It's dismaying to see history rewritten so brazenly.
Nortel collapsed because it made bad investments during the tech bubble, and then was hit by the nosedive in investment in network expansion when the bubble burst. On top of that, Nortel was terribly led, resorted to fudging its finances, and got caught.
That's what caused Nortel to collapse, not supposed Chinese spying. Huawei, the alleged beneficiary of the spying (which is just an unproven allegation at this point), was not even a major rival to Nortel when Nortel began to collapse. Huawei had barely even begun to expand out of China at that point. Nortel had much larger international competitors.
Yet somehow, almost two decades after Nortel began to implode, a rewritten history of Nortel's collapse, somehow premised on Chinese spying, has begun to become popular. I think this has much more to do with the recent increase in tensions between China and Canada than with any new information about how Nortel went under.