On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he was invoking the federal Emergencies Act to try to end the protest blockades that have entrapped downtown Ottawa and disrupted international border crossings across the country for weeks.

This is the first time the Act has ever been used, so Maclean’s spoke to Nomi Claire Lazar, a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and author of the book States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies about what this allows the government to do, why the law exists and what are the limitations on its power. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q. When and why was the Emergencies Act created?

A. The Emergencies Act came into force in 1988. It took a lot of debate to design this piece of legislation because it was intended to fix problems in the previous emergency legislation, the War Measures Act, which had been prone to quite a lot of abuse over the years. The War Measures Act came into force in 1914 during the First World War, and it’s infamous for being used during the Second World War to intern Japanese-Canadians. So that abuse was very much in the background, alongside the abuses that took place after the first Prime Minister [Pierre] Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act during the October Crisis. At that time, the RCMP made mass arrests, confiscating property. There was an inquiry and it was generally felt that this legislation was too broad and not in line with the principles in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

So the purpose of the Emergencies Act was to have a piece of emergency legislation that was careful, that had more checks and balances and that could sit alongside the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Q. What types of situations does the Act set out as being appropriate for its use? 

A. There are four different kinds of emergencies in the Emergencies Act. This is one of the things that makes it such a good piece of legislation, because often emergency powers are sort of a blanket thing: you declare an emergency and then you can do lots of stuff. But our emergency legislation ties the available powers to the seriousness and character of the situation.

So the four different types of emergencies are a public welfare emergency that usually pertains to things like natural disaster; then there’s a public order emergency, which is the one we’re under right now, and that pertains to threats to national security; then there’s an international emergency, which might have to do with the threat of invasion; and then finally a war emergency, if we’re in a condition of war. For each one, there are increasing powers that the Governor in Council can use, that are tiered to the situation.

Q. So is it a case that the Emergencies Act provides a broad framework of powers that are available to the federal government, and they then have to tailor or state which ones they’re invoking in a specific case?

A. That’s also a requirement under international law. Canada is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and right in the Act itself, it states that not only should this act sit alongside the Charter, but it should also sit alongside Canada’s obligations under the ICCPR. That means that there are two ways the government has to report which specific powers it’s using. One is to Parliament and the other ultimately will be to the relevant committee of the United Nations. So when a country declares a state of emergency and derogates (deviates from) its duties under the ICCPR, it has to basically confess and state exactly which rights it derogated, and why.

Q. What are the consequences or the enforcement mechanism there?

A. Well, the UN being the UN, there’s not much of an enforcement mechanism. It’s more like a public shaming. And in my research, I’ve found that those kinds of informal mechanisms can be very effective as long as a country’s not already too corrupt, basically.

This act is full of provisions, as well as some formal constraints. For example, the Act does not mention judicial review, and in its silence, it’s probably the case that there can be judicial review of any orders made under the Emergencies Act. But because we’ve never used it, some of this stuff we just don’t know [yet].

Q. What does the Act not do? This became a live issue yesterday when The New York Times reported that Canada was revoking civil liberties, which is not the case. 

A. A state party to the ICCPR can never derogate the right to life, freedom from torture, or freedom of thought for instance. And, importantly for our current circumstance, a state can’t make retroactive laws in an emergency either. That means anyone who donated to the convoy before the emergency order would not be subject to having their assets frozen.

In addition, these powers have to be used in a manner which sits alongside the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, so that means that rights are going to be limited, but they have to be limited in accordance with Section 1 of the Charter, which states that those limitations have to be reasonable in a democratic society.

Q. In this situation with the blockades, what were some of the key powers the federal government said it was invoking?

A. They’re going to use the prohibition of public assembly, they’re going to use the power to limit travel to and from a specified area, they might be designating protected places—so for example the border crossing. They also are empowering the RCMP to enforce bylaws, so instead of having to deputize the RCMP as sort of honourary Ottawa police officers, for example, they can just go ahead and enforce things right on the ground.

And then there are these interesting financial provisions. The idea is that from this point forward, anyone who makes a donation in support of illegal activities like the convoy could have their assets frozen. That would be true on a corporate level [too] for anyone who allows their trucks to participate, and there could be insurance implications as well.

Q. There was also compelling services like tow trucks as well, right?

A. Yes, and that sort of captures some of the absurdity of the situation, that you would invoke the Emergencies Act to get a tow truck to tow trucks. So there are powers in the Emergencies Act to compel people to do work or to use their property for certain ends to resolve the emergency, with due compensation.

Q. In your estimation, what was not possible to do before invoking this Act? Were there capabilities still on the table that weren’t being fully exercised?

A. It’s my view—I might change my mind as more evidence presents itself—that the vast majority of these powers were already available under the provincial state of emergency, and that the problem there was political will to make those orders. And then I think none of us really understand what went wrong with enforcement.

The big thing that is different here are those financial measures and it seems to me that this is suggestive both of a strategy and of the possibility that there’s information that we as the public don’t have access to just yet.  From the strategic perspective, we all know that the protesters are there for a variety of reasons and we know that some of them are violent extremists. So to the extent that you can get as many people as possible to go home—provide non-violent incentives to encourage them to go home before some kind of really serious enforcement is required or violence breaks out—the better. Those financial measures may be quite important along those lines.

Q. We saw the Prime Minister consulting the provinces yesterday in a first ministers meeting before invoking this. Do the provinces have to agree before invoking the Emergencies Act?

A. This is one of the slightly fuzzier areas of the law. My reading is that if the emergency is concentrated in one province, then that province needs to ask for federal help before there’s a national declaration. But because this was not confined to one province, it is a good thing for the Prime Minister to consult, but he does not need the permission of all of the premiers in order to invoke the act.

Q. What are some of the concerns here or critiques about invoking the Act, the slippery slope worries we often see when it comes to civil liberties?

A. The first big issue is does this situation meet the threshold for invocation of this law. I have not formed an opinion about this yet, in part because I do suspect this isn’t just about sweeping up the streets of Ottawa. There might be more going on here in terms of national security, though I don’t have information along those lines, that’s just speculation. So that’s the first concern: does this actually meet the threshold?

The second concern is that emergency powers are always dangerous. Emergencies are dangerous things, not just because of the inherent danger of whatever’s happening but also because they do tend to prompt responses that are sometimes disproportionate because people feel scared and they  want the government to step in strongly. There’s also the risk that certain powers become normalized. This legislation makes that unlikely in many ways, but that has to be on our minds.

Ultimately, in my reading about states of emergency across different countries and different time periods, what comes out is that what makes the big, big difference is citizens holding government to account. So this informal constraint on power, this keeping eyes on the government—make sure that we remember that our civil liberties are precious.

The post What Ottawa can do now under the Emergencies Act appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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Xiangguo Qiu would seem an unlikely character in a tale of international intrigue. A mild-mannered scientist who won accolades for her work fighting the deadly Ebola virus inside Canada’s most secure laboratory, her career was cut short in July 2019, when she and her husband were escorted out of her Winnipeg lab by the RCMP. Since then, she has become a central figure in a major political battle in Ottawa and the star of international conspiracy theories. She has been accused of selling state secrets, contributing to a clandestine Chinese bioweapons program, and even of helping to create COVID-19.

The story of Xiangguo Qiu is still shrouded in mystery, but former colleagues have told Maclean’s her case has more to do with tensions and warring priorities inside the lab than with anything more nefarious. Qiu’s own signature accomplishment, they say, offers some clues as to exactly where it all went wrong.

A medical doctor and biologist, Qiu joined the National Microbiology Lab (NML)—run by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC)—in 2003. Much of her work at NML focused on Ebola. There, she led a project that hoped to prove that lab-grown “monoclonal” antibodies could stop the virus from infecting healthy cells—if their strategy worked, it could be a huge breakthrough in treating other viral infections, from HIV to other coronaviruses to who knows what else. (Her husband, Keding Cheng, also a biologist at the lab, helped the project on occasion.)

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In 2005, Qiu and her colleagues in NML’s Special Pathogen program published a paper outlining how these monoclonal antibodies could work, but their promise was still hypothetical. They had been used to treat cancer and other illnesses for years, but the problem was that viruses like Ebola overran their targets’ immune systems incredibly quickly, and the antibodies just couldn’t act fast enough.

While many of Qiu’s colleagues went off to work on the lab’s more promising Ebola vaccine, she plugged away. “Despite the fact that everybody was saying that it will never work,” says Dr. Gary Kobinger, then the head of the program, “she kept going.”

The NML is Canada’s only biosafety level (BSL) 4 facility—level 4 is the world’s most secure classification, which means the NML can handle the most deadly and dangerous pathogens. The lab exists to pursue research that’s impossible for smaller labs, or unprofitable for private facilities. But being government-run comes with its own drawbacks: in 2010, the NML faced significant budget cuts. Kobinger had to put a number of projects on ice, but he gave Qiu a deadline: “I said, ‘Listen, we’re going to design experiments and we have six months,’ ” he recalls.

With the clock running out, something clicked: Qiu tried introducing three different monoclonal antibodies at the same time, which rapidly flooded the immune system of the lab animal. Monkeys infected with Ebola, on death’s door, staged miraculous recoveries. She called the cocktail of those three antibodies ZMAb.

The relief almost jumps off the page in a paper her team published in 2013: “The results reported here demonstrate for the first time complete protection against lethal [Ebola] infection when treatment is initiated as late as [three days post-infection].” ZMAb was quickly patented by the lab and licensed to a Canadian company.

When an Ebola epidemic began in West Africa in 2014, Health Canada ordered a small batch of ZMAb to be made. Partnering with two Canadian biomanufacturing companies, they produced a small run of antibodies, enough to give frontline medical workers who had been infected on the frontlines. It was the first time the antibodies had been given to a patient infected with Ebola, and it worked. (Years later, one doctor who received ZMAb would visit the lab to thank Qiu and Kobinger for saving his life.)

The government scientists weren’t in it for money or glory: when an American company, Mapp Biopharmaceutical, came forward with their own antibody cocktail, the Winnipeg lab offered to combine the two. They called the resulting treatment ZMapp. Ottawa drew up plans to mass-­produce the cocktail and ship it to West Africa: for $60 million, the Canadian government could have domestically produced enough antibodies—either ZMAb or ZMapp—to treat 40,000 people suffering from Ebola.

But it never happened. Instead of investing in two Canadian companies that were well-placed to manufacture the antibodies, which would have set Canada up as a more serious biomanufacturing hub, Ottawa instead tried to outsource the work to an American company. Canada never acquired a significant amount of the Winnipeg-designed therapy.

The idea lived on, however. The American company Regeneron developed a three-antibody cocktail that has proven remarkably effective in treating Ebola patients. Others have also built on the breakthrough. Monoclonal antibodies used to treat COVID-19 have cut the risk of death by as much as 70 per cent, while the first monoclonal antibody therapy was recently approved to treat and prevent HIV infection. The possibilities are endless.

In 2018, Qiu was awarded a Governor General’s Innovation Award, alongside Kobinger, for developing ZMAb, and heralded for her commitment to “unorthodox, cutting-edge technologies that went against prevailing scientific opinion.”

“So many labs are developing antibody therapies for other diseases,” she said after receiving her award. “I’m very happy. It’s not just that we found a cure for Ebola, but our work is having an impact on the whole scientific community. It has become a blueprint for treating those other infectious diseases.”

“This is what I’m the most excited about,” Kobinger told me in 2019, not long after Qiu was removed from the lab. “I think, to just have had a little contribution to this, was my career.”

Inside the lab, however, there was frustration. A number of those who worked there told Maclean’s that many felt the Special Pathogens program had discovered a way to save tens of thousands of lives, and could have been a world leader in these versatile therapeutics. Instead, the government squandered the opportunity by taking a short-sighted commercial approach.

***

Most Canadians weren’t familiar with Qiu or the NML—not until her 2019 removal from the lab set off a political firestorm.

Details on what, exactly, Qiu is alleged to have done remain murky. PHAC would say only that she was removed from the lab pending an “administrative investigation,” with the department vowing it was “taking steps to resolve it expeditiously.” The RCMP launched its own investigation in 2020, but it remains unclear what, exactly, they are investigating. CSIS confirms they have been contacted by the RCMP, but insists the investigation belongs to the police, not the intelligence agency.

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In the 2½ years since, no charges have been laid. In the absence of any explanation, reporting around the case has focused on Qiu’s connections to China. News outlets fixated on her work with scientists from the Academy of Military Science of the People’s Liberation Army, which does a significant amount of work researching infectious diseases and vaccines. Some reporting focused on the fact that graduate students from the University of Manitoba whose research was supervised by Qiu were also removed from the lab—the university declined to comment on those students, but previously told the CBC they had been “reassigned” to other professors.

There was breathless reporting that she had shipped dangerous viruses, including Ebola, to a BSL-4 lab in Wuhan, China, and ample speculation that she may have handed off Canadian intellectual property to contacts in China.

In Ottawa, opposition parties characterized the firings as a national security crisis and evidence of the Trudeau government’s too-cozy relationship with China. When they demanded documents from PHAC, the attorney general intervened to block their release—doing so, the government argued, could jeopardize future, still hypothetical, court proceedings. As of early 2022, that fight remains unresolved. The parties continue to wrangle over how those records could be released, and who should decide what information to disclose, redact or withhold entirely.

Conspiracy theories percolated on disreputable blogs and disinformation portals—after all, they argued, hadn’t COVID leaked out of that very same Wuhan lab Qiu had collaborated with? Other tenuous allegations were advanced by Erin O’Toole, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, who demanded to know how she got clearance to work at the “secret facility” in Winnipeg in the first place.

It remains an open question: what happened to Dr. Qiu?

***

Former colleagues see clues to Qiu and Cheng’s forced exit in the story of ZMAb.

Under the then-Conservative government, Qiu’s former colleagues say, Ottawa became “obsessed with intellectual property.” That meant research facilities like the NML were pressed to focus on research that could be readily patented, passed off to private companies and commercialized. This led to tensions in the lab between scientists hoping for life-saving breakthroughs and administrators, who were tasked with reducing costs and generating licensing revenue. (Most former colleagues would only speak off the record, so as not to jeopardize their jobs or professional relationships. Qiu herself did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story.)

ZMAb was emblematic of that shift. Plans to continue producing the treatment at home in Canada, with taxpayer money, were abandoned in favour of leaving the project to Mapp Biopharmaceutical, even though Mapp had yet to make any significant quantity of the treatment. A similar fate nearly befell the Ebola vaccine developed by the NML: a 2020 report from researchers at Dalhousie University found “the private sector was not only unnecessary to its development, but also likely slowed it down.”

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In tightly controlled labs like the NML, there is a byzantine set of procedures, protocols and paperwork at the best of times. Some of that is related to safety, given the dangerous materials being handled. Guarding against theft and espionage is also a key concern—it’s why employees at the lab had to be vetted by CSIS for their security clearance before working at the NML.

But the new emphasis on commercialization meant a renewed focus on intellectual property. Scientists, however, felt like they were being asked to draw blood from a stone: researching rare infectious diseases, scientists explained to me, simply isn’t very lucrative or attractive to the private sector. Therapies and vaccines are really only useful during an outbreak, and during a pandemic they are often sold at cost or given away. There was a feeling that this new focus was hobbling what scientists saw as their humanitarian mandate.

“We were so ahead, so ahead on all fronts, to have lost all this advantage,” Kobinger says, is “unfortunate.” It wasn’t long after ZMAb that Kobinger sat down with Qiu to tell her he was quitting the NML. “I said, ‘Qiu, listen, we will lose all this ground,’ ” he recalls. “ ‘If I want to continue to have a chance to contribute, [I need to] just leave and go into academia.’ ” Kobinger left for the Université Laval in 2016. Last year, he was appointed director of the prestigious Galveston National Laboratory, a BSL-4 facility in Texas.

Qiu stayed. And, thanks to her breakthrough on ZMAb, she was receiving calls from around the world, looking to collaborate. There was particular interest from China, which had recently completed work on its first level-4 lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A mix of global ambition and domestic concerns, following the 2003 SARS outbreak, meant Beijing was looking to beef up its domestic virology research.

Canada was bullish on the idea of deeper ties with China. The National Research Council, for example, was happy to provide one of its proprietary cell lines to help Chinese researchers develop new vaccine platforms—even heralding a breakthrough Ebola vaccine in 2018 as a prime example of “strategic R&D collaboration.” (Ottawa would later try to partner with that manufacturer, CanSino, on a COVID-19 vaccine, only to see the deal fall apart when China froze shipments of the vaccine amid political tensions.)

Qiu was an asset in building scientific relationships. She had been in Canada since the mid-’90s, but hailed from Tianjin, China—just south of Beijing—and had obtained her medical degree and master’s of immunology in China. When the World Health Organization asked Canada for personnel to help prepare for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Qiu was chosen to go. Over her years in the lab, she regularly partnered with researchers in China on strategies to beat viral epidemics caused by Ebola and coronaviruses.

One colleague told Maclean’s that Qiu recognized her identity might be a complicating factor—especially in a lab where a security clearance was a must. She worked harder and was especially cautious, the colleague says, “because she was a woman. Because she was Chinese.”

Some of that caution would prove to be warranted. Ottawa’s relationship with China cooled significantly in 2018 with the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, followed by the retaliatory and arbitrary arrests of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. Long-simmering concerns about Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft suddenly rocketed to the forefront.

Qiu wasn’t oblivious. When her name appeared on patents submitted to the China National Intellectual Property Administration—two breakthroughs in treating Ebola and the related Marburg virus, which built on her published work—she quickly informed her bosses to say it was done without her knowledge or permission, a former colleague says. It was a recognition of her contribution to the field of research, Qiu explained, not evidence of her clandestine cooperation with a foreign lab. (Indeed, Qiu regularly collaborated with researchers in China on Ebola countermeasures, as did others in the lab.)

But the focus on commercialization and intellectual property meant another layer of scrutiny: making sure that Canada retained ownership and credit for everything it reasonably could claim ownership and credit for. A former colleague says Qiu, and some of her colleagues, sometimes found themselves at odds with the intellectual property office. While Qiu was “extremely hardworking,” they say she was sometimes guilty of “playing a little bit fast and loose with the rules.” But, they stress, Qiu wasn’t the only one who bristled at the idea of worrying about paperwork and intellectual property rules, as scientists tried to make breakthroughs that promised to save thousands, maybe millions, of lives. “Scientists are a weird bunch,” the former colleague says. “They’re willing to take the [funding] . . . but don’t like the idea of following all the rules.”

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The sudden shift in relations with China likely increased the scrutiny on Qiu’s work, they say. They posit that a combination of an “arrogant attitude toward rule following” and her “not understanding the geopolitical ramifications of cooperating with your home country” may have gotten her into this mess.

Qiu’s former colleagues say the Ebola shipment was, indeed, what got Qiu in trouble with her bosses—not because she secretly collaborated with Beijing, but because she finally ran afoul of the lab’s obsession with intellectual property.

In May 2018, Qiu wrote an email to David Safronetz, head of the Special Pathogens program at the lab. A colleague at a government-run lab in Wuhan, she wrote, “has contacted me for possibility to receive [Nipah] and Ebola viruses from us. If possible, what paper work needs to be done beside the import permit from them and export permit from us? MTA?”

An MTA, or Material Transfer Agreement, governs the terms under which one lab might share a sample with another: it can dictate, for example, that the lab providing the sample owns the material in perpetuity. It could also require that any innovations or discoveries that come as a result of the sample must also be owned by the lab that provided the sample, and set terms on what kind of research could be forbidden.

“I don’t understand why MTA [has to be] in place in this case if PHAC doesn’t request it?” Qiu wrote. Given that the viruses were collected from outbreaks in West Africa, she posited, “no one owns the IP.”

There was a debate in the lab about whether the agreement was necessary. “Personally I don’t believe in MTAs for these materials,” Safronetz wrote. Matthew Gilmour, then head of the NML, weighed in some months later: “[MTAs] would be required, not generic ‘guarantees’ on their storage and usage.” Yet, far from being skeptical or hostile toward the Chinese lab, Qui’s bosses seemed excited by the prospect of building better ties with the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan. “Are there materials that [the Wuhan Institute of Virology] have that we would benefit from receiving? Other [viral hemorrhagic fevers]? High path flu?” Gilmour wrote.

Safronetz assured his boss that the transfer agreements, and all other paperwork, would be filled out. The shipment left Toronto in late March 2019. “We can confirm that we have all records pertaining to the shipment, and that all protocols were followed,” one email reads. The virus sample arrived without serious incident.

The MTA, however, was never signed. That is likely where things went off the rails for Qiu. While she may have believed that no one can own a naturally occurring virus, and one that was collected in West Africa, that is not Canada’s position. Ottawa believes if it comes from a government freezer, it belongs to the government. By not signing an MTA, Canada would likely not be able to lay claim to whatever discoveries the Chinese researchers made using the NML’s sample.

When Iain Stewart, the then-head of PHAC, was called before a parliamentary committee in May 2021 to shed light on the investigation, he stressed that “the fact that the transfer of the viruses took place—which, again, was done in compliance with internal policies and proper approvals—is not connected to the departure of the two employees.” An MTA, he explained, was not explicitly required, as it “is not a safety requirement but a document that provides a mechanism for transferring controlled materials from one party to another, primarily to safeguard intellectual property rights.”

Talking points developed by PHAC, written after Qiu was removed from the lab, read that an MTA was not required, as the agency was looking to promote “relationship building with [the Wuhan Institute of Virology], sharing done to foster robust global health agenda by enabling scientific advancements on pathogens with potentially significant societal consequences.” (Those media lines also tried to downplay Qiu’s work on ZMAb, reading: “PHAC’s contribution to addressing Ebola goes beyond any one individual.”)

The transfer of the virus itself may not have been the reason for their departure, but just four months after the virus was sent to Wuhan, Qiu and Cheng were escorted out of the lab.

Not long after their removal, in 2020, the government began requiring MTAs for all sample transfers, “for clarity to employees and safeguards for our science.”

At least some colleagues inside the lab believe that reasoning, despite PHAC’s carefully worded denial that the firings were not related to the shipment itself, Qiu’s position that Canada had no intellectual property claim to its viral samples is what got her in trouble. One of Qiu’s former colleagues, who spoke to Qiu in the weeks after her removal from the lab, says paperwork for the shipment “not done the right way” was the catalyst for her removal. From there, things “snowballed.”

***

The removal of Qiu and Cheng from the NML could not have come at a worse time. Less than a year later, the Wuhan lab became the centre of suspicions that the COVID-19 virus had originated there and leaked out. Investigations by the World Health Organization and the United States intelligence community have failed to turn up any concrete proof and both concluded that, barring new evidence, the theory that COVID-19 emerged from nature without human involvement is the right one. That did little to assuage skeptics.

At ZeroHedge, a conspiracy website known to peddle Russian government misinformation, Qiu’s removal from the lab became evidence of a broader plot: “Did China Steal Coronavirus From Canada and Weaponize It?” one headline asked.

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Project Evidence, an oft-cited open source repository of supposed proof for the theory that COVID-19 escaped from the lab, devotes an entire page to Qiu. “We ask you, the reader, to use your best judgment to determine if an investigation into a minor clerical or bureacratic [sic] error, such as a misplaced form, would take nearly a year to conclude,” the anonymous authors write, concluding: “We believe it is far more likely that this investigation involves matters of national security.”

In the House of Commons, the Conservative Party has seized on Qiu’s background and links to China as evidence of something nefarious. “Can the Prime Minister tell this House how a person with deep connections to the Chinese military obtained a high-level Canadian security clearance?” Conservative leader Erin O’Toole asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in May 2021.

But the accusations smacked of a conclusion in search of evidence. Qiu’s “deep connections” to the Chinese military consist of a handful of academic papers, published in reputable journals, that she co-authored with scientists working at the Chinese government’s Academy of Military Science.

That sort of cooperation was hardly uncommon prior to the chilling of relations in 2018. According to a document tabled in the House of Commons, there were six different papers published in recent years as collaborations between the Chinese military lab and the NML. There are more than a half-dozen authors listed on those papers, apart from Qiu, who continue to work inside the Government of Canada. One paper does not bear her name at all. (And collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Military Science goes back to before 2015, under the Conservative government in which O’Toole was a minister.)

Conservative members of Parliament have further called Qiu’s removal an “odd coincidence” in light of the COVID-19 outbreak, winking to the theory that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab, and accusing the Trudeau government of a “cover up” and “corruption” in the case.

***

Information may continue to trickle out about Qiu’s case and how Canadian intelligence agencies have probed her possible ties to Beijing. But given how fiercely the Liberal government is fighting to withhold this information, which includes classified material, the full story likely won’t be known for some time. The Conservatives seem determined to weaponize the case to prove the Trudeau government’s alleged inaction in tackling Chinese espionage—the lack of solid evidence is an asset in that effort.

It’s been 2½ years since Qiu and Cheng were removed from the lab. It’s been a year since they were actually fired, in January 2021. And yet they have yet to be formally accused of anything, and it’s not known if they have retained legal counsel. Maclean’s made repeated entreaties to the federal government to discuss Qiu and Cheng’s firing but was refused. It’s not clear whether the couple is still in Canada or whether they have decamped to China, where they still have family.

In Winnipeg, their home stands testament to the limbo the couple have been caught in. Their combined six-figure salaries went toward two things, a former colleague says: their children, and purchasing their dream home. The couple took possession not long before they were escorted from the lab by the RCMP. Sitting in their home after being suspended from the lab, they fretted about making mortgage payments on the $1.2-million property. Qiu told their former coworker: “We have worked all our lives for the house you’re in.”

Qiu’s former colleagues continue to believe that this was a bureaucratic snafu that was allowed to spiral into international imbroglio. As one colleague puts it, laughing: “I never got the impression she was a sleeper agent.” Other observers see the hallmarks of China’s dogged efforts to build its own scientific expertise by stealing others’ work. Whatever the explanation, it’s high time for Ottawa and the RCMP to clarify what, exactly, Qiu is alleged to have done. At a time when Canada sorely needs to maintain trust in its scientists, the mystery of the fired biologists has only allowed conspiracy and suspicion to fester.

---

This article appears in print in the March 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “The Qiu files.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post A brilliant scientist was mysteriously fired from a Winnipeg virus lab. No one knows why. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Anyone who has taken a trip to the grocery store recently has experienced a heavier hit to their wallet than usual. Eggs that rang in at $5.86; 500 grams of extra lean ground beef at $8.80; a loaf of bread for $3.61; a $7.25 bundle of asparagus and a carton of milk at $4.55 all reflect rapid escalation in food prices over the past few months, with a five to seven per cent price hike forecast in 2022. 

This, paired with generally stagnant wages and overall inflation at a 30-year high, has many anxious about how they will feed their families. But for more than five million Canadians already grappling with food insecurity, it’s a bleak reality that could lead to greater reliance on food banks, thrusting them farther to the margins of society.

Food insecurity is a growing problem and one that experts claim should be addressed through policy intervention. It would be reasonable to assume, then, that the issue is top of mind for a recently elected federal government. But the latest batch of so-called “mandate letters” to federal ministers, in which the Prime Minister identifies policy priorities he’d like them to pursue, makes no mention of tackling hunger or food affordability. 

Did the issue fall by the wayside? 

As recently as last year, the Liberals had cited food insecurity as a matter of importance: four ministers found it in their January 2021 mandate letters, and it got a mention in the 2020 Throne Speech. The government insists it still has a plan to address the issue through a number of related policy initiatives, hinting at opportunities in the upcoming budget. 

But advocates and food policy experts worry the Trudeau government has turned its attention elsewhere, noting the issue was absent from its most recent Throne Speech, too.

Melana Roberts, chair of the non-profit Food Secure Canada, says the lack of mention of food security in the mandate letters was a “glaring” omission that suggests the government has lost its sense of urgency to address the issue; she points to the UN Sustainable Development Goals Canada signed onto, which commits the government to end hunger by 2030.

As such, Food Secure Canada is also focusing on politicians outside Liberal tent. The decentralization of power in a minority government, says Roberts, offers opportunity to get hunger and food insecurity onto the federal radar, even if they’re not in the explicit ministerial mandates. Ahead of the most recent election, the organization ran a non-partisan campaign that mobilized constituents across Canada to speak with their federal candidates on issues around food insecurity. Roberts sees it as a launch pad for politicians to propose more informed policy. This could include private member’s bills, motions or parliamentary e-petitions.

“We have an ongoing dialogue with all the different parties to ensure that robust solutions are being put forward that are backed by community leadership to address root causes and see the kind of change that people are more than ready for,” she says. 

Food Secure Canada and other advocates have called on Ottawa to recognize food as a human right. But narrower goals are well within reach, they say. In an analysis of recent mandate letters, Robert’s group was critical of the government failing to outline food insecurity reduction targets, or committing to build resilient local food systems.  

 The organization’s report, however, was supportive of the government’s intent to develop a national school food policy, working towards a national nutritious meal program. The Liberals had first proposed a variation of this in its 2019 budget, saying they would create a “national school meal program.” 

Despite omission of food security from ministers’ to-do lists, the government claims it has other policies in place to address the issue. An emailed statement from a spokesperson for Karina Gould, the minister of families, children and social development, pointed to its latest mandate letter directive to develop a national school food policy in promoting food security. But it said the government was pouring its resources into broader initiatives like delivering its poverty reduction strategy, implementing a community services recovery fund for charities and non-profits and reducing regulated child-care fees to $10 a day. 

The spokesperson also mentioned existing measures like the Canada Child Benefit, Old Age Security Pension and the Emergency Food Security Fund for food banks. “At its core, food insecurity is a function of income and poverty,” the statement went on, adding that the government is focused on making life more affordable for Canadians. “As we emerge from the pandemic, these are the same priorities that will form the foundation of Budget 2022.”

Still, as it stands, the NDP is the only party with influence in Parliament that highlighted food security in its recent election platform: among other things, it promised to develop a national food policy. The party has also received credit for pushing income measures earlier in the pandemic that relieved hunger, such as the $2,000 monthly CERB payments, and a wage subsidy for businesses. With the balance of power in the Commons, say advocates like Roberts, the party is well-positioned to bolster policy.

Seasoned researchers, like Valerie Tarasuk, aren’t optimistic that the government’s current policy and proposals will be enough to alleviate the problem. She too was disappointed by the omission of food insecurity and hunger from the mandate letters, but not surprised. 

“I don’t think they get it— at least the political leaders, I don’t think they have a good understanding of food insecurity,” she says. “The behaviour through the last couple years suggests that.” 

Tarasuk, who leads PROOF, an interdisciplinary research team investigating household food insecurity in Canada, says the government shouldn’t be cutting cheques to food banks and charities if it wants to get to the root of the problem—a reference to the federal Emergency Food Security Fund and the Community Services Recovery Fund. 

“Things are really bad in terms of the sheer magnitude of people that are food insecure,” she says. “I think things are going to get harder and we’ll see an eroding of health around physical or metabolic issues related to diet and stress.”   

Tarasuk says the only intervention that’s been documented to have an impact on food insecurity has been income-based transfers, adding that the development of a basic income would be a positive step. Since that isn’t outlined in the mandate letters, she suggests the government take a look at its poverty reduction strategy and find ways to patch up existing social safety nets to ensure Canadians have enough income to meet their basic needs. 

Still, with no sign of food insecurity rates or grocery prices falling soon, these troubles will define life for many Canadians as they navigate another year of the pandemic. But for families scraping by, and the advocates who support them, the pressure to find some solution is mounting. Not too long ago, they had a reason to hope for robust action on the part of Ottawa to tackle a growing problem. That hope is starting to fade.

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