Air Canada’s Hong Kong jet maintenance deal amid China discord raises security concerns
globalnews.caAir Canada has awarded a Hong Kong company a major contract to perform heavy maintenance on 56 of its wide-body jets, sparking concerns about Chinese spies bugging the planes and aircraft becoming trapped in China if a military conflict erupts with Taiwan.
The maintenance company, HAECO, unveiled its major Air Canada deal with fanfare on Feb. 28, 2024, replacing ST Aerospace company, which performed the work at its Texas facility from 2017 to 2022.
The arrangement with HAECO was signed last September during a period of increasingly acrimonious political discord and military tensions between Canada and China, which has assumed a great deal of political and judicial control over Hong Kong. The deal, whose value is unknown, was not announced last fall.
“It’s a head scratcher, for sure,” said Phil Gurski, president of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting, and a former senior analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
“Given what China has done here in terms of interference in our elections, and running secret police stations, the prudent approach would be, for the time being, less China, not more China,” Gurski said. “I’d be hitting the pause button pretty damn quickly.”
Margaret McCuaig-Johnston, a board member at the China Strategic Risks Institute, also voiced disapproval and wasn’t surprised the new maintenance deal was kept under wraps for months as Canada and China traded barbs for most of 2022 and 2023.
“I have serious concerns about sending business away from our closest allies to a country that has treated Canada in the last six years with malign intent and has, as its first priority, Chinese interests,” said McCuaig-Johnston, also a senior fellow with the University of Ottawa’s Institute for Science,
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