Amid a narrowing federal election, the Chinese ambassador to Canada says some politicians are putting their own “political interests” ahead of the Canada-China relationship in an apparent reference to the Conservative Party.
First comes love, then comes marriage…
I really don’t want to see what’s in the baby carriage.
Chinese state-owned shipbuilder tapped to supply ferry for Crown corporation
A huge state-owned shipyard in China is building a 1,000-passenger ferry for use by a federal Crown corporation over the objections of Canada’s shipbuilding industry and at a time when two Canadians have spent 989 days in Chinese prisons as victims of what Ottawa has called “hostage diplomacy.”
Marine Atlantic Inc. awarded a $100-million, five-year ferry charter contract in late July to Sweden’s Stena North Sea Ltd., which subcontracted construction of the 200-metre vessel to China Merchants Industry’s Jingling shipyard for delivery in 2024.
A Liberal MP in diverse Toronto thinks we should thank Justin’s favourite country for donating supplies to us. Cabinet aides didn’t think this was a good time, maybe later.
Terry Glavin: The West is buckling under China’s brutal hegemony
In Canada the rot runs deep
Ottawa’s response to Canada’s latest humiliation has been characteristically tepid, relying mainly on the delicate complaints offered by lifelong China-trade enthusiast Dominic Barton, the ambassador Ottawa plucked two years ago from the helm of McKinsey & Co — a global consultancy noted for providing management-efficiency expertise to dictatorships all over the world and for its service to Purdue Pharma in boosting sales of Oxycontin to American drug addicts. Canada’s embassy in Beijing convened a kind of press conference consisting of a couple of dozen diplomats from a variety of liberal democracies who were invited to stand on a platform for a photo opportunity and mutter platitudes about how hostage-taking is bad manners.
Yes, you will: If “mandatory” fails to work, then what do politicians do for an encore?
Has America’s 1% become our version of the CCP?
Really. It’s virtually guaranteed.
You’ll like being Chinese. Really you will.
Twitter posts are “undermining Canada’s democracy,” said Canada’s Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault in a briefing note, who is urging regulation of hurtful comments for “a truly democratic debate.”
Cabinet on June 23 introduced Bill C-36 An Act To Amend The Criminal Code that threatens Facebook, Twitter and YouTube users suspected of posting content that promotes “detestation or vilification” with house arrest or $70,000 fines. The heritage department promised public consultation on the bill, according to Blacklock’s.
“This content steals and damages lives,” wrote staff. “It intimidates and obscures valuable voices, preventing a truly democratic debate.”
“Our objective is to ensure more accountability and transparency from online platforms while respecting the Canadian Charter Of Rights And Freedoms,” said the June 16 briefing note Regulation Of Social Media Platforms. “The mandate of the Department of Canadian Heritage includes the promotion of a greater understanding of human rights.”
Related: Psaki on de-platforming American citizens: “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others if you providing ‘misinformation’ out there.”
Canada’s public pension fund has invested millions of dollars in companies accused of bolstering China’s military-industrial complex — companies the U.S. government has barred Americans from putting their money into because they allegedly pose a security threat.
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board has invested $3 million in shares of a company that makes components for Chinese warships, and another $2 million in a company affiliated with a manufacturer of fighter jets and unmanned drones, according to its most recent holdings disclosure.
Canada’s former ambassador to China called the pension’s investments troubling.
Canada’s national police force broke privacy law by using controversial facial recognition software that put innocent Canadians in a “24/7 police lineup,” the federal privacy commissioner says.
The RCMP conducted “hundreds” of searches of Clearview AI’s database of billions of photos scraped from the public internet, including social media sites, without consent. The company lets law enforcement and private business then match photos against that database.
It was illegal, according to privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien — both Clearview AI’s collection of images without consent, and the RCMP’s use of that database of unlawfully collected images.
Clearview’s practices amounted to “mass surveillance,” Therrien concluded, and the RCMP’s use of its database broke the Privacy Act.
“The data involved in (facial recognition technology) speaks to the very core of individual identity and as both commercial and government use of the technology expands, it raises important questions about the kind of society we want to live in,” Therrien concluded in his report.
The RCMP initially denied it used Clearview AI, both publicly and to the privacy commissioner, who is an independent officer of Parliament.
After a joint Toronto Star and BuzzFeed News investigation found the Mounties had paid for Clearview’s services, however, the force publicly admitted to using the controversial tools on a limited basis — predominantly for identifying victims of child sexual exploitation.
But Therrien’s office concluded that not only did the RCMP initially “erroneously” say it had not used Clearview, the force “did not satisfactorily account for the vast majority of the searches it made.”
@stevenchase — House of Commons has been notified by the law clerk that the minority Liberal government has refused to comply with an order of the House asking that all uncensored records on the firing of two scientists from Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Lab be provided to the Speaker.
It’s like mentioning the pandemic Chinese lab origin theory has set some vast subterranean mechanism grinding, releasing a huge rolling boulder and triggering the closure of the exit doors.
What did we touch?
Prime Minister Spendy McBlackface gets taken to the woodshed.
Good work by the Globe & Mail;
Scientists working at Canada’s highest-security infectious-disease laboratory have been collaborating with Chinese military researchers to study and conduct experiments on deadly pathogens.
Seven scientists in the special pathogens unit at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg and Chinese military researchers have conducted experiments and co-authored six studies on infectious diseases such as Ebola, Lassa fever and Rift Valley fever. The publication dates of the studies range from early 2016 to early 2020.
The Globe and Mail has also learned that one of the Chinese researchers, Feihu Yan, from the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Academy of Military Medical Sciences, worked for a period of time at the Winnipeg lab, a Level 4 facility equipped to handle some of the world’s deadliest diseases. This researcher is credited as a co-author on all six of the papers. However, on two of them, he is listed as being affiliated with both the Winnipeg lab and the military medical academy.
Two of the Winnipeg lab scientists, Xiangguo Qiu and her biologist husband, Keding Cheng, were fired in January of this year after the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, as The Globe reported last week, recommended that their security clearances be removed on national-security grounds. CSIS had also been concerned about the nature of information Dr. Qiu might have passed on to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
[…]
Andy Ellis, former CSIS assistant director of operations, said it is “madness” for the Public Health Agency of Canada to be co-operating with the PLA, which in recent years has ramped up its recruitment of scientists and invested heavily in medical research as part of its strategy to modernize its military.
“It is ill-advised. It is the top lab in Canada,” Mr. Ellis said in an interview. “It is just incredible naiveté on their part.”
Mr. Ellis said it is also astounding that PHAC allowed a PLA scientist into the Winnipeg lab that requires the highest-level security clearance to gain entry.
“We won’t let a Canadian in unless we have done a deep background check, but we let [someone] in that we don’t know anything about. It doesn’t make sense,” he added.
[…]
James Giordano, a professor in the departments of neurology and biochemistry at Georgetown University and a senior fellow in biowarfare and biosecurity at the U.S. Naval War College, said he assumes research conducted by any academic working in China is available for use by Beijing for military or defence purposes.
He said China is interested in developing new bioweapons, but also to furthering the capacity for what he calls “heroic rescue,” where Beijing is able to “ride in like a white knight” and offer other countries treatments or cures for diseases that threaten their population and increase its international influence.
Prof. Giordano said China is particularly interested in modifying pathogens to create a novel organism that is not listed – and therefore not regulated – in the international Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
It makes sense to those who admire China’s basic dictatorship. Perfect sense.
You thought it was a joke They thought it was a great idea.
Calgary Sun: Province cancels plan to monitor campers with drones
Four days after a request for proposals (RFP) was posted by Alberta Environment and Parks seeking private contractors’ bids to operate a program that would provide surveillance on holidays and long weekends in the summer and fall, Environment Minister Jason Nixon said the plan has been shot down.
They’re not going to try this again? Rightttt…
Hey kids we’ve got a cool new app to help keep you safe! Don’t worry it’s perfectly secure and totally safe and we will like totally respect your privacy.
