Canada is still enduring harsh retaliation from China over the detention (house arrest) of Huawei's CFO for US extradition. We're stuck in the middle until either the US takes her in, or allows Canada to release her.
The story mentioned intel and Qualcomm but quite possibly Broadcom was/is lobbying hard behind the scenes. They have a long history with both ZTE and Huawei and a lot to lose from the blacklisting. Luckily they weren’t allowed to purchase Qualcomm when they tried