The threat had been smoldering for several years. Canada will ban Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE from rolling out their 5G network in the country after years of hesitation, Justin Trudeau’s government announced on Thursday.
That long-awaited decision had been postponed by the Canadian government amid tensions between Ottawa and Beijing in recent years over the three-year diplomatic-judicial saga that followed the arrest of Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou.
“We announce our intention to ban Huawei and ZTE products and services in Canada’s telecom systems,” Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said at a news conference on Thursday. “This follows a full review by our security agencies and in consultation with our closest allies,” he added.
Fear of data espionage
The United States is leading the campaign against Huawei, with US President Donald Trump’s spectacular ousting of the Chinese company in May 2019.
Washington, which no longer has a major telecom equipment maker in cellular networks, has since openly encouraged its European partners to do the same amid a showdown with China. Other Canadian allies have followed suit in the United States, including the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and Sweden.
Above all, the American intelligence services fear that Huawei will allow the Chinese authorities to use its equipment to monitor communications and data traffic. Huawei assures that it would refuse such a request.
“hostage diplomacy”
Huawei Canada was contacted by AFP and could not be immediately reached to respond to the announcement.
For the Minister of Public Safety, Marco Mendicino, the 5G innovation “represents a great opportunity for competition and growth” but “also entails risks”.
“There are many hostile actors ready to exploit vulnerabilities in telecommunications networks,” he said at the press conference.
Canada-China diplomatic relations soured in late 2018 with the arrest in Vancouver of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and daughter of the Chinese telecom giant’s founder.
This marked the beginning of a major crisis between the two countries, dubbed “hostage diplomacy,” with the simultaneous detention in China of two Canadians, former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor. After nearly three years of proceedings, Meng Wanzhou was finally released at the end of September 2021 and returned to China. And the two Canadians were released in no time.