Man accused of trying to send state secrets to China worked for Irving subcontractor

The man police arrested for allegedly trying to pass sensitive national security information to China worked for a subcontractor of the Irving Shipyard in Halifax.

Qing Quentin Huang was arrested on Saturday for what police say was an attempt to pass information to China about Canada’s national shipbuilding procurement strategy.

Huang has been working at Lloyd’s Register’s Burlington offices, as a structural design support engineer, for more than 6 years. The company is a subcontractor of Irving Shipyards in Halifax.

“At the moment we’re at no risk, in the national sense,” said Ken Hansen, a resident research fellow with the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies.

Hansen says he believes China’s interest lies with the Arctic offshore patrol ships, the first set of vessels under the government’s strategy.

“The Chinese are gathering information for their analysts to use, to try and project forward what Canada is going to be doing in the Arctic, and what level of capability we’ll be developing through this shipbuilding program.”

Hansen said Lloyd’s would have general classification information about the capabilities of the ships. But while the company would have access to it, officials say Huang did not.

“He had no authorized access to classified information, he did not have a security clearance, and he was not assigned any work under the national shipbuilding procurement strategy,” said Bud Streeter, the president of Lloyd’s Register Canada Ltd.

Irving Shipbuilding president Kevin McCoy echoed Streeter’s words.

“We can confirm that the accused was at no time employed by or on Irving Shipbuilding property,” he said in a statement.

According to Hansen, this type of commercial espionage is fairly common.

“This is going on everywhere in the world — defence analysts, economic analysts and policy analysts are doing this all the time everywhere.”