🇨🇦 Ottawa let a Chinese spy shop run wild for a decade

The funniest part is not that Hikvision was flagged as a national-security threat. It is that Ottawa knew, and still let it operate illegally for nearly 10 years. A senior federal official warned in 2025 that every extra day meant more surveillance capacity for Beijing, yet by 2024 more than a dozen federal departments had Hikvision gear on their properties, and over 28,700 devices were still exposed on public internet connections across Canada, as reported.

This is the Trudeau-era state in one snapshot: lectures on democracy abroad, total negligence at home. Mélanie Joly finally acted in 2025, after the company had already become a market leader and after bureaucrats had spent years marinating in their usual diversity seminars and globalist trade fantasies instead of protecting basic sovereignty. A partly PRC-owned surveillance giant, tied to blacklists and Uyghur monitoring, somehow got embedded in Canadian infrastructure while our ruling class obsessed over optics. They did not fail to see the threat. They chose managed vulnerability, because ideology and cheap imports mattered more than Canada.

🍁 Maple Chronicles