[Opinion] Canada's police co-operation with China comes without guardrails

submitted by Scotty to canada 11 points | 1 comments https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-police-co-operation-with-china-comes-without-guardrails/

Op-ed by Laura Harth, China in the World director at Safeguard Defenders.

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We already know, however, what an agreement of this kind looks like in practice, because one of Canada’s Five Eyes partners signed one and bore the consequences.

Under a similarly undisclosed MOU, Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) allowed MPS officers to interview targets on Australian soil.

Between 2015 and 2019, at least six Australian residents were interviewed by Chinese police there. Five of them returned to China “voluntarily.” Only one refused.

AFP oversight was found to be negligent or even absent. The AFP ended the agreement in 2024 after the abuses were exposed in Senate hearings.

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The lesson is straightforward. As a Chinese official lamented in response to our reports on illegal Chinese Police Service Centers abroad: “Extradition proceedings are cumbersome.”

Pressure is easy.

Per official figures, Beijing’s preferred method – persuasion – accounts for more than 70 per cent of the more than 14,000 forced returns globally since Operation Fox Hunt started in 2014 [Operation Fox Hunt is China’s Xi Jinping’s rapidly expanding web of relentless – and often illegal - long-arm policing operations around the globe].

The method isn’t subtle. Family members at home are punished. Targets abroad are harassed. The aim, as former justice minister Fu Zhenghua put it, is to “squeeze the living space out of them” until they agree to return.

It has happened in Canada, repeatedly.

Court documents at the trial of former RCMP officer William Majcher revealed at least 25 Canadian residents were targeted under the Fox Hunt campaign.

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Like Australia, Canada has declined extradition co-operation with China, reflecting a consensus across democratic nations: China’s legal system – with its systematic torture and politicized prosecution – cannot meet Canadian standards.

The new MOU does not formally cross that line. But it appears to walk right up to it.

In its response to CTV News, the RCMP cites Canada’s 2007 Protocol on Foreign Criminal Investigators in Canada – the same kind of framework Australia used – as governing co-operation with the MPS. That protocol allows foreign officers to operate here when a target is voluntarily co-operating with an investigation.

But what counts as “voluntary” when a target’s family is at the mercy of Chinese authorities?

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That is precisely the climate of fear the Chinese Communist Party seeks to instill, globally and at home.

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In 2021, then-CSIS director David Vigneault described Operation Fox Hunt as a “covert global operation” used to “target and quiet dissidents to the regime.” In 2023, he singled out the People’s Republic of China’s use of “family and friends living in China as leverage” as the campaign’s most effective tactic.

The CSIS Public Report 2024 went further still. It named the MPS among the agencies whose foreign interference “can include coercing a victim to return to the PRC or threatening their family members in China.”

In June, 2025, Canada led G7 leaders in a joint statement condemning the “misuse of co-operation with other foreign states … in order to detain, forcibly return, or repress targets.”

Seven months later, an MOU was signed with the world’s most prolific perpetrator of such conduct.

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Parliament should see the MOU. And when China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visits Ottawa this week, Anita Anand should tell him that Canada intends to release the police agreement to the public.

It is hard to believe the agreement would survive such scrutiny.