There Is Only "Transparency"

In the midst of a lockdown, under the cloak of darkness and behind closed doors:

Cabinet refuses to release “millions of pages” of documents on pandemic mismanagement in defiance of a House order, the Commons health committee was told. The Commons’ lawyer said cabinet aides simply stopped handing over records though a deadline for full disclosure expired last December 7: ‘At this rate it will take 58 years.’  

 

These documents:

The Liberals have asked a federal court to prohibit the disclosure of documents related to the firing of Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, who were escorted out of Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory in July 2019 and later fired.

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Stewart previously took over the National Research Council as it was cleaning up from a major computer hack blamed on Beijing. In the same job he oversaw a series of NRC collaborations with the country.

He signed off at the council on a deal to work with a Chinese company on its COVID-19 shot — only to see the agreement collapse when Beijing refused to release the vaccine to Canada in an alleged act of political reprisal. ...

The fallout of the hack continued while Stewart was president. An internal document reported by the Canadian Press in 2016 said rebuilding the ransacked system wouldn’t be done until 2018. Another government report, obtained by the Globe and Mail, estimated the cost of repairing the breach in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

But the agency continued to work with China.

The NRC helped develop an Ebola vaccine in 2018 with the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences and CanSino Biologics.

The council and China’s Ministry of Science and Technology issued a joint call for proposals in 2019 for collaborative industrial research and development projects.

And the NRC conducted a number of ventures and held annual meetings with the China National Biotec Group, part of the Sinopharm health-care company.

Much of the work setting up partnerships and helping Canadian technology companies enter the Chinese market was spearheaded by a research-council employee from China who had worked in the People’s Republic’s Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Co-operation, according to the agenda for an upcoming Canada China Business Council conference.

The NRC also provided CanSino with a cell-line that council researchers developed, for use in the Chinese firm’s COVID-19 vaccine. Then in May 2020, the government announced it had reached an agreement to help test the shot and manufacture it at one of the council’s facilities.

But by August the deal was kaput. Chinese customs authorities had refused to let the vaccine be exported here, a move many China watchers viewed as more retribution for Canada’s arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou.

 

(Sidebar: this Meng Wanzhou.) 

At the Public Health Agency’s National Microbiology Laboratory, meanwhile, scientists Xiangguo Qiu and husband Keding Cheng were removed from the facility in July 2019 as the RCMP investigated. Four months after Stewart arrived last fall, they were fired.

The government has refused to explain why the pair were let go, but questions have arisen about Qiu’s work in her native China. While employed by Ottawa, she was listed on two patents for inventions registered to Chinese government agencies, the National Post reported this week. The Globe has reported that Qiu worked closely with Chinese military scientists.

 

There's more:

The Liberal government is taking the House of Commons Speaker to court, in an unprecedented move to prevent the release of uncensored documents to members of Parliament that offer insight into the firing of two scientists from Canada’s top infectious-disease laboratory.

The government said in a court filing that the disclosure of this information could not only jeopardize national security but also, possibly, Canada’s international relations.

 

Lie a little better, guys.

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The Speaker of the House of Commons says he intends to ask the federal court to strike down the Trudeau government’s attempt to have a judge block parliamentarians from receiving documents regarding the firing of two scientists at Canada’s top laboratory.

“As Speaker of the House of Commons and guardian of its parliamentary privileges, I will oppose the Attorney General’s application and take the position that the Federal Court has no jurisdiction to restrict the House’s power to request documents,” Anthony Rota wrote in a letter addressed to parliamentarians Friday.

The judicial activists will do their jobs and punish Rota.

The unaccountable CRTC, the chairman of which has individual meetings with big telecom executives, will be just one beneficiary of the new draconian censorship laws the Liberals pushed through while Canadians didn't care to look:

While stirring up hatred against people is clearly very bad, the bill seems to have very limited benefits in terms of efficiently curtailing such deleterious incidents. Indeed, Canada’s previous experience with Section 13 suggests that this Liberal initiative will cause many more problems than it will solve.

All speech should be free speech. Reducing anything expressed as racism is false and emotionally retarded. Stamping out opinions, even vile ones, will not get rid of bigotry or any other social injustice. These censorship bills are about destroying popular dissent.

And we all know it. 

Facebook and Twitter are special:

Parliamentarians rejected a motion by Independent MP Derek Sloan to sanction Facebook and Twitter for censoring a press conference Sloan held last week.

During the conference, Sloan appeared with a number of medical health professionals who detailed ongoing attempts to silence and reprimand them for speaking out against the prevailing COVID-19 narrative. 

“Mr. Speaker, last week I hosted a Parliamentary press conference on the censorship of Canadian doctors and medical experts. Their testimony was truly shocking. Unfortunately, Facebook stopped my livestream in mid-conference. Despite this, the full press conference is now the most viewed video in history on CPAC‘s YouTube channel, with over 500,000 views,” said Sloan. 

“However, on Facebook and Twitter, they’re still restricting the sharing of this video on their platforms. Given the importance to democracy of Canadians seeing official parliamentary functions, does the minister denounce this censorship by Big Tech?”

If Derek Sloan is wrong, why not use those platforms to prove it? Isn't that how the free exchange of ideas works?

Right ...