Feds Need to Mandate Universities to Disclose Research Ties With Foreign Actors, Government Committee Hears

A government committee heard from witnesses that universities across Canada have partnered with Chinese agencies and would continue to do so unless Parliament mandates educational institutes to disclose these relationships.

Lawyer James Hinton, associate professor at Western University and senior fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation of Waterloo, Ontario, who appeared as a witness at the June 20 meeting of the House of Commons Science Committee, said the federal government has been “complicit” in allowing Canadian academic research to be compromised, specifically by China’s Huawei Technologies, which is allegedly tied to the Chinese military, according to Blacklock’s Reporter on June 21.

“We need to know who is working with Canadian research institutions and how much they have been benefiting,” said Hinton. “We really don’t know.”

Hinton said that Canada needs to consider legislation like what Australia has adopted to review and, if necessary, cancel international agreements made by universities. He also said that universities receiving public funding should be forced to “track and report” their research efforts with annual and concrete disclosure, “including how much and who they’re working with.”

“The federal government needs to take control of the situation [to] ensure that publicly funded intellectual property and data assets benefit Canadians, not foreign militaries,” said the professor.

Hinton went on to provide the committee with a list of more than 20 universities that partnered with Huawei before the federal government banned Huawei from participating in Canada’s 5G telecommunication network due to security concerns on May 19, 2022.

‘Tip of the Iceberg’

“I am naming these names so there is no longer a veil of secrecy in these deals,” said Hinton. “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Huawei has received intellectual property from the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, McGill University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Calgary, the University of Ottawa, the University of Laval,” said Hinton.

He also named the University of Regina, McMaster University, Western University, and Carleton University in his testimony.

“Significant public funding, millions of dollars and resources, are being used,” said Hinton. “Hundreds of patents have been generated for Huawei through these deals. The commercial rights go to Huawei and they can use this technology in any manner they want.”

During questions from the committee, Manitoba Conservative MP Dan Mazier asked what he thought of researchers who “have claimed scrutinizing national security threats of research funding is a threat to academic freedom.”

“I teach at Western; I know academic freedom well,” said Hinton. “Academic freedom requires an environment of enabled autonomy [where] researchers are free from undue external influence. State military actors are undue influencers, whether academics like to admit it or not.”

“I don’t think that universities are capable of screening national security issues,” added the professor. He said foreign countries are using Canadian research “to advance their national agendas,” and putting the country’s national security at risk.

‘End Deals’

“We should stop doing these terrible deals. End them now,” Queen’s University professor Christian Leuprecht told the committee.

Leuprecht, who is a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen’s University, as well as a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, said he had flagged concerns about research collaboration between Canadian universities and academics, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as early as 2018.

“Canadian institutional researchers know full well that their Chinese interlocutors are highly problematic. In other cases, they are unwitting participants,” he said.

The professor told the commons committee that the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and McGill University had been identified as the three Canadian universities ranking in the top 10 of universities outside of China that had developed collaborations with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the armed wing of the CCP.

“To be clear,” Leuprecht told the committee, “research data obtained in Canada has direct application to weapons development and other strategic military purposes.”