Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament last week, killing several in-progress bills. That includes one that would have forced telecom companies to remove Huawei equipment in their networks.

Per The Logic, prorogation ended Bill C-26, which would have pushed telcos to remove Huawei hardware from 5G networks by July 2024 and out of older 4G networks by the end of 2027. The bill was introduced in June 2022 and spent the last two years in votes and committees and was nearly finalized before prorogation.

The death of Bill C-26 will likely mean Huawei equipment will remain in networks for longer. Part of this is because of the cost of removing the equipment. For example, both Bell and Telus sought compensation from the government for removing the equipment in 2021, but Bill C-26 wouldn’t have allowed that.

The Logic notes that Bell, Telus and Iristel have been complying slowly with the expectation that the bill would become law. But with Bill C-26 dead in the water and no clarity on whether a future government — Conservative or otherwise — will introduce similar legislation, telcos will likely take their time to remove the rest of the equipment.

For example, Iristel CEO Samer Bishay told The Logic that the company would slow down the removal of Huawei equipment and focus on replacing it with new non-Huawei equipment as it breaks or becomes obsolete.

It’s a fairly anticlimactic end to what was once a major issue in Canadian news. Concern over Huawei and China was a major staple in the news from 2018 through 2022 as Canada faced pressure from allies to ban or restrict the use of Huawei equipment in 5G networks. Canada’s arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, in 2018 escalated tensions. You can read a whole timeline about the Huawei issue here. The federal government officially banned Huawei and fellow China-based telecom company ZTE from 5G networks in May 2022.

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Source: The Logic