For the past five and a half years, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) has been using communications equipment and technology from the controversial Chinese firm Hytera Communications — a company the United States government has blacklisted as a national security threat.

The federal government awarded a contract to provide and maintain RCMP communications equipment to a firm with financial ties to the Chinese government, Radio-Canada has learned.

Ottawa's efforts to build a massive icebreaker have become the focus of a heated interprovincial political battle over a plan to send the work to a B.C.-based firm instead of a Quebec shipyard.