Reasons for lab expulsions must be made public By: Editorial Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Monday, Jun. 21, 2021

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/06/2021 (1283 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The police turned up at the federal government’s Winnipeg virology laboratory on Arlington Street in July 2019 and marched two leading scientists out of the building. The Chinese husband-and-wife team of Xiangguo Chiu and Keding Cheng were dismissed in January this year.

It is high time for the government to tell the country what happened. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers have ducked and bobbed and weaved around the matter but have never disclosed what was going on and why two top scientists were abruptly kicked out of Canada’s leading centre for the study of the most dangerous pathogens.

The opposition parties in the House of Commons have been turning up the heat in their quest for explanations. Most recently, the opposition parties, which among them hold a majority of seats in the Commons, voted to reprimand Iain Stewart, president of the Public Health Agency of Canada, for his refusal to deliver documents that might cast light on the case. Mr. Stewart has been president of PHAC since September 2020 and was previously president of the National Research Council.

Mr. Trudeau and his ministers, courageously throwing Mr. Stewart under the bus, have been steering clear of the case. From the little information made public so far, it seems that the government may have failed to protect the Winnipeg laboratory from Chinese espionage.

The government officials’ story is that their delicate concern for privacy prevents them from telling the country how badly they mismanaged Canada’s top Level 4 laboratory. Since the facility is a key link in Canada’s defences against viral diseases such as the current COVID-19 epidemic, that answer is not good enough.

Scientific inquiry depends on international collaboration. Drug-makers were able to design vaccines for COVID-19 because virologists in many countries had already pooled their information about the way coronaviruses attack their victims and because Chinese scientists quickly found and published genetic information about the virus that appeared in Wuhan in 2019.

Management of an outfit such as the Winnipeg virology lab requires a sharp eye to distinguish between fruitful pooling of scientific discoveries and simple theft of proprietary information. Scientific progress can be strengthened when top scientists from around the world come here to collaborate with their Canadian colleagues.

The government is going to great lengths to maintain a cloak of secrecy over its management of the Winnipeg laboratory. The harder it strives to prevent disclosure, the more the public will suspect that something disgraceful is being concealed.

The Canadian public deserves assurance that the government knows how to join in international scientific collaboration without simply letting the Chinese government and Chinese armed forces scoop up western science and use it to build national scientific machinery that will aggrandize China and weaken Canada and its allies.

The government is going to great lengths to maintain a cloak of secrecy over its management of the Winnipeg laboratory. The harder it strives to prevent disclosure, the more the public will suspect that something disgraceful is being concealed.

The government should stop looking for ways to conceal and start looking for ways to own up to what happened at the Winnipeg laboratory in 2019. It should satisfy the country that it does know how to play in the big leagues of 21st-century science.

Eventually, if the concealment continues, there may have to be a criminal trial or a formal inquiry to discover the facts. By then, the Winnipeg laboratory’s reputation may have been fatally wounded and Canada’s role in virology research may have been diminished. A better solution is prompt voluntary disclosure.