OTTAWA – Two U.S. senators are expressing their “grave concerns” to Prime Minister Trudeau over the possibility that Canada might include Huawei Technologies or any other Chinese state-directed telecommunications company in its 5G network infrastructure.
A letter from Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democrat Senator Mark Warner dated October 11, first obtained by the Globe and Mail, urges the PM to prevent Huawei from supplying equipment, citing significant security risks.
“While Canada has strong telecommunications security safeguards in place, we have serious concerns that such safeguards are inadequate given what the United States and other allies know about Huawei,” reads the letter. “Indeed, we are concerned about the impact that any decision to include Huawei in Canada’s 5G networks will have on both Canadian national security and ‘Five Eyes’ joint intelligence cooperation among the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.”
The letter adds that allowing Huawei into the Canadian 5G market “could seriously jeopardize” the relationship between the United States and Canada on telecommunication issues such as spectrum management, therefore “depriving both Canadian and American operators of the scale needed to rapidly build out 5G networks.”
