Opposition's suspicions are justified: expert
Documents over scientists' firing elude committee
• Opposition parties are right to be suspicious of the Liberal government's efforts to withhold details around the firing of two scientists from a high-security infectious disease lab earlier this year, according to one expert on Parliamentary accountability.
For months, the head of the Public Health Agency of Canada has resisted calls to provide information to a Parliamentary committee around why the two Canadian scientists, Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng, were fired in January. The committee's latest efforts on Monday to view documents related to the firings have also been resisted by the government, who says it would breach the Privacy Act and jeopardize national security.
Kathy Brock, professor at Queen's University and an expert on issues of Parliamentary process and accountability, said the legal argument presented by the federal government could potentially be valid, but nonetheless appears to follow a trend of lacking transparency by the Trudeau government.
The Liberals, she said, have refused to release documents related to everything from the SNC-Lavalin scandal, to calls for a partial disclosure of contracts signed with COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, citing cabinet confidences and the need to protect commercial sensitivity, respectively. Government has also redacted documents tied to the WE Charity scandal as well as recent calls for more details around the procurement practices of Shared Services Canada.
“Given the reluctance of the federal government to respond to a lot of fairly reasonable requests that have come up, and the way it's controlled any communications and messaging on issues that are sensitive to the government, the opposition parties have a legitimate basis for being suspicious,” Brock said.
Her comments come as members of a special committee on Canada-China relations passed a motion on Monday evening that gives PHAC no more than 10 days to provide unredacted documents around the firings, which would be passed along to the House of Commons law clerk.
The two scientists were escorted out of Canada's only level-4 security lab in Winnipeg in July 2019, four months after the facility shipped Ebola and Henipah viruses to China's Wuhan Institute of Virology. They were fired in January 2021, and were stripped of their security clearances by authorities.
Canadian officials have said the shipments are not related to the outbreak of COVID-19, which was first detected in Wuhan. The federal health agency said the shipments and Qiu's firing are also not connected.
Opposition members and even some Liberals, have say PHAC should nonetheless provide documentation on the matter, saying it could be of extremely high public interest.
Still, at least part of the Liberal government's aversion to provide documents might be a result of the increasingly partisan nature of discourse in the House of Commons, Brock said, which has intensified during the pandemic.
“Because of the ramped up partisan nature of discussions between the opposition parties and the government, and the fact that we're approaching election, partisanship has emerged much more strongly,” she said. “That means that some of the compromises that you traditionally have are broken down.”
Opposition requests for documents, she said, have also been very broad in nature, and could weigh down the public service as it seeks to locate the relevant records. Several observers have said that requests made by the Canada-China committee are very similar to when Liberal opposition members called for documents in 2010 related to the abusive treatment of Afghan detainees by Canadian armed forces. The former Harper government had resisted efforts to have those documents provided to Parliament.
Members of the committee have been full throated in their calls for the release of documents, saying it is a matter of Parliamentary privilege.
Liberal MP Rob Oliphant, parliamentary secretary to the Foreign Affairs minister, had said the documents should be provided to the committee on a private basis. Oliphant Monday evening questioned the legal opinion provided by Christian Roy, senior legal counsel within the Justice Department, who said committees have never had the right to compel documents that could violate the Privacy Act.
“Lawyers are not always right and Justice lawyers are particularly, in my mind, not always right,” he said.
Other observers sided with the Liberals. Michael Wernick, former Clerk of the Privy Council, said the committee's latest demands for documents could set a “really dangerous” precedent, potentially allowing opposition parties to expose sensitive information.
“Imagine the scope for a partisan majority harassing political opponents and dissenting stakeholders, demanding journalist sources, medical records, psychiatrists' records, tax filings, adoption records, sealed court records, cabinet papers of their predecessors,” Wernick wrote on LinkedIn on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, the Conservatives released a statement criticizing a lack of transparency about $655 million in funding it said was awarded by the Canada Infrastructure Bank to ITC Holdings, a subsidiary of Fortis. Conservative members on the House transport committee put forward a motion on Tuesday calling for more details to be provided around the deal, which it said Liberal members blocked.