OTTAWA — Canada will soon bar telecom companies from using equipment made by China’s Huawei and ZTE in their 5G networks, and will order them to remove that gear from older 4G networks by the end of 2027, Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced Thursday.

Doing this will take legislation, due “in the very short term,” Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said at Champagne’s side in a Parliament Hill news conference. Its scope will extend beyond telecom networks.

“We will soon introduce a new framework to protect critical infrastructure in the finance, telecommunications, energy and transport sectors,” Mendicino said.

A policy statement from Champagne’s department says Canada is concerned that Huawei or ZTE “could be compelled to comply with extrajudicial directions from foreign governments in ways that would conflict with Canadian laws or would be detrimental to Canadian interests.”

The concern is that Chinese authorities could bug or sabotage Canadian data traffic passing through equipment supplied by a Chinese company. Huawei has previously said it’s never been asked to facilitate any such thing, and wouldn’t cooperate if it were.

Although 5G technology is relatively new, its higher speed and lower latency (its quicker response time, in plainer words) are expected to lead to new uses in a vast array of fields from telemedicine to autonomous vehicles that generate large amounts of data and require near-instant back-and-forth with faraway controls.

“Given the potential cascading economic and security impacts a telecommunications supply-chain breach could cause, allies have taken actions to enable them to prohibit the deployment of Huawei and ZTE products and services in their 5G telecommunications networks,” the Innovation Canada statement says.

Canada’s allies in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network—the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand—have all banned or sharply restricted their telecom companies from using Huawei gear. Some of them have also targeted ZTE.

Any existing 5G gear will have to be out by June 28, 2024, and any arrangements for related managed services ended by then, as well.

“I think that what the government was trying to achieve was a headline that said they banned Huawei, so they could show the Americans, and they got that,” said Alykhan Velshi, Huawei Canada’s vice-president of corporate affairs, in an interview with The Logic.

He said he was not surprised by the move, though he was surprised by how long it took.

The Liberal government had been trying for years to make up its mind on whether to ban Huawei from Canadian 5G networks. Ralph Goodale, then the minister of public safety, mentioned publicly that it was reviewing the situation in fall 2018, and various ministers have said at various times that a decision was imminent.

Meanwhile, Canadian telcos have largely chosen other vendors for next-generation wireless networks. But Huawei has said some of those telcos kept buying hundreds of millions of dollars of gear to enhance existing systems, and some 5G traffic passes through older equipment in places.

“There’s around 10,000 sites right now, across the country, that have Huawei equipment in them,” Velshi said.

Champagne said the government will not compensate companies that have to remove existing equipment.

That means their customers will have to pay, the Official Opposition Conservatives said.

“In the years of delay, Canadian telecommunications companies purchased hundreds of millions of dollars of Huawei equipment which will now need to be removed from their networks at enormous expense. Either the Liberal government is going to be asked for compensation from these companies or costs will be passed on to consumers,” they said in a statement.

Canada’s relationship with China has soured while the federal government pondered. Weeks after Goodale said Canada was reviewing Huawei’s place here, the RCMP arrested the company’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver, on a U.S. extradition warrant.

Then China arrested Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor on national-security charges and began obstructing imports of Canadian food products such as pork and canola.

After years of diplomatic work to reinforce what Canada called the “rules-based international order,” Meng, Kovrig and Spavor were freed in a carefully orchestrated exchange last September. After three years, China dropped its canola restrictions, just the day before the new announcement about Huawei and ZTE.

Champagne dodged a question about whether he’s concerned about Canadians now in China.

“Let me be clear: this is about Canada,” he said. “This is about our national security. This is about our telecom infrastructure.”

The Council of Canadian Innovators’s president Benjamin Bergen said in a statement that the decision “marks an important shift in policy thinking in Ottawa, one that we welcome and agree with as the correct course of action by our government.”

The government should hire Canadian companies to enhance cybersecurity, he said, because “it’s existential to Canada’s national security in today’s globalized and digitally connected sociopolitical landscape.”

Besides continuing to do business with telecom companies as long as they have Huawei gear, Velshi said he expects Huawei will keep selling consumer goods—“handsets, earbuds, smartwatches … the full range of electronic communication products”—and doing research and development in Canada.

But, he said, the company will be waiting to see the legislation Mendicino promises, to make sure it lives up to an agreement with China that forbids the two countries from discriminating against each other’s companies strictly because of where they’re based, and to Canada’s other obligations.

“We expect the government of Canada, in any legislation it introduces, to comply with the rules-based international order,” he said.