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.

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.

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.”