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During Prime Minister Mark Carney's January 2026 visit to Beijing, the RCMP signed a law-enforcement cooperation memorandum with China's Ministry of Public Security — the national police agency whose Fuzhou bureau ran the clandestine "overseas police stations" that the RCMP itself investigated in Toronto and Montreal. The RCMP will not release the agreement's contents without Beijing's permission. This is happening after Canada's own Foreign Interference Commission found the People's Republic of China to be "by far the most significant" foreign-interference threat to Canadian democracy.
In January 2026, during Prime Minister Mark Carney's state visit to Beijing, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police signed a memorandum of understanding on law-enforcement cooperation with the People's Republic of China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS). A joint statement from Carney and Chinese President Xi Jinping said the two sides "committed to strengthening law enforcement cooperation to combat corruption and transnational crimes, including telecommunication and cyber fraud and illegal synthetic drugs." The RCMP has refused to release the full text of the agreement, stating it will not do so without the agreement of China's government — drawing demands for disclosure from both the Conservative and New Democratic parties. The MPS is the same national police body whose subordinate Fuzhou Public Security Bureau operated the clandestine "overseas police service stations" that the NGO Safeguard Defenders exposed in 2022 and that the RCMP investigated in the Greater Toronto Area and in Montreal (the RCMP closed its Montreal investigation in September 2025 without charges; the two Montreal community organizations involved have sued the RCMP for defamation and contest the characterization). The cooperation agreement was signed against the backdrop of the Hogue Commission (the federal Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference), which in its January 2025 final report found the PRC to be "by far the most significant" foreign-interference threat and documented Chinese interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. A former senior RCMP officer, opposition public-safety critics, and national-security commentators have characterized the secret MPS cooperation agreement as a counterintelligence and sovereignty risk. This article documents the agreement, the institutional connection to the police stations, the election-interference findings, the official threat assessment, and the criticisms — with precise attribution and the honest caveats around the un-charged community organizations.
In January 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney made a state visit to Beijing — part of a thaw in Canada-China relations after years of deep freeze following the 2018-2020 Meng Wanzhou / "two Michaels" crisis and the subsequent foreign-interference revelations.
During the visit, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police signed a memorandum of understanding on law-enforcement cooperation with the People's Republic of China's **Ministry of Public Security (MPS)** — the PRC's national police and domestic-security agency.
The joint statement issued by Carney and Chinese President Xi Jinping described the law-enforcement element this way: the two sides "committed to strengthening law enforcement cooperation to combat corruption and transnational crimes, including telecommunication and cyber fraud and illegal synthetic drugs, in accordance with their respective laws."
The MOU was one of several cooperation agreements signed during the visit, alongside deals on forestry, trade, tourism, energy, and food safety. But the law-enforcement MOU is categorically different from a forestry agreement: it concerns cooperation between Canada's national police force and the police ministry of a state that Canada's own public inquiry has named its top foreign-interference threat.
The Ministry of Public Security is not an ordinary police agency. It is the PRC's national police and internal-security ministry, responsible for domestic law enforcement, public-order policing, household registration, and — critically — the apparatus of internal political control. The MPS operates under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party.
The MPS is also the parent institution of the **Fuzhou Public Security Bureau** — and the Fuzhou bureau is the body that operated the clandestine "overseas police service stations" in Canada and around the world.
This is the through-line that makes the cooperation agreement significant. The RCMP did not sign an MOU with some neutral foreign-police counterpart. It signed an MOU with the exact ministry whose subordinate bureau ran the illegal police stations that the RCMP itself investigated on Canadian soil. The institution on the other side of Canada's new law-enforcement-cooperation channel is the institution behind the transnational-repression operation Canada was, two years earlier, trying to shut down.
In September 2022, the NGO Safeguard Defenders published "110 Overseas — Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild," documenting a network of PRC "overseas police service stations" across dozens of countries, including Canada. A follow-up report in December 2022 ("Patrol and Persuade") expanded the count.
The stations' alleged function: to act as clandestine hubs for the Chinese state to monitor, intimidate, and "persuade" members of the Chinese diaspora — and to compel individuals wanted by Beijing to return to China, outside any legal extradition process. This is the practice national-security analysts call "transnational repression."
The RCMP response in Canada: - **Greater Toronto Area:** The RCMP announced in October 2022 that it was investigating reports of criminal activity related to alleged police stations operating on behalf of the PRC. Three of the alleged stations in the GTA were linked to the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau. - **Montreal:** In March 2023 the RCMP confirmed it was investigating two Montreal-area organizations — the Service à la Famille Chinoise du Grand Montréal and the Centre Sino-Québec de la Rive-Sud — as alleged police stations.
**The honest caveat, stated clearly:** The RCMP concluded its Montreal investigation in September 2025 **without recommending any charges.** The two Montreal community organizations have **sued the RCMP for defamation** (filed March 2024, seeking over $4.9 million), contesting the "police station" characterization. This article does NOT assert that those specific community organizations are guilty of anything — they were investigated, not charged, and they are contesting the matter in court.
What is NOT in dispute is the institutional reality: the Safeguard Defenders reports, the House of Commons committee study (CACN), and Public Safety Canada's own briefing materials all identify the MPS / Fuzhou Public Security Bureau as the institutional operator of the overseas-police-station model. The documented through-line is the ministry, not the individual community organizations.
The cooperation agreement was signed against a specific, official backdrop: Canada's own public inquiry had, one year earlier, named the PRC as the country's most significant foreign-interference threat.
The Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions — the Hogue Commission, led by Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Marie-Josée Hogue — was established in September 2023. Its preliminary report (May 2024) and final report (January 28, 2025, seven volumes, 51 recommendations) reached direct conclusions:
- The PRC was the **main perpetrator** of foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, described as "persistent and sophisticated." - China "clandestinely and deceptively" interfered in both general elections and is **"by far the most significant" threat.** - The interference did not change the overall outcome of either election, but **may have affected individual ridings** — the Commission found a "reasonable possibility" that a PRC interference campaign against Conservative candidate Kenny Chiu contributed to his 2021 defeat in Steveston—Richmond East, BC. - China's strategy was not to back a particular party, but to undermine individual politicians critical of Beijing and support those seen as more favourable.
This is not an opinion or an opposition talking point. It is the formal finding of a federal public inquiry led by a sitting appellate judge. When this article refers to the PRC as Canada's "biggest threat," that is the Hogue Commission's documented characterization.
The single most-criticized feature of the RCMP-MPS agreement is that the public is not allowed to see it.
The RCMP has stated that it will not release the full text of the agreement **without the agreement of China's government.** In other words: a Canadian public-transparency decision about a Canadian national-police agreement has been made contingent on Beijing's permission.
Both opposition parties have demanded disclosure: - The **Conservative Party** has pressed for the agreement to be released, framing it as a matter of national-security accountability. - **NDP public-safety critic Jenny Kwan** said Canadians should know what information the RCMP is sharing with Beijing under the agreement.
The transparency concern is structural. An MOU on law-enforcement cooperation typically governs what information is shared, under what conditions, with what safeguards, and subject to what oversight. Without the text, the public — and Parliament — cannot evaluate: - What categories of information the RCMP may share with the MPS. - Whether the agreement includes safeguards against the MPS using shared information for transnational-repression purposes. - Whether there is any independent oversight of what flows through the channel. - Whether information about individuals in Canada (including diaspora members the PRC targets) could be shared.
The government's position is that the MOU concerns ordinary transnational-crime cooperation (fraud, cybercrime, fentanyl precursors) and that such confidentiality is standard for diplomatic agreements. That position may be entirely correct. The problem is that it cannot be verified, because the document is secret — and its secrecy is, by the RCMP's own statement, subject to Beijing's consent.
The criticism of the agreement comes from credible, named sources, and this article attributes each rather than asserting wrongdoing in its own voice.
**A former senior RCMP officer**, quoted by the investigative outlet The Bureau, characterized the RCMP-MPS cooperation deal as a "counterintelligence danger that risks sovereignty." The argument: any information-sharing channel with the MPS is a channel the MPS's intelligence apparatus can exploit, and the asymmetry of the relationship (the MPS operates a sophisticated foreign-operations capability; the RCMP is a domestic police force) favours Beijing.
**Opposition public-safety critics** (Conservative and NDP) have focused on the secrecy and the lack of disclosed safeguards.
**National-security commentators** have raised the specific concern that the agreement "expands the channels through which intimidation, manipulation, and Chinese clandestine police operations already manifest in Canada" — i.e., that a cooperation channel could be used to legitimize or facilitate the same transnational-repression activity the police stations represented.
The government's defenders would respond: Canada cannot simply refuse all law-enforcement contact with the world's second-largest economy; transnational fraud and fentanyl-precursor trafficking are real cross-border problems requiring some coordination; and many democracies maintain police-cooperation channels with China. These are legitimate points. The counter to them is not that cooperation is inherently illegitimate, but that cooperation with this specific ministry, at this specific time, with no public safeguards and Beijing-contingent secrecy, fails the transparency test a democracy should apply.
The core of the story is a contradiction in the Canadian government's posture toward the PRC.
On one hand, the machinery of the Canadian state has, over the past four years, formally identified the PRC as the top threat to Canadian democratic institutions: the Hogue Commission ("by far the most significant" interference threat), CSIS (which has repeatedly named the PRC as the primary foreign-interference and economic-espionage threat in its public reports), and the RCMP itself (which investigated the MPS-linked police stations as criminal operations on Canadian soil).
On the other hand, the same government — through the same RCMP — has now signed a secret law-enforcement cooperation agreement with the police ministry of that same state.
Both things are true simultaneously. The government would argue they are reconcilable: that you can both defend against a state's interference AND cooperate with its police on shared criminal threats, the way Cold War adversaries cooperated on narrow common interests. That argument is not unreasonable in the abstract.
What makes it hard to accept on faith in this specific case is the combination: the counterparty ministry is the one behind the police stations; the inquiry finding the PRC the top threat is one year old; the agreement is secret; and the secrecy is contingent on Beijing's permission. Each element alone might be defensible. Together, they describe a government asking Canadians to trust — without seeing the document — that a cooperation channel with the police force of its designated top adversary is safe.
Parliament Audit takes no position on whether the agreement should exist. We document that it exists, that it is secret, who the counterparty is, and what Canada's own institutions have said about that counterparty. Whether the cooperation is prudent is a judgment that the public cannot fully make until the agreement is disclosed — and the case for disclosing it is the clearest conclusion the documented record supports.
The Liberal Party permits anyone who “ordinarily lives in Canada” to be a member — a category that includes non-citizens such as international students and work-visa holders. The Conservative, NDP, and Green parties require members to be Canadian citizens or permanent residents. The Bloc Québécois has no citizenship or residency requirement at all.
On April 27, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the Canada Strong Fund — "Canada's first national sovereign wealth fund." Initial federal contribution: $25 billion over three years. The funding mechanism, per Policy Options Canada: government deficit spending. Canada is projected to run a deficit of $66.9 to $78.3 billion this year, with federal debt-service costs ($55.6 billion) already exceeding what Ottawa transfers to the provinces for healthcare. Real sovereign wealth funds — Norway's, Singapore's, the Gulf states' — are built on surplus revenues. Canada is borrowing the seed money. Here is the structural problem with that.
Mark Carney built his 2025 campaign on a single economic promise: to make Canada "the strongest economy in the G7" through the Trump tariff crisis. As of the latest Statistics Canada figures, Canada has posted two consecutive quarters of annualized GDP decline — a technical recession, the first since COVID-19. Mexico, whose economy is even more exposed to U.S. tariffs than Canada's, grew (barely) in 2025 and avoided recession. Here is the documented record, with the honest caveats.
About this article
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<article>
<h1>Carney Signed an RCMP Cooperation Deal With China's Police Ministry — the Same Body Behind the Illegal "Police Stations" in Canada. The Agreement Is Secret.</h1>
<p><em>By Parliament Audit · May 29, 2026 · 8 min read</em></p>
<p><strong>In January 2026, during Prime Minister Mark Carney's state visit to Beijing, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police signed a memorandum of understanding on law-enforcement cooperation with the People's Republic of China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS). A joint statement from Carney and Chinese President Xi Jinping said the two sides "committed to strengthening law enforcement cooperation to combat corruption and transnational crimes, including telecommunication and cyber fraud and illegal synthetic drugs." The RCMP has refused to release the full text of the agreement, stating it will not do so without the agreement of China's government — drawing demands for disclosure from both the Conservative and New Democratic parties. The MPS is the same national police body whose subordinate Fuzhou Public Security Bureau operated the clandestine "overseas police service stations" that the NGO Safeguard Defenders exposed in 2022 and that the RCMP investigated in the Greater Toronto Area and in Montreal (the RCMP closed its Montreal investigation in September 2025 without charges; the two Montreal community organizations involved have sued the RCMP for defamation and contest the characterization). The cooperation agreement was signed against the backdrop of the Hogue Commission (the federal Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference), which in its January 2025 final report found the PRC to be "by far the most significant" foreign-interference threat and documented Chinese interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. A former senior RCMP officer, opposition public-safety critics, and national-security commentators have characterized the secret MPS cooperation agreement as a counterintelligence and sovereignty risk. This article documents the agreement, the institutional connection to the police stations, the election-interference findings, the official threat assessment, and the criticisms — with precise attribution and the honest caveats around the un-charged community organizations.</strong></p>
<h2>What was signed in Beijing</h2>
<p>In January 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney made a state visit to Beijing — part of a thaw in Canada-China relations after years of deep freeze following the 2018-2020 Meng Wanzhou / "two Michaels" crisis and the subsequent foreign-interference revelations.</p>
<p>During the visit, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police signed a memorandum of understanding on law-enforcement cooperation with the People's Republic of China's **Ministry of Public Security (MPS)** — the PRC's national police and domestic-security agency.</p>
<p>The joint statement issued by Carney and Chinese President Xi Jinping described the law-enforcement element this way: the two sides "committed to strengthening law enforcement cooperation to combat corruption and transnational crimes, including telecommunication and cyber fraud and illegal synthetic drugs, in accordance with their respective laws."</p>
<p>The MOU was one of several cooperation agreements signed during the visit, alongside deals on forestry, trade, tourism, energy, and food safety. But the law-enforcement MOU is categorically different from a forestry agreement: it concerns cooperation between Canada's national police force and the police ministry of a state that Canada's own public inquiry has named its top foreign-interference threat.</p>
<h2>Who the MPS is — and why it matters</h2>
<p>The Ministry of Public Security is not an ordinary police agency. It is the PRC's national police and internal-security ministry, responsible for domestic law enforcement, public-order policing, household registration, and — critically — the apparatus of internal political control. The MPS operates under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party.</p>
<p>The MPS is also the parent institution of the **Fuzhou Public Security Bureau** — and the Fuzhou bureau is the body that operated the clandestine "overseas police service stations" in Canada and around the world.</p>
<p>This is the through-line that makes the cooperation agreement significant. The RCMP did not sign an MOU with some neutral foreign-police counterpart. It signed an MOU with the exact ministry whose subordinate bureau ran the illegal police stations that the RCMP itself investigated on Canadian soil. The institution on the other side of Canada's new law-enforcement-cooperation channel is the institution behind the transnational-repression operation Canada was, two years earlier, trying to shut down.</p>
<h2>The "police stations" — what is documented, and the honest caveat</h2>
<p>In September 2022, the NGO Safeguard Defenders published "110 Overseas — Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild," documenting a network of PRC "overseas police service stations" across dozens of countries, including Canada. A follow-up report in December 2022 ("Patrol and Persuade") expanded the count.</p>
<p>The stations' alleged function: to act as clandestine hubs for the Chinese state to monitor, intimidate, and "persuade" members of the Chinese diaspora — and to compel individuals wanted by Beijing to return to China, outside any legal extradition process. This is the practice national-security analysts call "transnational repression."</p>
<p>The RCMP response in Canada:
- **Greater Toronto Area:** The RCMP announced in October 2022 that it was investigating reports of criminal activity related to alleged police stations operating on behalf of the PRC. Three of the alleged stations in the GTA were linked to the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau.
- **Montreal:** In March 2023 the RCMP confirmed it was investigating two Montreal-area organizations — the Service à la Famille Chinoise du Grand Montréal and the Centre Sino-Québec de la Rive-Sud — as alleged police stations.</p>
<p>**The honest caveat, stated clearly:** The RCMP concluded its Montreal investigation in September 2025 **without recommending any charges.** The two Montreal community organizations have **sued the RCMP for defamation** (filed March 2024, seeking over $4.9 million), contesting the "police station" characterization. This article does NOT assert that those specific community organizations are guilty of anything — they were investigated, not charged, and they are contesting the matter in court.</p>
<p>What is NOT in dispute is the institutional reality: the Safeguard Defenders reports, the House of Commons committee study (CACN), and Public Safety Canada's own briefing materials all identify the MPS / Fuzhou Public Security Bureau as the institutional operator of the overseas-police-station model. The documented through-line is the ministry, not the individual community organizations.</p>
<h2>The election-interference backdrop — the Hogue Commission</h2>
<p>The cooperation agreement was signed against a specific, official backdrop: Canada's own public inquiry had, one year earlier, named the PRC as the country's most significant foreign-interference threat.</p>
<p>The Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions — the Hogue Commission, led by Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Marie-Josée Hogue — was established in September 2023. Its preliminary report (May 2024) and final report (January 28, 2025, seven volumes, 51 recommendations) reached direct conclusions:</p>
<p>- The PRC was the **main perpetrator** of foreign interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, described as "persistent and sophisticated."
- China "clandestinely and deceptively" interfered in both general elections and is **"by far the most significant" threat.**
- The interference did not change the overall outcome of either election, but **may have affected individual ridings** — the Commission found a "reasonable possibility" that a PRC interference campaign against Conservative candidate Kenny Chiu contributed to his 2021 defeat in Steveston—Richmond East, BC.
- China's strategy was not to back a particular party, but to undermine individual politicians critical of Beijing and support those seen as more favourable.</p>
<p>This is not an opinion or an opposition talking point. It is the formal finding of a federal public inquiry led by a sitting appellate judge. When this article refers to the PRC as Canada's "biggest threat," that is the Hogue Commission's documented characterization.</p>
<h2>The secrecy problem</h2>
<p>The single most-criticized feature of the RCMP-MPS agreement is that the public is not allowed to see it.</p>
<p>The RCMP has stated that it will not release the full text of the agreement **without the agreement of China's government.** In other words: a Canadian public-transparency decision about a Canadian national-police agreement has been made contingent on Beijing's permission.</p>
<p>Both opposition parties have demanded disclosure:
- The **Conservative Party** has pressed for the agreement to be released, framing it as a matter of national-security accountability.
- **NDP public-safety critic Jenny Kwan** said Canadians should know what information the RCMP is sharing with Beijing under the agreement.</p>
<p>The transparency concern is structural. An MOU on law-enforcement cooperation typically governs what information is shared, under what conditions, with what safeguards, and subject to what oversight. Without the text, the public — and Parliament — cannot evaluate:
- What categories of information the RCMP may share with the MPS.
- Whether the agreement includes safeguards against the MPS using shared information for transnational-repression purposes.
- Whether there is any independent oversight of what flows through the channel.
- Whether information about individuals in Canada (including diaspora members the PRC targets) could be shared.</p>
<p>The government's position is that the MOU concerns ordinary transnational-crime cooperation (fraud, cybercrime, fentanyl precursors) and that such confidentiality is standard for diplomatic agreements. That position may be entirely correct. The problem is that it cannot be verified, because the document is secret — and its secrecy is, by the RCMP's own statement, subject to Beijing's consent.</p>
<h2>The criticism — attributed</h2>
<p>The criticism of the agreement comes from credible, named sources, and this article attributes each rather than asserting wrongdoing in its own voice.</p>
<p>**A former senior RCMP officer**, quoted by the investigative outlet The Bureau, characterized the RCMP-MPS cooperation deal as a "counterintelligence danger that risks sovereignty." The argument: any information-sharing channel with the MPS is a channel the MPS's intelligence apparatus can exploit, and the asymmetry of the relationship (the MPS operates a sophisticated foreign-operations capability; the RCMP is a domestic police force) favours Beijing.</p>
<p>**Opposition public-safety critics** (Conservative and NDP) have focused on the secrecy and the lack of disclosed safeguards.</p>
<p>**National-security commentators** have raised the specific concern that the agreement "expands the channels through which intimidation, manipulation, and Chinese clandestine police operations already manifest in Canada" — i.e., that a cooperation channel could be used to legitimize or facilitate the same transnational-repression activity the police stations represented.</p>
<p>The government's defenders would respond: Canada cannot simply refuse all law-enforcement contact with the world's second-largest economy; transnational fraud and fentanyl-precursor trafficking are real cross-border problems requiring some coordination; and many democracies maintain police-cooperation channels with China. These are legitimate points. The counter to them is not that cooperation is inherently illegitimate, but that cooperation with this specific ministry, at this specific time, with no public safeguards and Beijing-contingent secrecy, fails the transparency test a democracy should apply.</p>
<h2>The contradiction at the centre</h2>
<p>The core of the story is a contradiction in the Canadian government's posture toward the PRC.</p>
<p>On one hand, the machinery of the Canadian state has, over the past four years, formally identified the PRC as the top threat to Canadian democratic institutions: the Hogue Commission ("by far the most significant" interference threat), CSIS (which has repeatedly named the PRC as the primary foreign-interference and economic-espionage threat in its public reports), and the RCMP itself (which investigated the MPS-linked police stations as criminal operations on Canadian soil).</p>
<p>On the other hand, the same government — through the same RCMP — has now signed a secret law-enforcement cooperation agreement with the police ministry of that same state.</p>
<p>Both things are true simultaneously. The government would argue they are reconcilable: that you can both defend against a state's interference AND cooperate with its police on shared criminal threats, the way Cold War adversaries cooperated on narrow common interests. That argument is not unreasonable in the abstract.</p>
<p>What makes it hard to accept on faith in this specific case is the combination: the counterparty ministry is the one behind the police stations; the inquiry finding the PRC the top threat is one year old; the agreement is secret; and the secrecy is contingent on Beijing's permission. Each element alone might be defensible. Together, they describe a government asking Canadians to trust — without seeing the document — that a cooperation channel with the police force of its designated top adversary is safe.</p>
<p>Parliament Audit takes no position on whether the agreement should exist. We document that it exists, that it is secret, who the counterparty is, and what Canada's own institutions have said about that counterparty. Whether the cooperation is prudent is a judgment that the public cannot fully make until the agreement is disclosed — and the case for disclosing it is the clearest conclusion the documented record supports.</p>
<hr />
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Originally published by <a href="https://parliamentaudit.ca/news/carney-rcmp-china-public-security-mou-police-stations">Parliament Audit</a>
under the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND 4.0</a> license.
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