In late October 2025, a quiet but consequential decision unfolded at Ericsson Canada, the Swedish telecom giant contracted to manage critical portions of Rogers Communications’ national wireless network. Approximately 115 specialized network operations technician jobs—high-level technical roles responsible for monitoring, maintaining, and securing the back-end infrastructure of one of Canada’s largest wireless providers—were offshored to India. Canadian workers reportedly trained their overseas replacements before the transition took effect on October 31, 2025.
The move, framed by Ericsson as part of routine “global consolidation,” has drawn sharp criticism from opposition politicians and telecom unions. Conservative MP Kyle Seeback and others publicly warned that these were far from routine work. The technicians oversaw Rogers’ wireless backbone, including systems tied to emergency services such as 911 networks. Offshoring them, critics argued, transferred operational control of vital Canadian critical infrastructure to foreign hands—raising alarms about sovereignty, data privacy, and national security.
This story resurfaced yesterday (June 2, 2026) in the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance during pre-budget consultations, where Seeback highlighted the case once again. Yet despite months of warnings, there has been no public government intervention. The revelation comes at a striking moment: the Liberal government has spent the past year promoting Bill C-8—legislation explicitly designed to protect Canada’s digital and telecommunications infrastructure from exactly these kinds of vulnerabilities.
The Job Description
These were not entry-level or call-centre roles. The technicians were the skilled backbone of Rogers’ national wireless network, responsible for operating and maintaining its most sensitive systems: cellular towers, 5G infrastructure, real-time network monitoring, troubleshooting, and the critical links that keep emergency communications — including 911 — running without interruption.
When Rogers transferred much of its field operations to Ericsson in 2025, many of these high-level positions moved under the new contractor. The timing could not have been more contentious. The offshoring decision landed squarely in the middle of a unionization drive by the United Steelworkers (USW). Canadian employees were ordered to train their Indian replacements — with some required to travel overseas for the hand-over — only to see their own jobs eliminated shortly afterward. To date, Ericsson has offered no public assurance that responsibility for 9-11-related functions remained fully under Canadian control.
National Security Risks of Offshoring
Critics, including Conservative MP Kyle Seeback and representatives from the United Steelworkers (USW), have repeatedly outlined the profound national security dangers posed by this offshoring decision. At its core, the relocation has resulted in a significant loss of sovereign control over critical telecommunications infrastructure. These systems are designated as essential to public safety, emergency response, and national resilience; they form the invisible backbone that keeps Canada’s wireless communications running 24 hours a day. By shifting day-to-day operational access outside Canadian borders and direct regulatory jurisdiction, the country has effectively ceded oversight of a vital national asset to foreign subcontractors, leaving Ottawa with limited ability to enforce immediate accountability or intervene in real time if problems arise.
Data and privacy exposure represent another concern. Foreign personnel in India operating these networks are not subject to Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), the cornerstone of domestic privacy safeguards. As a result, sensitive network logs, user metadata, location data, and even emergency-service protocols could be handled under entirely different legal standards. This creates openings for foreign government access requests, data-sharing arrangements, or even inadvertent leaks that Canadian authorities would have no direct power to prevent or investigate. In an era when telecom networks carry everything from personal communications to government and financial transactions, the potential for unauthorized exposure is not theoretical—it directly threatens the privacy rights of millions of Canadians.
Espionage and sabotage vectors have also emerged as serious potential threats. Granting routine operational access to non-Canadian technicians creates insider-risk pathways and remote interference points within systems that underpin not only 911 emergency calls but also critical sectors such as financial markets, healthcare delivery, transportation coordination, and public safety alerts. Even without malicious intent, the arrangement opens the door to state-linked actors or opportunistic cybercriminals exploiting access for intelligence gathering or disruptive operations. Reliability gaps compound these issues: time-zone differences spanning up to 12 hours, potential language or cultural barriers in high-pressure technical troubleshooting, and reduced on-the-ground accountability could delay responses to network outages or cyber incidents. Such delays have real-world consequences—past Rogers network disruptions have already shown how quickly millions of Canadians can be left without service, affecting everything from hospital communications to emergency dispatching.
Unions and opposition MPs, alarmed by these layered risks, formally urged then-Industry Minister Mélanie Joly to invoke existing national-security provisions and pause the offshoring pending a full review. Despite these direct appeals, no such action was taken.
Relocated to India: Cyber Fraud Epidemic Meets CSIS National Security Warnings
The jobs were relocated primarily to India, a country grappling with a well-documented and massive cyber-fraud problem. In 2025 alone, Indians lost approximately $3.5 billion CAD to cyber fraud, according to data from the Ministry of Home Affairs and Investment scams accounted for more than 75% of losses. The country recorded 2.815 million cybercrime cases—up from the previous year—with financial fraud dominating. Enforcement agencies have blocked millions of fraudulent transactions, but the scale remains enormous: experts describe India as a global hub for scams, phishing, “digital arrest” frauds, and tech-support cons targeting victims worldwide, including Canadians.
This environment already raises legitimate questions about background risks when foreign personnel—regardless of corporate vetting—gain operational access to sensitive Canadian telecom systems. Those concerns are compounded by Canada’s own intelligence agency repeatedly identifying India as one of the top state actors engaged in foreign interference and espionage against Canada. The CSIS Public Report 2025 (released May 2026) lists India alongside China, Russia, Iran, and Pakistan as the main perpetrators. It states that historically, India has cultivated covert relationships with Canadian politicians, journalists, and members of the Indo-Canadian community to exert its influence and advance its interests. This has included transnational repression (TNR) activities, such as surveillance and other coercive tactics meant to suppress criticism of the Government of India.
While the 2025 report tones down some language compared to prior editions, India remains explicitly named as an active threat. Canada’s National Cyber Threat Assessment has also noted that Indian state-sponsored cyber actors have conducted espionage against government networks. Critics argue that handing operational control of critical telecom infrastructure to personnel in a country flagged this way compounds the risk.
The Bill C-8 Hypocrisy: Protection Promised, Action Absent
Here is where the story takes its sharpest turn. On June 18, 2025—just months before the Ericsson offshoring—the Liberal government introduced Bill C-8, An Act respecting cyber security, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts. Ministers and officials promoted it aggressively as landmark legislation to safeguard Canada’s digital infrastructure.
Key elements include amending the Telecommunications Act to enshrine the security of the Canadian telecommunications system as a core policy objective, granting the government broad powers to issue binding orders directing telecom service providers (like Rogers) to take any measures necessary to secure the system against interference, disruption, or degradation, and managing third-party and supply-chain risks while imposing security conditions and creating the new Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act (CCSPA) for critical sectors including telecom.
Bill C-8 passed the third reading in the House of Commons on March 26, 2026, and is currently in the Senate committee. Government messaging framed it as a direct response to foreign threats, supply-chain vulnerabilities, and the need to protect critical infrastructure.
Yet when faced with a concrete case—offshoring operational control of Rogers’ wireless backbone (including 911 elements) to a CSIS-listed interference actor with a rampant fraud ecosystem—the government has remained silent. No directive, no national security review, no use of the very powers it championed in Bill C-8. Opposition MPs and unions have repeatedly pointed out this gap: the bill targets risky equipment and suppliers but appears to leave the door open for foreign operational staffing of critical systems.
A Pattern or an Oversight?
The Ericsson/Rogers case is not isolated. Canadian telecom giants have offshored tens of thousands of jobs over the past decade, often to India and other lower-cost jurisdictions. Unions via the Canadian Telecommunications Workers Alliance (CTWA) have warned that this erodes not just employment but digital sovereignty itself.
As of today, no major Canadian news outlet has covered the 115-job offshoring in depth. The story lives primarily in political statements, union releases, and social media from figures like Seeback and Raquel Dancho. The June 2 Finance Committee mention may change that—if transcripts and video emerge and spark broader scrutiny.
The central question remains: If Bill C-8 was truly meant to protect Canada’s telecommunications infrastructure from foreign risks, why has the government taken no visible steps to address a case that critics say directly undermines that goal?