Universities should be required to disclose research ties with foreign actors, the House committee hears

Witnesses testifying before a House of Representatives committee on Tuesday said universities across Canada cooperate with Chinese agencies and will continue to do so unless parliament directs educational institutions to disclose these relationships.

Attorney James Hinton, associate professor at Western University and senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation, appeared as a witness on June 20 encounter of the Science Committee of the House of Commons. As reported by Blacklock’s Reporter on June 21, Hinton said the federal government has been “complimentary” in the compromising of Canadian academic research, particularly by China’s Huawei Technologies, which allegedly has ties to the Chinese military.

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

Hinton said Canada should consider legislation similar to what Australia has passed to review and, if necessary, cancel international agreements between universities. He also said universities receiving public funding should be forced to “track and report” their research efforts with annual and concrete disclosures, “including how much and with whom they work.”

“The federal government needs to get the situation under control [to] ensuring that government-funded intellectual property and data assets benefit Canadians, not foreign militaries,” the professor said.

Calling names

Hinton then provided the committee with a list of more than 20 universities that collaborated with Huawei before the government banned Huawei from participating in Canada’s 5G telecommunications network on May 19, 2022 for security reasons.

“I’m naming these names so that there is no longer a shroud of secrecy in these deals,” Hinton said. “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.”

He also mentioned the University of Regina, McMaster University, Western University and Carleton University.

“Significant government funding, millions of dollars and resources, is being used,” Hinton said. “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 way they want.”

During questions from the committee, Conservative MP Dan Mazier asked what he thought of researchers who “have alleged that investigating the threats to national security from research funding poses a threat to academic freedom.”

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

“I don’t think universities are capable of screening national security issues,” the professor added. He said that other countries are using Canadian research “to advance their national agenda”, endangering the country’s national security.

‘End offers’

“We need to stop doing these horrible deals. End it now,” Queen’s University professor Christian Leuprecht told the committee.

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

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

Leuprecht said the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto and McGill University have been identified as the three Canadian universities ranked in the top 10 universities outside China that have developed partnerships with the People’s Liberation Army, the armed wing of the CCP .

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