“Canada’s China Class”

Here is the funniest thing said by any MP on Parliament Hill this week: “We share the outrage on foreign interference. We know this is an issue. This is a challenge we have to address.”

The hilarious speaker was Iqra Khalid, the Liberal MP for Mississauga-Erin Mills, whose declaration came just after Liberal and NDP members had voted together to shut down a Commons ethics probe into how two Public Health Agency of Canada scientists, Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Kedie Cheng, came to pass some of this country’s most sensitive secrets to Communist China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

One begins to see what the Trudeau government was so scared of – why it went to such lengths to conceal documents related to the firing of two scientists from the top-security National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, stonewalling a parliamentary committee and even calling an early election rather than hand them over.

Because as the documents make clear, this was no ordinary national security breach. This was a national security disaster. How it happened, how it went undiscovered for so long, with how serious consequences, must await further investigation. But what we know already – what the government has known for at least three years, and did its best to suppress – is staggering.

Michael Spavor has reached a settlement with the Canadian government over his detention in China.

Says it all.

@fancypants_s https://t.co/rk3VUWkCuY

— Patti Jo (@TheSupeHero) March 7, 2024

h/t Patti Jo

A Chinese couple working at Canada’s highest biosecurity lab were secretly sending information to Beijing and mailed live Ebola to China, a bombshell investigation has found.

In a 600-page report released this week by the Canadian intelligence service, the pair were also accused of allowing visitors into the lab who tried to leave carrying plastic bags of vials containing an unknown substance.

Dr Xiangguo Qiu and Dr Keding Cheng were found to have left visitors with ties to the Chinese government and military unsupervised at the facility.

h/t Canucklehead

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 former federal executive criticized for his failure to disclose records of security breaches at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg retired just weeks before cabinet tabled the long-awaited documents on Feb. 28.

Iain Stewart became the first manager to be censured by Parliament since 1891. He retired as National Research Council president after more than six years in the post.

It seems careless to let uncleared foreign researchers roam unattended in a high-security microbiology lab, as one of the scientists fired in 2020, Keding Cheng, did.

To the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, it seemed even more careless, and suspicious, that his wife and colleague, Xiangguo Qiu, hadn’t told her employers she took a side trip to the

Wuhan Institute of Virology. Or that she had applied to a “talent program” in China that the Canadian spy agency suspected was connected to commercial espionage.

In the larger sense, the whole thing was an example of carelessness, here in Canada.

There is an old saying, “It is always darkest before the dawn.” The meaning behind this axiom is that things may look dire, but they will soon turn for the better.

When it comes to the federal government and national security, however, I fear only more darkness for the foreseeable future.

Facing questions about how scientists who were intentionally sharing information with China were cleared to work at a Winnipeg lab studying deadly diseases, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau deflected criticism to his chief political rival and accused the Conservative leader of weaponizing national security.

During a Thursday news conference in Thunder Bay, Ont., Trudeau was asked how scientists working on high-security viruses at the Winnipeg-based National Microbiology Lab were able to collaborate with the People’s Republic of China.

After a years-long fight for access, the federal government dumped hundreds of pages of documents about the dismissal of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng. The two were marched out of the facility in July 2019 and were stripped of their security clearances. Their dismissals were announced in January 2021.

🇨🇦🚨🚨🚨This might be one of the biggest coverups in Canadian History by Justin Trudeau?🤔

And he is caught red handed yet again endangering Canada’sdemocracy, security and health.‼️

Now the Beijing interference in our elections makes perfect sense!☝🏻 pic.twitter.com/LVGkKOi9DP

— Contrarian (@ContrarianTribe) February 29, 2024