Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to be able to join everyone today. I will be splitting my time with the member for Abbotsford.
I want to thank the member for Wellington—Halton Hills for bringing forward this motion. It is one that is timely and this is an issue we need to deal with immediately.
I want to recognize the communist regime in Beijing continues to abuse human rights of Falun Gong practitioners by harvesting their organs and denying them the ability to assemble and worship in their way. We know they are also denying those same rights to Uighurs and putting them into forced labour camps, and there are rumours of sterilizations. Let us also never forget the Tibetan monks who have been fighting against the Beijing regime for ages. Of course, all Canadians are too well aware of the human rights abuses being committed against the champions of democracy in Hong Kong by the Chinese Communist Party.
A lot of speakers today talked about Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor. They have now been unlawfully detained for 708 days. I would just like to remind the House it was the Minister of National Defence who described it as “hostage diplomacy”. Both gentlemen deserve to be brought home and we need to do that collectively as quickly as possible.
The issue of intimidation of Chinese Canadians here by the Government of China has already been referred to, and it has been given the name Operation Fox Hunt. We know the ambassador to Canada from China has also made shocking threats about Canadians who currently live in Hong Kong. We have to take those threats seriously and we need to make sure the ambassador himself knows that was completely inappropriate. The government should be dressing him down and recalling its own ambassador from China because of those shocking revelations.
We are here to talk about Huawei, and the government has waited far too long. It has been over a year since the former public safety minister, Ralph Goodale, said that we would have a decision by the current Liberal government before the last federal election. This has dragged on and on, and meanwhile, all of our Five Eyes partners have already said no to Huawei. Allies in Europe under NATO have said no to Huawei and giving access to their 5G networks.
We cannot deny the fact that if we take those alliances and partnerships seriously in the areas of intelligence collection, the defence of our sovereignty and working in cohesion with like-minded nations, there is no way we should be allowing Huawei to even continue to speculate on having access to our future 5G network.
We know the Chinese Communist Party has great interests in Canada. It is buying up sections of our natural resources. Through its belt and road initiative, it has a strategy called the polar silk road. It has been building icebreakers and submarines with under-ice capabilities as both commercial and military vessels to transit the Northwest Passage. Because of that interest, because of its continued espionage and surveillance of Canadians here at home, we have to take measures now as a government to ensure we are protecting Canadians and our interests as best as possible.
As the shadow minister of National Defence, I have been following this debate for ages, and I have watched as one after another our Five Eyes partners have said no to Huawei. A lot of that is bound in article 7 of China's 2017 national intelligence law, which says that Chinese companies must support, co-operate with and collaborate in national intelligence work.
It could not be any clearer that the People's Liberation Army and the Communist Party of China have nefarious objectives with respect to collecting as much intel as possible from Canadians, Canadian companies and the Government of Canada, as well as all our allies at all those different levels.
Just to demonstrate how Huawei has already been used for intelligence-gathering purposes, all we have to do is look at what has happened in Europe. Back in 2009, Vodafone, which is the biggest company in Europe, installed a bunch of Huawei equipment throughout Italy. It was found that Huawei had provided equipment that was faulty. Vodafone's security briefing documents, which were given to Bloomberg, reported there were a number of switches that could have been exploited by the Chinese government to ensure it was given access the network in Italy. Even Vodafone has lived through this. A lot of us who have travelled to Europe as well are familiar with that company. We have to make sure that does not happen here.
Actually, it has happened here. All we have to do is look at the Nortel campus, which is now home to the Canadian Armed Forces. If we look at the history of Nortel, we realize that there was a bugging of the Nortel campus by a Chinese organization called Faxian Corp. It hacked into the emails of Frank Dunn, the CEO, 100-plus times a day and was able to use those to undermine Nortel's success. It also took and reverse-engineered a number of Nortel's hardware and products, which it was able to use back in China. It was also reported that it largely benefited start-up tech companies in China like Huawei. It took years for the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence to ensure the Nortel campus contained no bugging or surveillance equipment before they finally moved into their new location.
We know the People's Liberation Army has an elite cyberwarfare unit, unit 61398. It has hackers working all day and all night long who have hacked into companies like Equifax and stolen hundreds of thousands of documents on Canadians. It has hacked into the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, Nortel, plus many other companies here in Canada and around the world. That was one of the reasons why the United Kingdom reversed its decision to allow Huawei to have limited access to the 5G network. More importantly, it realized there were other options out there and it did not have to use just Huawei. There are other companies, like Nokia, Ericsson and others, that can provide 5G equipment.
I look at how our Five Eyes partners, as well as members of the Canadian Armed Forces, have been saying that we do not want to give the Communist Party of China and its regime in Beijing easy access to our 5G networks. The best way to say it was reported back in March in The Canadian Press, when Chief of the Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance was worried about anything that would give China easier access to the Canadian military computer networks. He said that the Five Eyes network is “monumentally important” to Canada and the Canadian Armed Forces. He also stated:
I've made it clear that I have concerns...[with] China and China's cyber efforts...and clearly if there was to be an avenue, an easier avenue, for China to get into our digital networks then I would be [very] concerned about that.
We know that China has maligned activities in the past, especially in cyberspace, and we should not be giving it that easy access. Even the Australian military, the U.S., New Zealand and the U.K. are calling Huawei a high-risk vendor. I reiterate this. Are we going to just continue to delay and dither, which is the Liberal way, or are we going to recognize—