The federal government is "concerned" that Chinese spies are stealing Canada’s industrial and high-technology secrets, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay told the media last month.

"We’re very concerned about economic espionage," he said triggering a firestorm of response from Beijing.

Chinese Ambassador to Canada Lu Shumin retorted: "I can say responsibly that the so-called Chinese economic espionage against Canada does not exist at all...It (the accusation) is not conducive to the friendly relations and cooperation between our two countries."

The Chinese response was predictable.

It is the response of Richmond (Liberal) MP Raymond Chan that is puzzling and even frightening.

Chan wants Canadians and the Conservative government to play the ostrich and not discuss the threat publicly.

He says claims that the government needs to crack down on Chinese spies are totally out of line.

"It’s important that we don’t do this kind of things over the media," Chan told a radio station.

Chan is a product of the failed Liberal policy of engagement with China which has over the decades used an assortment of front men from tycoons to Triad members to infiltrate Canada’s business, political and financial infrastructure.

For years, Chan’s Liberals have swept under the carpet threat assessments, hushed up industrial theft reports while playing along with China’s rich and powerful.

They opened Canada’s doors to those who think our human rights policies and trade doctrines are a joke.

Yet Chan and his allies like Henry Yu, a professor at University of B.C.’s history department who specializes in Asian-American history, say they are unaware of Chinese industrial espionage.

What a joke. Here are some reports that can help refresh their memories.

In August 2003, The Asian Pacific Post detailed how in the high-rise glass towers of Vancouver, Tricell (Canada) Inc. and Top Glory Enterprises Ltd., both incorporated in the late ‘80s, worked for the Communist government of China.

Among their jobs was to help facilitate the covert entry of China’s secret police into Vancouver by hoodwinking the Canadian government into believing they were government executives.

That same year, we told you the inside stories of how the Liberal government desperately tried to hush up Project Sidewinder, which was trying to alert the Canadian government to a Chinese military intelligence apparatus that sets up businessmen, gangsters and diplomats overseas as part of an elaborate spy network--a story not unlike what is being heard now.

In August 2003, The Asian Pacific Post reported that the FBI is warning lawmakers that China has more than 3,000 "front" companies in the US whose real purpose is to direct espionage efforts. In Canada, similar warnings involving an estimated 500 firms have fallen on deaf ears. The situation was being called the most significant threat to North America’s security.

Then there is the relationship with maritime behemoth - COSCO.

The shipping line is intimately linked to the China International Trust and Investment Corp., a key fundraiser for the Chinese government and a technology-acquiring source for China’s military.

Its vessels have been caught carrying thousands of weapons into California and Chinese missile-technology and biological-warfare components into North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, according to U.S. intelligence reports.

Insisting there is no evidence to show COSCO is involved in any illegal activity--the Vancouver Port Authority has a "gateway to North America" deal with the shipping giant.

When Canada’s Nortel Telecommunications based in Brampton, Ontario wanted to do business in China, they hired Katrina Leung’s company--Merry Glory Ltd.

Little did they know that the 49-year-old corporate matchmaker would be in the limelight several years later accused of having slept her way into the good graces of two FBI agents while stealing secrets for the Chinese government.

Leung, who was paid $1.2 million in 1995 and 1996 for negotiating the Nortel-China deal, has strong connections to Canada’s Chinese business associations.

Around the same time, while the modern day Matahari was greasing the way for Nortel, the Canadian spy agency--CSIS--was conducting an investigation in the offices of Ontario Hydro regarding the theft of information in the nuclear technology field by "an individual of Chinese origin."

According to a secret intelligence report obtained by The Asian Pacific Post, the individual sent unauthorized faxes, some containing hours worth of data, to a telephone number in the offices of the State Science and Technology Commission of China.

The report said that there were two other cases where Canadian companies have alleged that their employees had been selling industrial secrets to China.

Many in the China trade lobby know of James Ting - a citizen of the world, an entrepreneur who constructed a universe of interrelated companies and finances from Toronto to Tokyo to New York.

Ting was a darling of the Chinese-Canadian trade lobby. Even Chan’s former boss, Jean Chretien had Ting on his Team Canada visits to China.

On the flip side, spy watchers were warning Ottawa without much success, that Ting was China’s frontman to acquire high and medium technology and engage in economic and industrial espionage.

Among the companies Semi-Tech showed as part of its organization were several Chinese state-owned companies, related to military and intelligence activities obviously using what seemed to be a Canadian consumer based company as cover.

Sensitive intelligence reports kept hidden by the Liberals in Ottawa also show how Chinese-state owned enterprises used a network of companies to get data processing contracts that included economic intelligence, for many of the largest companies in Canada.

"They thus gained access to a phenomenal amount of information about Canada’s leading companies, their plans, technical secrets, business ideas etc. including personal information about millions of Canadians," said a former employee of Canada’s spy agency.

If these investigations mean nothing then just look at the recent case of China’s Redberry, an imitation of the popular Blackberry handheld e-mail device, created by the Waterloo, Ontario-based Research in Motion Ltd.

Chan, our Richmond MP, does not want any of these matters discussed in public.

You figure out if this silence is in the interest of Canada or China.