Ban on Huawei would have ‘limited’ consequences for Canada

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 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.

Experts from the U.S. 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.