Conrad Black: Trump is right to take on China, but Canada shouldn't extradite Meng

Huawei's Financial Chief Meng Wanzhou leaves her family home in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, May 8, 2019. REUTERS/Lindsey Wasson/File Photo

Certainly many ironies are established in the controversies about the state of Huawei, the Chinese tech giant in the sights of the United States Department of Justice and its problem related to the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, the company’s chief financial officer in a request of extradition from the United States. The first place to start from the perspective of Canada is the almost certain fact that Huawei’s business was largely based on one of the most colossal and prolonged information thefts and violations of patent laws in the long history of the industrial espionage, mainly at the expense of this country.

Nortel Networks Corporation, formerly Northern Telecom, was to some extent the largest corporation in the history of Canada, and at its peak in approximately 2000, accounted for a third of the total valuation of all listed companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Giant bankruptcy

Nortel employed 94,500 people worldwide. At the time it was a great Canadian success story frequently mentioned with pride as indicative of Canada’s presence at the forefront of innovative technology.

Even so, from one moment to the next everything went terribly wrong and in 2009 the largest bankruptcy in the history of Canada involved Nortel, and tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of investors were lost, while lawyers and accountants happily raised $ 2.5 billion to carry out the prolonged and complicated gifts of a great Canadian icon.

Huawei’s business was largely based on one of the most colossal and prolonged thefts of information and violations of patent laws in the long history of industrial espionage, mainly at the expense of this country.

Huawei had been a contract manufacturer of Nortel products in China. Nortel had been the victim of a series of hacker attacks that invaded its internal systems and accessed huge databases of technical, research, financial, commercial and product planning matters, and internal correspondence, all electronically registered everywhere of the company. Around this time, Huawei began its rapid rise and usurped Nortel’s market position, taking advantage of the economies in an underdeveloped country.

Source: Conrad Black | National Post