Cory Morgan: It’s Past Time Ottawa Began Taking Security Risks Posed by the CCP Seriously

Chinese police officers wearing masks stand in front of the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, China, on Jan. 26, 2020. Betsy Joles/Getty Images

Commentary

It seems as if hardly a month goes by without another revelation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) infiltrating or influencing companies and orders of government within Canada.

This month is no exception. It has been exposed that the RCMP had contracted an Ontario-based company with ties to the CCP to provide equipment related to police radio communications. The security and encryption of communications within a national police force should be rather important considerations. A company providing services related to anything so sensitive should be thoroughly vetted, yet somehow the ties between Sinclair Technologies and the CCP were overlooked when sourcing services.

Sinclair Technologies is controlled by Chinese-based Hytera Communications. The CCP owns a 10 percent stake in Hytera Communications. Hytera was blacklisted by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission last year on the grounds that they posed “an unacceptable risk” to U.S. national security.

While the connection may appear minor, when it comes to something as important as the security of communications within our national police force, there shouldn’t be any connections whatsoever with the CCP.

On Dec. 7, when the contract with Sinclair Technologies came to public light, RCMP spokesperson Corporal Kim Chamberland told The Epoch Times that equipment from Sinclair posed no security concerns. On Dec. 8, the press secretary to Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino stated the contract has been suspended, presumably due to security concerns.

Nuctech is a Chinese-owned company with deep ties to the CCP at its highest levels. The company has been flagged for unfair business practices going back as far as 2010 when the EU imposed tariffs on it, and it was banned from airports by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration in 2014 due to security concerns. Despite its shady and well-documented history, Nuctech was awarded a contract in 2020 to install X-ray security equipment for 170 Canadian embassies, consulates, and high commissions around the world. The contract was only cancelled when Canadians became aware of it and rightly expressed outrage over the security risks presented to our embassies and consulates.

The security of information provided by people seeking visa applications is now questionable due to Canada’s use of VFS Global for visa services in 83 countries. VFS uses subcontractors for their services. Beijing Shuangxiong Foreign Service Company is one of those subcontractors and it operates the Canadian visa application centre in Beijing. Beijing Shuangxiong is owned by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau. In other words, its owned by the Chinese police.

Visa applications involve the disclosure of very sensitive, personal information. Many applicants have been unwittingly sharing that information with Chinese authorities while thinking they were only disclosing it to Canada. Ward Elcock, a former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told the Globe and Mail the situation “represents a lazy abdication of our standards to those of a police state.”

RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki recently told a parliamentary committee the force is conducting an investigation into “broad” Chinese interference in Canadian affairs. It wasn’t specified what this interference could be, but she did state they weren’t looking into the allegations of Chinese interference in the 2019 Canadian election though one would think that should be a top priority. Canadians really should know which candidates received campaign funding from Chinese sources if indeed that happened. Let’s hope they don’t entrust details of their investigation to radio communication equipment provided by Sinclair Industries.

It shouldn’t be that difficult to avoid these controversies, yet they keep happening. These stories aren’t odd, occasional outliers. They are becoming a pattern, and citizens should be concerned.

Foreign espionage is nothing new and every country has practiced it. The way it’s done has changed, though. The CCP has been aggressively infiltrating countries around the world for years. They are skilled at using corporate proxies to gain access to sensitive information in foreign nations. While it is an effective way to mine data and meddle in the affairs of other nations, it is also one of the most easily traceable methods of spying. Corporate connections are documented and searchable. It shouldn’t be hard for government agencies to research prospective contractors to find potential ties to hostile entities such as the CCP.

Procurement policies calling for background checks on prospective government contractors and the rejection of bids from companies with any connection to the CCP should be easy enough to create and follow. Could it really be that tough to find companies without those connections?

Unless the Liberals fundamentally strengthen their handling of the China file and take action against the CCP’s sophisticated approach to intelligence gathering and incursions into Canadian affairs, we are bound to see more of the same in the future.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.