BAN HUAWEI, EX-SPY CHIEF SAYS
Retaliation from China would be ‘limited’: expert
5G NETWORKS
OTTAWA • A former chief of Canada’s spy agency thinks China could only inflict “limited” harm to the nation and its Five Eye allies if Huawei was banned from their 5G networks.
“Let me say something from Canada’ perspective (…) I would argue that the amount of harm that China can do to any one of our countries is in fact limited. Would there be short-term pain? Would there be perhaps serious pain for a little while? It is nothing like the kind of pain that might be felt by Vietnam or Malaysia or some countries in that part of the world,” Richard Fadden said Monday during a webinar titled “All Five Eyes on 5G”.
By “our countries”, the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was referring to members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance: Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.
“Everybody sort of reacts and said, ‘China’s there, they’re so important, we can’t antagonize them.’ I would argue that our countries would not be materially hurt in the medium to long term if we said no to Huawei,” added the former national security advisor to prime ministers Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau.
Two experts from the U.S. quickly agreed with his assessment.
“There are a lot of impressions of China as this 10-foot economic giant. But if you look at the actual numbers, the amount of reliance on China for trade is relatively small,” said Martin Rjasser, a former senior intelligence officer at the CIA.
Fadden and Rjasser were two of five cybersecurity experts representing four of the intelligence allies (an expert from the U.K. was absent) during the webinar organized by the Conference of Defence Associations Institute.
The topic of the day: what will happen to the Five Eyes alliance if any of the members don’t ban Huawei from their national 5G network like the U.S.?
Canada still hasn’t decided if it will allow Huawei to bid on the construction of critical 5G infrastructures.
Then last week, the U.S. said it would reassess its intelligence sharing with Canada if the Trudeau government allowed Huawei into 5G.
In an interview with the National Post on Tuesday, Fadden said “its time for the government to take a decision”, and that decision should be to ban Huawei from Canada’s 5G.
Fadden also argued that it was time that Canada actually studied the potential impact and costs of a diplomatic and economic retaliation by China if Huawei is barred from the nation’s 5G network.
“We should make a really careful review and not only rely on the research that
HUAWEI IS … CLEARLY SUBJECT TO DIRECTION BY THE CHINESE STATE.
characterizes China as a phenomenal market,” Fadden said.
But why is Huawei’s potential involvement in our country’s 5G wireless network such a hot topic anyway?
That’s because 5G promises to be a technological game-changer thanks to much faster connection speeds and greater bandwidth, which will permit new or expanded use of digital technology in business and recreation.
With so much private and/or secret information travelling along Canada’s future 5G networks, cybersecurity will be more vital than ever.
Many experts are concerned that involving Huawei in building Canada’s 5G network would open back-door vulnerabilities exploitable by the Chinese government, described in 2018 as “one of the biggest threats facing our countries” by CSIS’S current director, David Vigneault.
“Huawei is a Chinese company in the sense that it’s not state owned, but it’s operating in a sector considered strategic by the Chinese state and it’s clearly subject to direction by the Chinese state,” Fadden said during Monday’s webinar.
If Canada and other Five Eyes allies were to follow in the steps of the U.S. and outright banned Huawei from participating in the building of its 5G network, Fadden thinks they would lose “some” trade opportunities in China.