New policy includes lists of sensitive research areas and foreign institutions considered national security risks. After much uncertainty and multiple delays over the past year, university administrators are welcoming the clarity provided by a new federal policy on research security. “I don’t love this kind of thing, but if we had to have something because […]
national security
A new era of research security
National security agencies are taking a renewed interest in universities and their research in the face of rising geopolitical concerns. Canada is home to a great deal of world-class research, but the federal government and its security services are raising the alarm that the country’s combination of advanced technology, human talent and democratic society has […]
Researchers decry a lack of clarity under national security risk assessments
Concern rises about potential research chill as new rules are extended across federal research-funding agencies. A pilot project by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) to identify and minimize national security risks in federally funded research will soon roll out at all federal research-funding bodies. But researchers whose grants were rejected under the […]
Huawei ban adds to concerns of a chill effect in research over national security rules
‘We punch above our weight in Canada because we collaborate,’ says one computer science professor, ‘and this has the potential to erode those collaborations.’ The federal government’s recent decision to ban Chinese electronics companies from Canadian 5G networks has highlighted concerns that tightening national security rules are having a chilling effect on research in Canada. Read […]
Mystery surrounds ouster of Chinese researchers from Canadian laboratory
Canadian researchers are reacting with puzzlement to the news that a “policy breach” has caused the nation’s only high-containment disease laboratory to bar a prominent Chinese Canadian virologist, her biologist husband, and a number of students from the facility. On 5 July, officials at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, Canada, escorted Xiangguo Qiu, […]