Ottawa doesn’t screen research grant applicants

OTTAWA • Applicants for Canada’s federal research grants aren’t screened for affiliation with China’s Thousand Talents Program, an initiative implicated in leaks to China from Canada’s infectious disease lab and which CSIS has warned poses a threat of economic espionage to research institutions.

The Thousand Talents Program is one of several Beijing uses to recruit well-placed people from Chinese expatriate communities working in science and technology fields in other countries, in a bid to increase Chinese research and development.

Documents released last month revealed the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) believed Xiangguo Qiu, a since-fired doctor at Canada’s microbiology lab in Winnipeg, had been part of the program and had multiple undeclared associations with Chinese universities.

But the federal government’s granting councils, which hand out more than $2 billion in research funding every year, don’t specifically screen for researchers connected to China’s program.

National Post asked the Canada Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council about their policies and received an identical statement from all three agencies.

“Canada’s research ecosystem must be as open as possible and as secure as necessary as researchers need to collaborate with reliable and trusted partners to drive innovation,” reads the statement from David Coulombe with CIHR. “While the federal granting agencies do not collect data regarding participation in foreign talent and recruitment programs, such as China’s Thousand Talents program, they do provide advice and guidance on how researchers can mitigate their research security risks.”

Qiu was a celebrated researcher at the National Microbiology Lab, which studies the world’s most dangerous pathogens, before being abruptly suspended in 2019 and then fired in 2021 for concealing unauthorized work with Chinese institutions and leaking scientific secrets to China.

After resisting multiple attempts from parliamentary committees to release information about the security breach, the Liberal government finally released documents last month that detailed the decision to fire Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng. He was also a researcher at the lab and was found to have breached security protocols at the lab and to have collaborated with his wife’s deceptions.

In a security assessment, CSIS determined Qiu was likely associated with the Thousand Talents Program, which it said posed a serious risk. “Service information reveals that these programs aim to boost China’s national technological capabilities and may pose a serious threat to research institutions, including government research facilities, by incentivizing economic espionage and theft of intellectual property,” the CSIS assessment said.