After two years of the Canadian government starting to restrict funding for academic research involving countries such as China, the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is still seeking patents for such research that it collaborates on with Canadian public universities. The restrictions concern research projects funded by the government in countries considered to pose a threat to Canadian national security.

The patents submitted by Huawei over the past two years relate to areas of fifth generation, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, optical communications, and among its collaborators are scientists and researchers from the University of Toronto, McMaster University, Western University Ontario, University of California, British Columbia, and Queen's University.

Except for Queen's University, all the aforementioned universities stated that they only fulfill contracts previously signed, but have no intention to cooperate with Huawei in research thereafter.

For his part, Jim Hinton, a patent lawyer in Waterloo, who submitted the relevant patent application documents to the Globe and Mail newspaper and went to Congress for a hearing last month, said these applications have appeared since the beginning of 2022, indicating that Canadian universities are actively working on transferring intellectual property rights to Huawei.

The Canadian federal government also issued new guidelines in 2021 to clarify to academia the scope of sensitive research that foreign governments and militaries care about, and require academia to submit them to the federal government when applying for funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of the federal government.

All of Huawei's patent applications are submitted according to the guidelines.

The Canadian government stated that the guidelines aim to prevent foreign interference, espionage, and involuntary knowledge transfer from assisting countries and organizations that pose a threat to Canada in military, national security, intelligence fields, or that may harm Canada politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Interference in building critical infrastructure.

The directive is not retroactive and applies only to federally funded research. Canada currently does not prevent universities from cooperating with Chinese companies.