When Canada's Nortel Networks went bankrupt in 2009, China's Huawei recruited an entire Nortel team to its Canadian arm to advance its 5G networks development. As Canada banned Huawei in its 5G network in 2022 over security concerns, the former Nortel team leader became a Royal Society of Canada fellow that same year. Wen Tong, the established engineer who brought his Nortel team with him to join Huawei Canada in 2009, currently leads the Chinese telecom giant's 5G wireless technologies research. Nortel was once a world-leading telecom company and the crown jewel of Canada's high-tech industry for decades, before filing for bankruptcy protection in January 2009. Brian Shields, a former senior security adviser at the company, attributed its collapse partially to intellectual property theft by Chinese hackers in a previous interview with NTD Television Network, a sister company of The Epoch Times.