House Hansard - 139

44th Parl. 1st Sess.

December 1, 2022 10:00AM

Dec/1/22 5:23:30 p.m.
Watch
Re: Bill C-26

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I see that they are no more interested in what you have to say than what I was saying, so I do not take it personally. The 5G network is a new communications technology with bandwidth that is 10 to 100 times greater than that of current networks. The technology stands out for more than just its speed. It stands out for its extremely low latency, which is the time it takes for one computer to communicate with another and receive a response. This opens the door to many possibilities in different areas, but to achieve performance, 5G uses a multitude of pathways. To simplify, let us say that something that is sent from Montreal to a computer in Paris could have a portion pass through New York, another through London, another through Barcelona, and so forth. This makes the technology particularly vulnerable because it becomes difficult to track the path that the data takes. Huawei has already been implicated in the scandal involving China spying on the African Union headquarters. In 2012, China offered the African Union a fully equipped ultramodern building. Africa is known to be an extremely important location for Chinese investment. China supplied everything: networks, computers and telecommunications systems. After a few years of operation, in 2017, African computer scientists realized that the servers were sending out huge amounts of data at night, when nobody was working in the building. They discovered that the data was going to servers in China, which was spying on all staff and political leaders. Huawei was the main supplier of the network infrastructure. Microphones were also found in the walls and tables. China passed a new national intelligence law in 2017. One thing is clearly set out in their law. All Chinese companies must absolutely participate in China's intelligence efforts. It is a form of economic and commercial patriotism, and we could also add digital. In other words, all the private players are being mobilized to say that they are going to participate in the construction of the great digital wall of China. This includes military intelligence and civilian intelligence. For instance, a company can be called upon to spy on behalf of another Chinese company in order to place China in an advantageous position on the world stage. At this very moment, a genomics company called BGI, which works with genes, is still supplying medical equipment to Canadian hospitals. Its machines collect data, and only the company's technicians are authorized to carry out the monthly maintenance. They are the only ones with access. It turns out that this company has close ties to the Chinese military. There is also Alibaba, a publicly traded Chinese company similar to Amazon that was founded by businessman Jack Ma. It derives its income from online activities, including a public market designed to facilitate transactions between businesses, payment and retail sales platforms, a shopping search engine and cloud computing services. Another example is Tencent, a company founded in 1998 that specializes in Internet and mobility services and online advertising. Tencent's services include social networks, web portals, e-commerce and multiplayer online games. Tencent manages and operates well-known services, such as messaging services Tencent QQ and WeChat, and the qq.com web portal. Today, China is the champion of data collection. This rising power requires new practices, new barriers and new ways of doing things. We should not think that the U.S. does not have their own giants that collect data, but just in China there are 800 million Internet users. That is more than the U.S. and India put together and one-quarter of all Internet users in the world. This number of users will give public and private Chinese actors, which have a close relationship, access to large sources of data that they can mine at will. China has built a formidable digital system. There is a reason why it is constantly increasing its data storage. There is no doubt that the issue of cybersecurity is at the centre of the current international economic war that is engulfing an increasingly multipolar world. We need to acknowledge this. We need to act. We support this bill because it is well-intentioned, but we have to find a way to put some meat on the bones.

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House Hansard - 139