Canadians should be wary of a recent agreement between the RCMP and China’s Ministry of Public Security, writes Laura Harth.Fred Dufour/The Associated Press
Laura Harth is China in the World director at Safeguard Defenders.
In October, 2014, Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS) officer Xin Ting walked into China’s Consulate General in Vancouver to convince Zhou Guoqing to return. He had been on the run from Chinese authorities for 15 years for alleged loan fraud.
When Mr. Zhou wavered, citing his Canadian citizenship, Ms. Xin warned: “Next time, we won’t be so gentle.” Naming his alleged associates in China, she added: “They are all under our control.”
Mr. Zhou boarded a flight to China the next morning.
The MPS officer’s account was published as propaganda back home – material we surfaced in Safeguard Defenders’ 2024 Chasing Fox Hunt report.
Canadians should keep these events in mind when they hear about the memorandum of understanding between the RCMP and China’s Ministry of Public Security signed in January.
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RCMP spokesperson Robin Percival said the MOU “outlines specific forms of mutual collaboration,” but the text itself remains secret.
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.
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.
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?
After years of documented Chinese police operations breaching the sovereignty of other countries, formalizing co-operation simply isn’t a guardrail.
A formal channel does not replace the covert one. It runs alongside it, lending Beijing a veneer of legitimate co-operation while signalling to diaspora communities that Canadian institutions are now partners of the very ministry harassing them.
That is precisely the climate of fear the Chinese Communist Party seeks to instill, globally and at home.
For half a decade, CSIS has been warning about exactly the kind of Chinese state activity this MOU condones.
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.
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.