Mendicino concedes there could be new 'Chinese police stations' in Canada, insists RCMP will shut them down

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino concedes there may be new so-called “Chinese police stations” in Canada after saying last month they’d all been shut down, but he insists the RCMP will close any new sites if they do exist.

The Spanish human rights organization Safeguard Defenders said last fall it had identified more than 100 of these alleged Chinese overseas police stations, including several in Canada. The groups says these stations serve to spy on Chinese dissidents in Canada and abroad and collect information about opponents to the regime in Beijing, under the guise of providing resources to Chinese people living abroad.

China has denied that the stations engage in any foreign interference.

“I am confident that the RCMP have taken concrete action to disrupt any foreign interference in relationship to those so-called police stations, and that if new police stations are popping up and so on, that they will continue to take decisive action going forward,” Mendicino told CTV’s Question Period host Vassy Kapelos in an interview airing Sunday.

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There were reports earlier this month that two Montreal-area community groups, under investigation for allegedly hosting so-called police stations, were still operating normally.

The Canadian Press reported that the two groups in question — Service a la Famille Chinoise du Grand Montreal, based in the city's Chinatown district, and Centre Sino-Quebec de la Rive-Sud, in the Montreal suburb of Brossard, Que. — said the RCMP had taken no action against them.

The Canadian Press has also reported that Mendicino told a parliamentary committee last month “the RCMP have taken decisive action to shut down the so-called police stations.”

In response to questions about the timeline of which stations were closed when, and whether any were still in existence, Mendicino told Kapelos he was “obviously very clear” at committee that the federal police force had “taken, in the past tense, decisive action.”

“That doesn't mean that there can't be new foreign interference activities,” Mendicino said. “Our expectation is that if those activities manifest, if there is foreign interference, that yes, the RCMP will take decisive action as they have in the past.”

He added it is his job to ensure the RCMP has all and resources needed to do its work, but that the RCMP is operationally independent from the government.

The public safety minister noted the mechanisms his government has put in place to combat foreign interference in Canada, including establishing the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians and the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, and appointing former governor general David Johnston to study the issue and determine whether a public inquiry is necessary.

The federal government has also recently wrapped up its consultations on the possibility of creating a foreign agent registry in Canada — similar to those in Australia and the United States — but Mendicino hasn’t given a timeline of when such a registry may be implemented.

“Look, we want to set this tool up as quickly as we can, but we also have to do it in the right way,” he said.

“And I can tell you that the conversations that I've had through the consultation period have been very informative and instructive,” he also said.

The consultations on a possible foreign agent registry — and the reports of the so-called Chinese police stations operating in Montreal — come amid broader concerns about alleged Chinese interference in Canada, as well as the recent decision by the federal government to expel a Chinese diplomat.