(OTTAWA) The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) on Thursday suspended a contract with a Beijing-linked company that supplied it with radio equipment, after news sparked outrage earlier this week.
The half-million-dollar contract for a system intended to secure the RCMP’s terrestrial radio communications was awarded to the company Sinclair Technologies, based in Canada, but controlled since 2017 by the Chinese company Hytera Communications.
“The RCMP has suspended the contract,” a spokesman for Public Security Minister Marco Mendicino told AFP.
PHOTO SPENCER COLBY, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Federal Minister of Public Security Marco Mendicino
Asked about it this week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was “troubled”, considering the warnings of Canadian security agencies against “foreign interference in our institutions and our structures”.
Hytera Communications is partly owned by the Chinese government and its products are banned from sale in the United States.
This decision by Washington has heightened Ottawa’s concerns about China’s potential access to federal police communications in a context of tensions between the two countries.
Conservative Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre called the case a “staggering” blunder that could “come straight out of a spy novel, although the characters in those novels can’t be that incompetent”.
The US telecoms regulator, which considers Hytera to pose a threat to US national security, in November banned the sale of its new products in the US market, as did Huawei.
Hytera is also being sued in the United States by its American competitor Motorola, which accuses it of industrial espionage, which it denies.
One of the company’s former principals recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to steal trade secrets, according to court documents released Dec. 7.
Several contracts at Sinclair
The Canadian Department of National Defense has awarded several contracts to Sinclair over the past decade, including one last year for the supply of antennas to Canada’s two main naval bases: Halifax and Esquimalt, British Columbia. . The other contracts were awarded before the acquisition of Norsat by Hytera in 2017.
Sinclair spokeswoman Martine Cardozo declined comment Thursday, other than to say Aurora’s business is “a completely independent entity.”
Although the RCMP did not respond to repeated requests for comment, Radio-Canada cited a statement in which federal policing expressed confidence in the security of the system and reminded that any contractors involved must obtain a security clearance.
Minister Mendicino told reporters as he left Thursday’s weekly cabinet meeting that the radio equipment was installed by the RCMP, which also monitors and maintains it. “So there are very direct controls on the equipment itself,” he said.
Mr. Mendicino added, however, that the federal government was reviewing its relationship with Sinclair and how the RCMP contract was awarded, to ensure that the proper security checks had been carried out.
“There’s no doubt that there are very legitimate concerns about how the contract was awarded, which is why we’re looking at it very, very closely,” Mendicino said. Obviously, if there were any concerns or if there were any flaws in this process around the contract, very quick and immediate action would have to be taken to suspend or cancel the contract altogether. »
“Why didn’t we ask CST? »
During question period in the Commons on Thursday afternoon, the leader of the Bloc Québécois in the House, Alain Therrien, asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau how he could explain that his government had been able to “give a company belonging to the Chinese government the access to secret RCMP frequencies.
PHOTO ADRIAN WYLD, THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
Alain Therrien, leader of the Bloc Québécois
It is a filtering system that ensures the confidentiality of the communications of the Prime Minister and foreign leaders visiting Canada, and no one has deemed it necessary to do security checks.
Alain Therrien, leader of the Bloc Québécois
Mr. Trudeau replied that the eyes of the government “are always open when talking about supposed threats by hostile actors” and he assured that his government was “very concerned about the history of these contracts with Sinclair Technologies”.
The Bloc MP returned to the charge by reminding the Prime Minister that the federal government already had a Communications Security Establishment (CSE). “Imagine: no one in the government saw fit to call on the expertise of the CST,” said the MP for Laprairie.
The Prime Minister replied that his government had asked ministers and officials to follow up on these matters.
Questioned Thursday in a scrum before the question period, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly, maintained that these contracts “should never have been signed by the public service, period”.
“What I said in my Indo-Pacific Strategy [il y a dix jours], is that we had to make sure that we had a national security lens in everything we do, particularly in terms of contracts and procurement. »
To the parliamentary committee
The RCMP’s contract with Sinclair was also discussed at a meeting of the House of Commons National Defense Committee, where the Prime Minister’s national security adviser, Jody Thomas, was appearing to testify about security in the ‘Arctic.
“We are examining what happened with this contract, assured Mme Thomas. The terms of reference for the review that we are doing, we are creating them. I am still collecting information from the relevant ministries. »
China repeatedly came back to the table during the parliamentary committee meeting. Thomas said in particular that Beijing’s ambitions in the Arctic stem from its desire to secure shorter sea routes to Europe and take advantage of the region’s vast reserves of natural resources.
“(Chinese authorities) have a voracious appetite for hydrocarbons, rare earth minerals and fish,” she explained. They see (the Arctic) as an essential part of their sustainability as a nation. We must therefore ensure that the rich resources of the Canadian Arctic are protected. »
With The Canadian Press