Juno News - June 17, 2024


Is Canada too soft on espionage？


Episode Stats

Length

13 minutes

Words per Minute

165.5037

Word Count

2,190

Sentence Count

7

Hate Speech Sentences

7


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I want to move on to another healthcare adjacent piece we have you may recall in Canada you may
00:00:15.760 have forgotten by now actually there was that big scandal a couple of years back when you had these
00:00:20.400 two scientists affiliated with the Chinese military that were working at Canada's level 4
00:00:26.000 lab the national microbiology lab in Winnipeg they were fired police escorted them out and
00:00:33.360 the government was then so so so transparent about all of the oh wait nope sorry I think they actually
00:00:40.360 tried to cover it up and fought their own speaker of the house in court to prevent any information
00:00:46.100 coming out of that that sounds more right yeah it's amazing how little we know even years later
00:00:52.580 about what exactly went down there the RCMP claim they are still in the process of investigating it
00:00:59.240 this whole saga was very adequately captured by a series over at the C2C journal now this piece I
00:01:08.720 think was quite fascinating the scandal at Canada's national microbiology laboratory it's called the
00:01:15.120 scientists who came in from the cold Peter Sean Taylor who wrote this over at C2C journal joins me
00:01:20.420 now Peter good to talk to you again thanks for coming on today oh it's uh always a pleasure to
00:01:24.920 be here Andrew the I this is one of these stories where you know front page news one day just seems to
00:01:31.180 have become a distant memory within a couple and I mean even when I read your piece I you know I've had
00:01:36.540 you know many many other news stories pop up on my radar sins and it was like oh yeah we never really
00:01:41.300 did get to the bottom of that did we no well you've got a you need a program for all the national
00:01:46.780 security scandals going on and uh and this one which I think in any other era would um would consume
00:01:54.880 us for months and months as you're right it was a week or two and it was uh disappeared and now it's
00:02:01.080 been replaced with the Chinese government interference in the 2019-2021 election and then our MPs uh um spying on
00:02:11.580 on Canada so we've uh had a huge cycle of these sorts of national security crises um but I mean
00:02:19.940 the Winnipeg lab scandal to me is really um quite concerning and and and speaks to to many just
00:02:28.840 disconcerting things going on in Canada right now and it's a bit of a shame perhaps that we've uh
00:02:34.060 it's dropped so low on uh the the attention span of the country one of the things not that I believe
00:02:40.120 Canada should ever aspire to be like China the old you know line of Justin Trudeau's admiring their
00:02:45.240 their basic dictatorship but there is an incredible double standard there and the way China deals with
00:02:50.260 as you note in your piece even minor security infractions I mean remember the whole two Michaels
00:02:54.920 thing uh came about because China accused these men of spying and then you contrast that with uh you
00:03:01.320 know the way that Chinese espionage attempts in Canada are treated and it is an afterthought I mean
00:03:06.940 police are still investigating with no sign of whether they'll ever do anything resembling a
00:03:11.340 charge and again I'm not saying we should strive to be like China but man if the roles were reversed
00:03:16.400 I I would uh you know I would be praying non-stop for whatever Canadian was implicated in spying in a
00:03:23.540 Chinese lab well I don't know that it's aspiring to to to be like China but but surely any country
00:03:30.240 that's uh concerned for its own well-being is going to want to crack down on spies at least send a signal
00:03:38.080 to the rest of the world that this isn't uh behavior that we condone but but what did happen in the
00:03:43.520 example of these two scientists well um you know we we found out in in 2018 that there was something
00:03:51.700 suspicious going on it took us a year and a half to take away their um uh take away their security
00:04:00.260 clearance it took two and a half years to to actually fire them and then when we had what seems
00:04:06.340 to me pretty clear proof that they were spies in the conventional sense that they were taking Canadian
00:04:12.660 secrets and giving them to another country um we didn't even bother to arrest them and and it appears
00:04:19.940 that we we just let them go uh back to China where they seem to be living quite comfortable lives
00:04:25.380 working in their uh preferred occupations uh the fact that they did leave during a COVID lockdown when
00:04:32.900 when China had um claimed its borders were closed actually suggests that there must have been
00:04:39.300 there could have been some kind of deal between Canada and China to quietly let them uh depart um so
00:04:47.140 I mean that's really concerning any country you know spying should be unacceptable to any country
00:04:54.740 you don't have to aspire to China to say that we should crack down on spies um we're just sort of
00:05:00.900 failing at the very basic level of protecting our own national security well and one thing we've seen
00:05:06.980 in the past and I'd say the government has become reluctantly harsher on China in the last couple of
00:05:12.980 years probably post to Michael's but but going back as early as you know basically the beginning of the
00:05:18.980 Trudeau government there so much was overlooked because the government just wanted to get this
00:05:24.820 trade deal with China and uh China was you know not won over by this China exploited this as they do
00:05:31.300 every other vulnerability in the world absolutely and I think you could argue that deference is still
00:05:37.460 ongoing uh today when you look at the the the foreign interference um uh inquiry uh that uh
00:05:48.660 is it deliberate or is it uh inadvertent to just briefings the thesis briefings uh seem to be just
00:05:55.220 routinely ignored um within the bureaucracy and the the liberal government um because they don't put very
00:06:03.460 much um interest in it so um whether that's uh deferring to Chinese interests or it's simply dropping
00:06:11.620 the ball uh it's unclear but but there there is no real attention in Canada to to take national
00:06:18.500 security issues seriously and that and that's what really comes through strongly in this Winnipeg lab
00:06:23.540 scandal I spoke to Sam Cooper formerly of global news now with the bureau about foreign interference last
00:06:30.260 week and and one of the points he raised is that we just don't have the legal mechanisms available
00:06:35.860 to do what we need to do to protect Canada from foreign interference now that's looking at it in an
00:06:40.340 election context in a democracy context but if we apply that same thesis here do we have here a breakdown
00:06:49.220 of the system or do we have a system that is just not built to deal with this well I mean the easiest
00:06:55.540 way to answer that question is look what they do in the US um and and ask your counterfactual not
00:07:01.460 what China would have done if they had discovered this breach at their highest uh security biohazard
00:07:08.020 laboratory but ask what would have happened in the US if uh it had been discovered that a couple of
00:07:13.780 Chinese researchers were sending secrets back um to China uh they would have been arrested there would
00:07:20.580 have been DOJ and FBI news releases there would have been um all sorts of of attention paid there
00:07:27.860 it would have properly being treated as a scandal um there's a long list of you know one of the the
00:07:35.300 background issues in this was whether the two scientists were participants in the what's called the
00:07:40.740 thousand talents program in China where uh western researchers are paid quite handsomely to transfer
00:07:47.940 knowledge they gain back to China by whatever means it's a thinly veiled form of industrial espionage
00:07:55.380 um the FBI has a very active uh campaign cracking down on anyone and the the former um head of
00:08:04.340 Harvard's uh chemistry department was recently uh uh last year was um sentenced for participating in a
00:08:11.700 talents um program so during the Trump era they they canceled the visas of a thousand uh Chinese
00:08:19.860 researchers who had uh connections back to Chinese military institutions which was again the case in the
00:08:27.380 the Winnipeg scandal here um so look at uh our closest neighbor and they don't have any uh time for this
00:08:36.900 kind of business uh that they deal with it very harshly and I think that's the example we should
00:08:43.860 should be following um there's no question that the Americans wouldn't stand for this at all
00:08:50.580 so moving forward here are you an optimist or a pessimist on this because I know you're doing your
00:08:56.340 I think very important work in drawing attention to this but you know even from the conservatives we
00:09:00.820 just don't hear this issue discussed anymore as you mentioned there have been a lot of
00:09:05.140 sexier and fresher issues that have taken the oxygen out and you know do you think this is
00:09:10.020 possible to fix basically well that's I mean I like to think of myself as an optimist in general uh
00:09:18.020 maybe my my work uh experience intrudes on that um uh well I guess you know the government itself
00:09:27.300 claims that they've fixed all the uh security lapses that have been identified by this issue and that
00:09:33.380 they're checking uh people's security clearance much more tightly so perhaps there's been a within the
00:09:39.940 bureaucracy itself because that's one of the parts of this scandal is the the bureaucracy basically let
00:09:45.300 these two scientists particularly shoe um do whatever they want because they valued the the research
00:09:51.940 and the international collaboration much more highly than they did their their role as a national security
00:09:56.980 institution so perhaps there's been some uh salutary effect on the bureaucracy uh I find it hard to
00:10:05.380 believe that there's been a real change of thinking at the federal liberal level they're so wedded to this idea
00:10:12.980 that China is um is going to let them in uh so to speak at some point and they're going to um reap all the
00:10:20.340 benefits from all the the deference uh for all this time so uh at that broader level I think it's going to take
00:10:29.220 a change in government to really elevate national security um matters in Canada but but it is possible
00:10:36.020 that at the micro level um security procedures have been toughened up at not only the Winnipeg lab
00:10:41.940 but perhaps other uh sensitive federal institutions around the country yeah and and I think people
00:10:47.940 need to understand at the very least the institutional vulnerabilities that do exist to
00:10:53.140 China I mean academia is a tremendous example of this the number of these so-called research
00:10:57.780 partnerships that have uh put uh Chinese researchers and again state-affiliated military
00:11:03.700 affiliated researchers on key projects here and I noted that when the foreign registry was floated
00:11:11.220 in politics you had universities in Canada last week saying oh well we think this might jeopardize
00:11:16.020 our research partnerships you're like exactly that's the point of it mm-hmm yes I mean it's certainly
00:11:22.580 not just uh government it's private sector it's universities um I mean Xu and Cheng were were also
00:11:30.740 jointly appointed at the University of Manitoba um interestingly enough though Manitoba uh cut ties with
00:11:38.660 them almost immediately after these revelation revelations were made um and they were escorted
00:11:45.940 off the the lab uh property whereas it you know as we discussed it took two and a half years to
00:11:51.780 actually fire them from the federal government um so yeah it's it's not just the federal government that's
00:11:57.860 it's it's all over Canada I mean it's all over all western um nations um uh there was a study out of
00:12:05.700 Australia about uh the level of um Chinese collaboration with universities and Canada ranked third in total
00:12:14.340 after the U.S. and the U.K. um so we are certainly a object of interest uh from China at the at the
00:12:22.180 university level and and yeah as you say there's all sorts of things not just access to Ebola virus but
00:12:28.260 but all sorts of sensitive um and cutting-edge technology that that that may be vulnerable
00:12:34.900 it is a fascinating read it's a lengthy read but I think a very important one in c2c journal over uh different
00:12:41.060 parts there that's how much uh content you had to work with here and I feel you probably still could
00:12:46.020 have gone on and turned this into a book as well uh the second part came out a couple of weeks back
00:12:50.420 the vials and the damage done Canada's national microbiology laboratory scandal uh Peter Sean
00:12:56.420 Taylor from c2c journal always good to talk to you thanks for coming on today yeah thanks for having
00:13:00.900 me Andrew anytime thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton show support the program by donating to true
00:13:06.020 true north at www.tnc.news