Mendicino Explains Previously Inconsistent Remarks About RCMP Shutting Down Covert Chinese Police Service Stations

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino speaks in the foyer of the House of Commons on April 26, 2023. The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino says the RCMP will be addressing any “new” undercover Chinese police service stations that show up in Canada—an admission that comes just over two weeks after he said the RCMP had shut down all the covert police stations operating on Canadian soil.

“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 said while appearing on CTV’s “Question Period” on May 14.

Mendicino told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs on April 27 that the RCMP had “taken decisive action to shut down the so-called police stations” operating in Canada.

However, two Montreal-area community groups that the RCMP have been investigating for several months now for allegedly hosting secret Chinese police service stations said a day later that they are continuing to operate normally.

“We have not received any closure requests from the RCMP,” both groups said in a joint statement to The Canadian Press on April 28.

In February, The Epoch Times reported that a location in Richmond, B.C., had been listed in an online post as an overseas police outpost by a regional Chinese police bureau in July 2020.

The post, written in simplified Chinese, said the Richmond police station had been established in 2016 along with stations in 28 other countries worldwide.

Police Stations

Mendicino said on “Question Period” that the inconsistency between his previous committee comments and the alleged police stations’ activities was due to the RCMP’s operational independence from the federal government.

“It is not for elected government to go out and conduct these investigations,” he said, while also saying the RCMP are still “taking decisive steps to disrupt those activities that are in relationship to so-called police stations.”

“Disrupted means shut down,” he added. “But if there are other foreign interference activities in relationship to the so-called police stations, yes, our expectation is that they will act.”

The show’s host, Vassy Kapelos, pressed Mendicino on his previously inconsistent remarks before committee regarding the police stations, but the public safety minister said he had been speaking in the “past tense.”

“When we said that we were obviously very clear that at the time the RCMP had taken, in the past tense, decisive action,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that there can’t be new foreign interference activities.”

Conservative MP Dan Albas said shortly after that Mendicino’s comments were “disconcerting on many levels.”

“The Minister responsible can’t give a straight answer to whether these police stations are active or not, despite multiple attempts,” he wrote on Twitter on May 14.

All opposition parties voted in favour of a non-binding motion on May 8 calling on the federal government to immediately shut down all known unofficial Chinese police stations operating in Canada.

The Canadian Press and Andrew Chen contributed to this report.