In late October 2025, Ericsson Canada quietly offshored approximately 115 high-level network operations technician roles responsible for monitoring, maintaining, and securing the back end of Rogers Communications’ national wireless network. Those positions—covering cellular towers, 5G infrastructure, real-time network monitoring, troubleshooting, and systems linked to emergency services including 911—moved to India and Canadian workers trained their replacements.
In June 2026, we first exposed this national-security threat in the article “Liberals Hand Hostile Nation Canada’s Critical Telecom Infrastructure — The National Security Risk No One Is Talking About.” We detailed how offshoring these roles meant losing sovereign control over critical systems, exposing sensitive network data outside Canadian privacy laws, and creating clear risks of espionage, sabotage, and delayed emergency responses. Conservative MP Kyle Seeback and the United Steelworkers had already sounded the alarm. CSIS’s 2025 Public Report continued to list India as one of the top state actors engaged in foreign interference against Canada.
The Liberal government spent a full year promoting Bill C-8 as the solution to these exact vulnerabilities — yet took no public action.
Bill C-8 received Royal Assent on June 15, 2026, and the Amendments to the Telecommunications Act took immediate effect, adding security of the Canadian telecommunications system as a core policy objective and granting the Governor in Council and the Minister of Industry broad powers to direct telecommunications service providers to take—or refrain from taking—any measures necessary to secure the system. The new Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act imposes obligations on designated operators, including management of supply-chain and third-party risks.
Nearly two months later, there is still no public indication that these powers have been used—or even publicly considered—with respect to the Ericsson/Rogers offshoring. The operational roles remain in India.
But an anonymous source familiar with network operations and the company’s managed-services arrangements has shared detailed internal research with us that explains why Bill C-8 does not close the most serious gaps. The risk is not merely theoretical foreign interference or corporate cost-cutting. It is the plain text of Indian domestic law applying to the people who now hold privileged access to Canadian critical infrastructure.
The legal regime that reaches the technicians
India’s Information Technology Act, 2000 (as amended, principally in 2008) contains several provisions that create direct compulsion obligations for anyone performing work involving computer resources from within India—or involving resources located in India.
Section 69 authorizes the Central Government or a State Government (or specially authorized officers) to direct any agency to intercept, monitor, or decrypt any information generated, transmitted, received, or stored in any computer resource when satisfied it is necessary or expedient in the interest of the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, preventing incitement to certain offences, or for investigation of any offence.
The subscriber, intermediary, or any person in charge of the computer resource must extend all facilities and technical assistance to provide or secure access, intercept/monitor/decrypt the information, or provide stored information. Failure to assist carries imprisonment of up to seven years and a fine. Procedures and safeguards are prescribed by rules (notably the 2009 Interception, Monitoring and Decryption Rules), but the underlying compulsion on the individual remains.
Section 69B allows the Central Government to authorize agencies to monitor and collect traffic data—origin, destination, route, time, size, duration, type of service, and related identifiers—for cyber-security purposes. Persons in charge of the relevant computer resource must provide technical assistance and online access. Knowing non-compliance is punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment and a fine.
Section 70 permits the government to designate computer resources that affect Critical Information Infrastructure—systems whose incapacitation would have a debilitating impact on national security, economy, public health or safety—as protected systems, with severe penalties for unauthorized access. India itself recognizes that certain digital infrastructure warrants special legal protection.
Section 70B establishes the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) as the national agency for cyber-incident response. CERT-In may call for information and issue directions to service providers, intermediaries, data centres, body corporates, and any other person. Non-compliance is punishable by up to one year in prison or a fine. CERT-In’s April 2022 directions impose mandatory rapid incident reporting, log retention, and assistance obligations on a wide range of entities.
Section 75 extends the Act’s application to offences or contraventions committed outside India by any person, regardless of nationality, if the conduct involves a computer, computer system, or computer network located in India.
These are not obscure or rarely invoked clauses. They are the statutory backbone of India’s lawful interception, cyber-security monitoring, and incident-response regime. Network administrators, security personnel, technical-support staff, and operators with credentials or administrative capabilities fall squarely within their reach.
Why network operations are different
The distinction drawn by the Canadian Telecommunications Workers Alliance (CTWA)—the coalition of Unifor, United Steelworkers, and CUPE that has repeatedly raised these issues with MPs, agencies, and regulators—is critical. Basic call-centre work raises one level of concern. Roles inside a Network Operations Centre (NOC), Technical Assistance Centre, network engineering, cybersecurity operations, provisioning, core-network support, location services, APNs, or systems tied to Next-Generation 911 raise an entirely different level.
The technicians offshored by Ericsson under its Rogers contract possessed exactly that privileged access and the visibility into real-time network status, configuration rights, logs, troubleshooting capabilities, and the ability to act on the systems that keep emergency communications running and Canadian workers trained their Indian replacements before the jobs disappeared. Ericsson has offered no public assurance that responsibility for 911-related functions remained exclusively under Canadian operational control either.
A Canadian carrier can assert that the underlying systems remain in Canada and that Canadian privacy statutes or new Bill C-8 orders govern the company, but those assertions do not bind an Indian resident who is ordered by a competent Indian authority to provide access, technical assistance, or stored information. Corporate NDAs, technical data-segregation measures, or “Canadian control” policies cannot override a criminal compulsion directed at the individual under Indian law and Section 75 further complicates any claim that the work is purely extraterritorial to India if any computer resource located in India is involved in the performance of the duties.
The pattern Ottawa continues to ignore
The Ericsson/Rogers case is not isolated. In February 2026, the CTWA publicly documented that nearly 20,000 Canadian telecommunications jobs had been outsourced over the preceding decade to destinations including India, the Philippines, Egypt, and the United States. The alliance has framed the issue as a direct threat to digital sovereignty, privacy, and the security of critical national infrastructure, and has demanded legislation requiring that such functions remain under Canadian operational control.
Meanwhile, the Carney government has pursued a deliberate reset of economic relations with India, including high-level visits and negotiations toward a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement—while CSIS continues to identify India as one of the main perpetrators of foreign interference and espionage against Canada. The tension between commercial outreach and the concrete legal risks created by offshoring privileged access has not been publicly reconciled.
Bill C-8 gives the federal government powerful new tools over Canadian telecommunications service providers. It does not reach into the personal legal obligations of workers residing in India, nor does it nullify the extraterritorial and assistance provisions of the IT Act. The residual jurisdiction risk therefore remains intact.
What remains unanswered
Has the Minister of Industry or the Governor in Council considered an order under the newly amended Telecommunications Act requiring that critical network-operations functions with access to emergency systems remain under the direct operational control of persons subject only to Canadian law? Have Rogers or Ericsson been asked to provide detailed assurances—beyond generic statements—about the location of administrative credentials, monitoring tools, and personnel with privileged access? Has any national-security review examined the interaction between Indian compulsion powers and the systems that underpin 911 and public-safety communications?
More than eight months after the jobs moved and nearly two months after Bill C-8 became law, those questions have received no public answer. The technicians with the keys are still working from a jurisdiction whose law can compel them to turn those keys over. Canada’s critical telecommunications infrastructure continues to operate under that unresolved exposure.
The source who shared the IT Act research with Wiretap Media put the matter plainly: governments recognize that some digital infrastructure is sufficiently important to warrant special legal protections. The unanswered question for Canada is whether critical telecom functions should be performed under a foreign legal regime that can compel access at all.