comment: "Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, former executive vice-president of NSERC and now senior fellow at the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa, noted that the new security guidelines only cover federal grants and not individual academic research with China’s military. China offers a lot of money to Canadian researchers and universities to work with them, she said.
  “The People’s Liberation Army is not our friend and we should not be partnering with them,” she said. “Any collaboration with the National University of Defence Technology is clearly going to a military purpose and Canadian researchers should be using their own personal ethical lens to decide not to move forward with that research.”
  ...
  Dennis Molinaro, a national-security analyst and professor at Ontario Tech University, said “there is a lot of passing the buck” taking place on the subject of university research with China.
  The universities say they need clarity from government on risks posed by their joint research. But CSIS, for instance, which gathers intelligence on foreign threats, is prevented from sharing specific details with Canadians – even with law enforcement unless it’s specifically for prosecution and regarding a criminal offence.
  “Each are relying on the other to do the right thing, meaning the university wants to know what specific threat exists so it doesn’t curb academic freedom, and the intelligence sector wants the university to act on the basis of, in essence, ethics, that partnering with this kind of institution in the PRC is unethical,” Mr. Molinaro said.
  He said the federal and provincial governments need clearer guidelines for academic partnerships and legislative reform to the CSIS Act that enables the spy service to talk more openly about threats that exist."