OTTAWA — Doing nothing about Chinese-made security gear monitoring sensitive Canadian facilities risks the faith of Canada’s allies and could put the military at risk, opposition critics said, following The Logic’s reporting on the issue.

Three years after the United States began pushing Chinese-made equipment out of its security and defence sites, Canada’s Department of National Defence appears not to have taken an inventory of the cameras and related equipment in use at thousands of its buildings and bases across the country.

Under pressure during that time, the Liberal government scrapped a plan to buy security scanners made by China’s Nuctech for Canadian embassies. It’s legislating to remove telecom gear from Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE from private companies’ communication networks and ban it from next-generation 5G networks.

“This government exhibits a troubling recklessness about China,” Bloc Québécois defence critic Christine Normandin told The Logic in an email in French. “It’s incredible that after Nuctech, Huawei, the coercion against the Chinese Canadian diaspora, the interference in our elections and many other events, this government only ever does the bare minimum to counter interference and espionage.”

The government needs to inventory all its digital cameras from Chinese businesses and replace them as fast as possible, Normandin wrote.

The NDP is “troubled” by the apparent lack of action, said the party’s defence critic Lindsay Mathyssen in an email. Particularly in light of Canadian allies’ moves.

“This government must ensure our service men and women can do their jobs securely while also providing confidence to our allies that Canada is meeting their security obligations,” she wrote.

The United Kingdom and Australia have followed the American lead, taking steps to replace cameras manufactured in China or with Chinese-made components.

“Canada is certainly behind allies, in terms of acting upon what has been recognized as a pretty fundamental threat, whether that threat is manifest or whether the potential of that threat is already built into the technology,” said Rafal Rohozinski, a cybersecurity expert and CEO of the SecDev Group.

In an interview, he said China has built an extraordinarily invasive security state internally, using advanced technology that starts with the inputs from cameras. The risk that cameras sold abroad could be rigged to feed intelligence to China is obvious, he said.

National Defence told The Logic that it uses a list of approved security companies to supply cameras and they’re overseen by internal experts in a directorate for architectural and engineering services.

That might well be inadequate, said Rohozinski.

“Unless something comes from trusted vendors—and increasingly there’s the phrase ‘trusted forges,’ which means that at the level at which chips are designed and made, there’s security in the supply chain—it really becomes difficult to know whether or not something is secure or insecure,” he said.

This is a genuinely difficult problem, he said, because it means reversing 30 years of procurement practices. During the Cold War, Canada and its allies carefully avoided products with links to the Soviet Union; since then, they’ve bought all kinds of gear off the shelf without thinking too deeply about where components come from.

“It requires a complete change in mindset as well as a completely different kind of budget,” Rohozinski said.

Canada is also vulnerable to Chinese retaliation to a degree the United States isn’t, because of the relative sizes of their economies and Canada’s economic dependence on exporting raw materials. Australia is in a similar position in many ways but it’s already had a reckoning with interference from China and chosen to pay the price, Rohozinski said.

Canada hasn’t, plus it has the luxury of expecting U.S. protection.

“Things go slower in Canada in these kinds of things, whether it’s 5G or CCTV cameras,” he said.