LILLEY: Trudeau suing the House of Commons to keep lab firings of Chinese secret

LILLEY: Trudeau suing the House of Commons to keep lab firings of Chinese secret

A Commons committee is seeking documents related to the firing of two scientists from Winnipeg's National Microbiology Laboratory

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Publishing date:

Jun 24, 2021 

President of the Public Health Agency of Canada Iain Stewart, right, approaches the bar in the House of Commons to be admonished by the Speaker of the House of Commons Anthony Rota on

 Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Monday, June 21, 2021. 

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What exactly is Justin Trudeau trying to hide when it comes to the firing of two scientists from our national microbiology lab?

On Wednesday, the Trudeau government filed a lawsuit against the Speaker of the House of Commons in Federal Court.

The reason for the lawsuit is to have the court issue an order sealing documents demanded by the House through a vote earlier this month.

The Commons committee on Canada-China relations has been asking for documents related to the firing of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

The pair, along with a group of students from China, were escorted out of the lab in July 2019 and their security clearance was revoked.

At that point little was said, but eventually it became clear that CSIS and the RCMP had been involved in an investigation.

In January 2021, it was revealed that the pair were fired after an intervention from CSIS.

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While still at the lab, Dr. Qiu was involved in shipping samples of the Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

There was also the sharing of other information between the lab the Wuhan Institute.

This week the National Post reported Dr. Qiu is listed as one of the inventors on two patents filed in Beijing by the Chinese government in 2017 and 2019 related to the Ebola and Marburg viruses.

It is illegal for Canadian civil servants to file a patent outside the country without permission from the minister they report to.

There are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding these two former civil servants, questions the government clearly doesn’t want to answer.

After ignoring several requests from the committee to turn over documents, the House of Commons voted last week to order the papers released.