TELUS’s CFO Doug French announced on February 14 that the company would use Huawei’s equipment for its 5G network despite U.S. claims of covert "back doors" enabling surveillance, violating judicial oversight like Western firms’ legally mandated wiretap access. A 2017 Chinese law forces Huawei to comply with CPC demands, including cases like unauthorized data downloads from the African Union (2012–2017). With Canadians more hostile toward China than Americans or Japanese—fueled by trade wars and hostage detentions—the move risks national security under the Five Eyes alliance. The coronavirus crisis, exposing economic strain (20% oil demand drop) and potential CPC cover-ups, may further erode trust in China’s tech, mirroring past authoritarian failures. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I tell you about a bizarre decision by TELUS, the phone and internet company, to go full China, full Huawei, just days after the Wall Street Journal revealed that Huawei builds secret backdoor hacking entrances for the company that TELUS wouldn't even know about.
Just incredible.
I'll take you through it.
But before I do, can I invite you to become a premium subscriber?
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Go to premium.rebelnews.com.
Tonight, days after it's revealed that Huawei has secret back doors in its communications hardware, TELUS announced they're going to build their 5G network with Huawei.
Are they taking secret bribes from China?
It's February 14th, and this is the Ezra Levance Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
The Wall Street Journal broke a big story this week.
U.S. officials say Huawei can covertly access telecom networks.
Trump administration ramps up push for allies to block Chinese company.
Yeah, well, that's the thing.
I'm not sure if Justin Trudeau's government is really acting like a U.S. ally these days on everything from taking Omar Cotter off the no-fly list to palling around with Iran's terrorist regime to being chummy with China, despite the fact that China is holding two Canadians hostage and has for over a year now.
Anyways, back to Huawei.
Huawei, according to U.S. officials, has secret back doors to their technology that allows the company to get into your private communications.
Now, most telecommunications companies allow, let's call them front doors, that let law enforcement listen into communications if they have a search warrant.
I guess in the olden days they'd call that a wiretap.
And that's normal.
If a policeman goes to court and asks for a search warrant from a judge to listen in or copy a criminal's phone calls or emails, and if the judge agrees, the policeman can take that warrant and show it to the phone company and get that info.
That's part of our system.
There are checks and balances on that.
I've just described some of them, the judge.
But what if the phone company itself uses that same door to snoop around on its own?
No police, no judge, just the phone company.
That's what U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal that Huawei can do.
Huawei can do its own wiretaps using those law enforcement doors.
And they can do it without the phone companies even knowing.
Let me quote from the story, Huawei does not disclose this covert access to its local customers or the host nation national security agency.
So Huawei builds a country's phone networks, sells networks to companies like Bell or TELUS or Rogers for internet and cell phones.
Police can search by getting a search warrant to tap into those phones, but they have to go through rigorous legal processes.
A judge has to say, yeah, makes sense.
But Huawei, who built the network, they can secretly just pop in and do the same thing and no one notices.
Oh, and they're controlled by the Communist Party of China.
No big deal.
Now, Huawei put out a really weird video yesterday, which was a mix of Western-style media, social media chit-chat and Chinese-style Soviet awkward talking points.
I was riveted like watching a car crash.
I watched the whole video.
This Huawei spokesman wandering through doors talking about doors, backdoors, front doors, said the Wall Street Journal story could not be true.
And he said it's obviously not true because if anyone ever discovered that Huawei really was using backdoors this way, well, everyone would immediately stop using Huawei gear.
Take a listen.
Edward Snowden blew the whistle on this type of backdoor back in 2013 when he revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency pressures some companies to install vulnerabilities in their products.
These backdoors allow the NSA to circumvent security protocols and get access to otherwise private information.
So, does Huawei install these?
Hell no.
Take all that noise that you hear in the news and put it aside for a second.
Think about this.
The security of our products is our bread and butter.
If anyone ever found a malicious backdoor in our equipment, every single carrier in the world would drop us in a heartbeat.
Really?
Is that how it would work?
If you own a Huawei cell phone, which is sold in Canada?
Let's say you spent $500 on a little hand phone.
Would you really throw it away, $500 worth of phone away, because you heard something about internet security?
Would you really?
Or let me make that a bigger question.
If you're a cell phone company like TELUS that spends billions of dollars on network hardware, would you really throw that away because you discovered China's spying?
Would you?
Or would you more likely be embarrassed and ashamed of it and terrified that you'd lose your company and your customers that maybe you'd even be tempted to cover it up and hide the fact that China was spying on your customers in your country because your foolish decision to let Huawei build your national phone company is what let the spying happen.
And you don't want to lose your customers or lose your money or write off billions of dollars worth of equipment.
So is it really true what that dramatic actor says, that if a phone company discovered that China was spying on their customers, that they'd drop Huawei and never use it again?
Huawei's Hidden Gifts00:03:22
Yeah, no.
And I can say this with certainty because it has already happened, obviously.
There's a European cell phone company called Vodafone.
And would you look at this?
Vodafone found hidden back doors in Huawei equipment.
While the carrier says the issues found in 2011, 2012 were resolved at the time.
The revelation may further damage the reputation of a Chinese powerhouse.
Got it.
The issues were resolved as in no one was fired, no one stopped using Huawei.
What?
Were they going to throw out a billion dollars worth of hardware and face international embarrassment, maybe even a class action lawsuit from their customers if they admitted something was wrong?
Or would they just have a private, quiet little meeting at the Chinese embassy maybe over a nice meal maybe and just resolve it?
That's the thing.
As we've learned recently, Huawei bribes Canadians all the time.
Now sometimes the bribes are legal.
Like when Huawei gives millions of dollars to the University of British Columbia and we've learned that this was enough to make the university administration take China's side in the hostage crisis.
That's all it takes to make a mighty institution like UBC shill for communist China.
Just give them a few million bucks.
At least we know about that though.
Unlike, say, the Trudeau Foundation, whose foreign funding skyrocketed after Trudeau became prime minister, but they haven't disclosed who paid that money.
Gee, I wonder who.
This kind of bribery is massive.
I mean, China has, what, two, three trillion dollars worth of foreign currency reserves.
What's a few million here or there?
What's even a few billion to corrupt the West.
And look at this news from a Hong Kong newspaper called the South China Morning Post.
Prestigious U.S. schools, including Harvard and Yale, under U.S. investigation over foreign funding gifts from China.
And look at this.
Yale may not have disclosed at least $375 million in contributions, while Harvard may lack appropriate controls to track money it receives.
Gee, I wonder if that's on purpose or by accident that they don't track their money.
Authorities have requested records of gifts from foreign sources, including Huawei and ZTE, as well as documents related to China's thousand talents plan.
Let me read a few paragraphs from this story.
The U.S. Education Department announced that it has launched an investigation into Harvard and Yale universities on suspicion of failing to report hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign gifts and contracts from China and other countries.
The agency said Yale may have failed to report at least $375 million in foreign gifts and contracts, choosing not to report any gifts and contracts over the last four years.
Harvard, it added, may lack appropriate institutional controls over foreign money and fail to fully report all foreign gifts and contracts as required by law.
This is about transparency, said U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVoe in a statement.
Unfortunately, the more we dig, the more we find that too many are under-reporting or not reporting at all.
We will continue to hold universities and colleges accountable.
You know the thing about universities?
When was the last time you've been on a university?
It's sort of incredible these days.
They sell naming rights for everything.
Gordon's Chernobyl Concerns00:14:41
It's like a Formula One car driver with all these patches on his outfit.
They name buildings.
They name rooms in buildings.
Entire schools on a university campuses are named, and they're named after the generous donors.
I mean, donors like the recognition, and universities like creating a culture of philanthropists outdoing each other, sort of a competition of who can out-donate each other, who gets to name the school after them.
It's very healthy, I think.
Billionaires buying hospital wings to be named after themselves.
We all win when that happens, don't we?
I like naming things.
I love it.
And so do universities.
So how weird is it?
How odd that these donors don't want to be known.
They want to be secret, and the universities are helping them keep a secret.
That's sort of opposite land, isn't it?
Why would you keep it a secret?
Unless there's something about it that you're shy about, that you're embarrassed about.
Like taking Chinese money for reasons you don't really want to have to explain to the public.
Which brings us to TELUS.
Just an awful, awful phone company.
They're all terrible, but I think TELUS is the worst.
First of all, they're so leftist.
It's gross.
They recently announced some weird plan that they brag.
They're a neutral company, but they're saying they're inspired by the Liberal Party of Canada.
What?
Are you a company or a political party?
What are you doing with shareholder money?
Well, look, they're heavily regulated by Trudeau's CRTC.
So what do you think they are?
They've always been anti-oil sands too, which is when they first irritated me.
They're super gross when you remember that TELUS was born from AGT, Alberta government telephones.
They actually come from Alberta, but they hate Alberta now, or at least the oil sands.
But boy, do they love China.
Hmm, take a look at this.
Canada's TELUS to launch 5G network with Huawei soon, CFO.
Canadian telecom operator Telus Corp will soon begin rolling out its 5G network, and its initial module will be with Huawei Technologies Company Limited's equipment, the company's chief financial officer Doug French said on Thursday.
It's important for us to launch our network when the time is right, French said in a statement, adding that the company will continue to collaborate with the Canadian government in building the ecosystem.
Gee, I wonder what discussions Doug French has had with the Chinese government.
I wonder if there are any undisclosed payments to TELUS, any secrets like Yale and Harvard have kept, like Vodafone has covered up.
Do you trust TELUS?
I can't trust them as far as I can throw their phones.
Look, this is not a right-wing criticism.
This is a Canadian criticism.
It's a democracy thing.
Here, listen to Barack Obama's national security advisor if you think this is just a right-wing thing.
Here's Susan Rice.
It gives the Chinese the ability, if they choose to use it, to access all kinds of information, civilian, intelligence, military, that could be very, very compromising.
So, much as I disagree with the Trump administration on a number of things, on this, their concern about Huawei, I believe they're right.
As a matter of protection, would the United States have to have a slightly different security relationship?
Yes, and that will throw the Five Eyes collaboration, which serves the security interests of every Canadian and every American, into jeopardy.
We just, it can't be done.
Can't share.
I don't see how we can share in the way we have.
It's not a joke.
It's truly serious.
Yeah, Huawei is really just the corporatizing of China's cyber warfare agency.
And now TELUS wants to be their Canadian base of operations.
If you use TELUS, if you have a TELUS phone or TELUS internet account or cable, time to switch.
How do you feel about being a guinea pig for Huawei?
How do you feel about Huawei being able to snoop on your calls and emails and what you watch on the internet without anyone even knowing?
So who does want this?
Well, Trudeau seems to.
He admires China's basic dictatorship.
There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime.
Yeah, that's a bad thing.
And our U.S. allies say if we go ahead and build our communication networks with Chinese spyware like TELUS says they're going to do, the U.S. will cut us off as allies in sharing secrets with us.
But maybe Trudeau sort of wants that.
stay with us for more.
Well, there's one man who I think knows more about the perils of allowing Huawei into our communications life, and that's our friend Gordon G. Chang, who joins us now via Skype.
Gordon, I have to say the timing of this announcement by TELUS and their CFO, so this is their very senior executive, is just awful to me.
I mean, it's right after the Wall Street Journal reveals what U.S. officials called a secret back door that Huawei can get into the networks.
It's right after the U.S. Department of Education announces investigations into secret payments to Harvard and Yale by China.
The timing is awful, but they seem confident.
What's going on?
I wish I knew, Ezra, because clearly Huawei is a danger.
If you allow Huawei into your 5G network, whether it's a core or non-core equipment, it is going to be able to take data.
And by the way, that distinction between core and non-core probably is meaningless in reality.
So I think that clearly TELUS is making a grave mistake.
Remember, Canada is a five eyes partner of the United States.
This is the United States is going to have to reconsider its relationships with Canada.
And so I think that Justin Trudeau, your prime minister, needs to have a conversation with that company.
Gordon, I watched the official response by Huawei to the Wall Street Journal article about the secret back door that Huawei can get in.
And they had an actor make about a six-minute video, and we played an excerpt of it earlier.
The actor said this.
He said, Huawei would never spy on our customers because the first time we did that, all our customers would immediately abandon us.
And I thought, well, that makes some logical sense.
But then I discovered that Vodafone discovered just this sort of back door in 2011, 2012.
They didn't dump Huawei.
They claim they made a few patches.
But if you're a company that's invested billions in Huawei infrastructure, you're locked in.
You don't want to write it off.
You don't want the embarrassment.
You don't want a lawsuit from your customers.
You have a lot of incentives to paper it over to actually become an apologist for Huawei.
I don't think that PR line by Huawei holds water.
I think they have been caught, and there's a lot of moral hazard by companies to go along with it because otherwise they're in trouble too.
Yeah.
Well, Huawei servers were used by Beijing to surreptitiously download data from the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa from 2012 to 2017.
Also, two points, Ezra.
First of all, China's 2017 national intelligence law requires every Chinese entity to spy if demanded.
So that's Chinese law.
And the second thing is in the Communist Party's top-down system, nobody can refuse a request from the party to do something.
So those contentions by Huawei just don't hold water.
As a matter of law, they are under a compulsion to spy.
Yeah.
Let me shift gears a little bit because Huawei is very much on our minds here.
It feels imminent like Canada has to make a decision soon.
That's just how it feels.
I don't know how long Trudeau can kick the can down the road.
But I'd like to talk about something else I see you very active on on Twitter.
And I'd like to remind our viewers to follow Gordon on Twitter at Gordon G. Chang, and we'll put that on the screen.
Gordon, one of the things you've been talking about a lot is the coronavirus and how China isn't, well, I mean, like any authoritarian regime, we can't trust what they say.
It's probably infused with propaganda and, you know, scapegoating or avoiding responsibility.
It reminds me of Chernobyl in this former Soviet Union.
Let me ask you this.
Donald Trump has had China on the back foot because of his massive tariffs.
China's growth rate has fallen to the lowest in a generation.
Economically, I think it was hurting a bit.
Now, on top of that, you have this coronavirus, the actual costs of trying to deal with it, the worry, the demoralization, foreign countries stepping away, flight bans, quarantines.
I wonder if, like Chernobyl, this is something that could cause the unraveling of China just through cost and stress and exposing the brittleness of the communist system.
I watched the mini-series on HBO of Chernobyl, and although it was an interpretation of history, it convinced me how big of a shock to the authoritarian system Chernobyl was.
Do you think the coronavirus is the same?
Well, it could very well be, Ezra.
And matter of fact, in China, you have a number of people saying the same thing.
So, for instance, right after the coronavirus outbreak, you had Chinese dissidents actually start to write reviews of the HBO show, Chernobyl.
And they didn't mention China because they didn't want to be censored.
That didn't work, of course, because the censors took it down.
But people are discussing this.
Also, the virus outbreak is wreaking havoc on the Chinese economy.
So we know that oil demand is now down 20% year on year.
All sorts of events that were planned are being canceled, including the Canton Fair.
And that was scheduled for April.
And it shows that Chinese leaders think that this virus is going to continue for quite some time.
So that's a real hit to exporters.
You have all the cancellations that you talked about of the flights.
So I think the Chinese economy is in red territory.
And that's important because the Communist Party, one of their two main bases of legitimacy, is the continual delivery of prosperity.
And you now have an economy that is contracting.
You know, I suppose in some ways it's not important how the virus began.
If it came from, as some people allege, eating bats, as some have alleged.
I understand that Wuhan is also the location of a high-security biological research center, Ebola, things of that sort, that many have said is also a military facility for weapons research.
I suppose it doesn't matter how it started because it started.
Do you have any thoughts?
I mean, I want to debunk disinformation and conspiracy theories.
We don't want to engage in that.
But it is interesting because at the end of the day, Chernobyl was caused because the Soviet system, they cut corners because they wanted to save costs and it was the Soviet way and there was no public interest.
So at the end of the day, why Chernobyl went wrong actually was an expression of Soviet communism.
Do you have any conclusions about how this started or is it still too sketchy to be firm on that?
We don't know how this started.
And China is not helping because it has not allowed US CDC personnel, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
They haven't allowed US CDC personnel into China.
And there is a WHO delegation there, but they're not allowed anywhere near the outbreak.
So they're sitting cooling their heels.
So Beijing has been doing its best to try to prevent the world from learning how this started.
There are a number of theories how this started.
You mentioned one of them.
It just naturally mutated from bats.
Other people are saying that there was a release from that Wuhan Institute of Virology, that P4 lab that you mentioned.
We really don't know.
The Lancet, which is the authoritative British medical journal, ran an article on January 24, which said that most of the initial cases of coronavirus had nothing to do with the wet market that people point the finger at.
Well, Ezra, if that's the case, it means that there's got to be another source, and that other source, one of those other sources, could very well be the lab.
And I actually do think it matters how it started, because if the Chinese people believe, as some of them do, that this virus was started from the lab, then there's hell to pay for the Communist Party, because there'll be no forgiving the party.
People are already white hot over this.
This would make it even worse.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
TELUS And Huawei Controversy00:02:11
Well, listen, we're always grateful for your time, Gordon.
And China is certainly in the news for Canada and will be for a long time to come.
It's great to see you.
And once again, I'd like to encourage our viewers to follow Gordon in real time.
He's constantly showing news articles that I personally would not have otherwise come across.
I recommend his Twitter feed at GordonGChang.
It's an outstanding education.
Thank you, my friend.
It's good to see you again.
Thank you so much, Ezra.
All right.
Stay with us.
More ahead on The Rebel.
Hey, welcome back.
What do you think of the fact that TELUS is announcing it's going to proceed with Huawei as part of their cell phone company?
I think that is so tone deaf.
Remember, I told you that Pew Research, which is a liberal but fairly reputable research and polling company, they surveyed people all around the world for attitudes about China.
And did you know that the country in the world that is most hostile to China, number one is Sweden, believe it or not, number two is Canada.
More than the United States, more than Japan or Korea, Canadians have turned against China because China has turned against Canada.
China has seized Canadian hostages.
China has abused us with barriers against our agricultural exports.
Canadians hate China.
Not the Chinese people, not the Chinese ethnicity, but the Chinese communist government.
And now with the Wuhan coronavirus, I can only imagine those numbers are worse.
Imagine that's the political context.
And you're an executive at TELUS and you say, now's a good time to announce we're going with Huawei.
How can you not beg the question, are you taking a bribe?