Mounties mum on report of two more illegal Chinese police stations on Canadian soil

FIRST READING: The RCMP have been hesitant to confirm whether the stations are violating Canadian law

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TOP STORY

The same non-profit which said they found Chinese police stations operating on Canadian soil now say they’ve found two more.

Safeguard Defenders is a Spanish-based NGO that monitors police disappearances in China. In October they released a report claiming that Chinese law enforcement operates a worldwide network of “service stations” to enforce the Chinese policy of “Involuntary Return” – a program of compelling Chinese nationals to return home whenever the country’s security service deems that they’ve violated Chinese law.

Three of these stations were identified as being in the Toronto area. One was registered to a private home, another was a strip mall populated largely with Chinese-Canadian businesses and the third was the office of a registered non-profit known as the Canada Toronto FuQing Business Association.

And now, Safeguard Defenders say they’ve found two more. One in Vancouver, and another in an unidentified Canadian city.

Although Safeguard Defenders’ initial report prompted immediate political ripple effects around the world, the impact was probably felt most sharply in Canada, for which this is only the latest allegation of alleged Chinese political interference.  

In October, a House of Commons committee on Canada-Beijing relations was utterly dominated by concerns from across the political spectrum that China was using the stations to ratchet up its surveillance of Chinese nationals living and working in Canada.

“I don’t think any of us are, to be honest, surprised. We’ve heard for a long time about people intimidated and threatened in this country,” said Heather McPherson, the NDP’s Foreign Affairs Critic.

The issue may even have helped prompt a face-to-face rebuke of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the recent G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia. China’s ambassador to Canada has been summoned multiple times before Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly to answer to allegations about the station.

But thus far, Canadian law enforcement have been hesitant to lend credence to the Safeguard Defenders report. The alleged stations have been under investigation by the RCMP since October, but police have failed to confirm that anything illegal is happening at them.

It would indeed be a violation of any number of Canadian laws if China was found to be operating police stations on Canadian territory for the express purpose of enforcing Chinese laws – but the Mounties don’t appear to be ready to confirm that this is what’s happening.

“Our aim is to prevent intimidation, threats and harassment as well as any form of harm initiated on behalf of a foreign entity being applied to any community in Canada,” was how the RCMP described their probe in a November statement.

When queried about the stations – either in Canada or in other countries which made the Safeguard Defenders list – officials for the People’s Republic of China have long claimed that the stations are merely volunteer-staffed outposts to help Chinese expats complete routine administrative paperwork.

“During the past two years, the pandemic made international travels not easy and quite a few Chinese nationals found their Chinese ID cards and/or driver licences expired or about to expire, and yet they could not get the ID renewed back in China in time,” was now China’s Ireland embassy explained one such station in Dublin.

IN OTHER NEWS

Canada may have just experienced the greatest fraud in its entire history (and prior frauds are not particularly close). A new Auditor General’s report has concluded that at least $27.4 billion in COVID payments appear to have been paid out to Canadians who were not eligible. This is in addition to another $4.6 billion in COVID payouts that were already under suspicion. All told, in only a few months Ottawa may have lost a quantity of money equivalent to several times the construction costs of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. As to where it all went, there’s good reason to believe that part of it became an unprecedented wealth transfer to organized crime. This time last year, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada was warning that criminals could very easily have exploited COVID benefit programs without ever being caught.

Lest you think that the Alberta government is spending all its time on weird sovereignty projects, the province did score a procurement coup this week by securing five million bottles of badly needed children’s acetaminophen and ibuprofen. Notably, the feds were only able to track down one million bottles.

The saga of Bill C-21 (a Liberal proposal to institute the largest gun ban in Canadian history) has now taken two distinct and potentially contradictory paths …

As frequently noted in this newsletter, MAID has been getting a lot of bad press due to steady instances of sick and vulnerable Canadians being offered state-sanctioned death instead of medical treatment. This has led to opposition calls to hold off on a March, 2023 deadline in which euthanasia would be extended to Canadians whose only underlying condition is mental illness. Justice Minister David Lametti said “no,” and asserted that Canada’s MAID system is working fine in principle, and that the controversial cases are deviations from the norm.

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