one being the ‘Thousand Talents Program (TTP)’.” The TTP recruits Chinese experts from western nations to boost China’s national capabilities in science and technology.
One of the TTP applications according to CSIS declares Qiu as the applicant and the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the declaring entity, stating that her work term was from 2019 to 2022.
TTP participants are given up to $1 million in research subsidies and may enjoy preferential PRC tax and visa treatment, housing subsidies and prioritized medical care in China, the report said.
CSIS also uncovered the existence of an unfinalized employment agreement between Hebei Medical University in China and Qiu from 2018 to 2022. Qiu graduated from an immunology program at Hebei Medical University, which is located in Shijiazhuang.
The agreement stipulated that she would be provided with funding of approximately $1.2 million and that her compensation would be the equivalent of $15,000 per month when onsite
Qiu listed the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Hebei Medical University, China’s National Institute for Food and Drug Control and the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology in CVs that were provided for Chinese audiences, security investigators discovered. But she had omitted her Chinese links on her CV when she provided it to Canadian audiences, including in her applications at PHAC.
CSIS discovered that Qiu was nominated for an “international cooperation award” by China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences for using “Canada’s Level 4 Biosecurity Laboratory as a base to assist China to improve its capability to fight highly-pathogenic pathogens… and achieved brilliant results.”
Finally, CSIS uncovered an airline ticket for Qiu for travel to Beijing in April 2018, booked by an email address associated to CanSino, a Chinese vaccine company.
CSIS concluded that Qiu has developed “deep, cooperative relationships” with PRC institutions and “intentionally transferred scientific knowledge and materials to China in order to benefit the PRC Government, and herself, without regard for the implications to her employer or to Canada’s interests.”
“The Service therefore assesses that Ms. Qiu has engaged, may engage or may be induced to engage in activities that constitute a threat to the security of Canada as defined in the CSIS Act,” it concludes.
July 7, 2020
An updated CSIS security assessment of Cheng in July 2020 “calls into question” his reliability “as it relates to loyalty” given his “close personal and professional relationship” with his wife, Qiu.
The report reveals that Cheng was aware of his wife’s applications to China-sponsored “talent programs,” as well as her associations to PRC military institutes and related individuals, and that he was himself involved in an application for one of these “talent programs” in 2013, although it is unclear what came of it.
CSIS concluded that he could not credibly claim “complete ignorance” of his wife’s activities, as he did in his security interviews with the spy agency, and that he was therefore “not truthful.”
File photo of scientists working in Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory. Photo by Handout/National Microbiology Laboratory
August 5, 2020
Both scientists file grievances to PHAC in which they allege that the investigative and disciplinary processes were in violation of their collective agreement, that they were not afforded procedural fairness, and that they were victims of discrimination because they are Chinese.
They claimed that they were asked specific and personal questions regarding their connections to China as a result of racial profiling, and said they were loyal Canadian citizens.
August 20, 2020
Qiu and Cheng are notified by Health Canada, in separate letters, that their respective security statuses are suspended immediately, as is their pay, pending a review for cause.
PHAC’s vice president of the Infectious Disease Prevention and Control Branch reject both scientists’ grievances in separate letters, arguing that the allegations against them are “significant and complex” and that further consultation and investigation were required as new information emerged.
While the PHAC official sympathized with the “significant emotional toll” experienced as a result of this investigation, the official rejected any notion that the two scientists suffered any prejudice, or financial damages given that they had their full salary and benefits during the entire administrative investigation period.
“With respect to your allegation of discrimination, I can assure you that the employer acted only according to the information that was brought to its attention, and your ethnicity was never a factor in determining the course of action,” the official wrote.
November 30, 2020
A report of the review of Qiu’s security status from PHAC claims there were “frequent inconsistencies” in her statements concerning breached PHAC policies and she “deflected” her links to foreign entities. It said she often claimed a lack of memory about the matters in question and rebutted allegations of improper conduct.
“To this day, despite serious consequences, she refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of her actions on PHAC,” reads the report.
It adds that Qiu has been afforded “ample opportunities to be truthful and trustworthy but continues to make blanket denials, feign ignorance and at times provide explanations that are inconsistent with the evidence gathered.”
“It is assessed that Qiu can no longer be trusted and this poses such a security risk in the workplace that cannot be mitigated.”
As for Cheng, the report states that the information collected reflects “a recurring pattern of questionable judgement that may negatively affect the performance of duties” and may lead to “an inability or unwillingness to safeguard sensitive information, assets or facilities.”
It recommends that PHAC revoke both scientists’ reliability status and secret security clearance.
January 19, 2021
Qiu and Cheng are informed of the revocation of their reliability status and secret security clearances.
January 20, 2021
The Public Health Agency officially terminates both scientists’ employment, effective immediately. National Post
