RCMP End Investigation Into Alleged Chinese Police Stations in Quebec With No Charges Laid

The South Shore Sino-Québec Centre in Brossard, Quebec, is seen on March 9, 2023. Noé Chartier/The Epoch Times

A more than two-year investigation into alleged secret Chinese police stations in Quebec has been closed, with no charges laid, the RCMP says.

“We confirm that we have closed the foreign interference investigation into alleged illicit activities reported in connection with Chinese diaspora service centres in the Montréal area,” RCMP Quebec division spokesperson Cpl. Erique Gasse said in a statement to The Epoch Times.

Gasse said the police force can’t comment in greater detail due to ongoing legal proceedings. The news was first reported by the Journal de Montreal.

“At this stage, the RCMP is not recommending that charges be laid. However, the RCMP will continue its efforts to combat foreign interference and any form of intimidation, harassment, threats or harmful targeting of diaspora communities or individuals in Canada,” he said.

In March 2023, the RCMP disclosed an investigation into the Chinese Family Service of Greater Montreal (SFCGM), in the city’s Chinatown neighbourhood, and the South Shore Sino-Québec Centre (CSQRS), in Brossard, part of the Greater Montreal area. Both were suspected of operating as secret Chinese police stations.

News of the Chinese police outposts first emerged in September 2022 following a report by Spain-based human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders, which identified 54 police stations in dozens of countries around the world—including three stations in Toronto—run by two provincial-level police bureaus in China.

In December 2022, the NGO published a second report, noting that the number had reached 102 stations across dozens of countries on five continents, including one in Vancouver, and a fifth police station in Canada whose specific location wasn’t identified.

In February 2023, The Epoch Times reported that a shopping mall location in Richmond, B.C., had been listed as an overseas police outpost by a regional Chinese police bureau in a July 2020 online post. The post, written in simplified Chinese, said the police station in Canada was established in 2016, alongside other stations in 28 countries worldwide.

The Mounties launched investigations into the allegations. On March 2, 2023, the RCMP’s deputy commissioner of federal policing Michael Duheme appeared before the House of Commons Procedure and House Affairs Committee, testifying that operations at four alleged police stations—the three in Toronto and one in Vancouver—were presumed “ceased.”

A week later on March 9, the RCMP confirmed to The Epoch Times that their Integrated National Security Enforcement Team had opened an investigation into SFCGM and CSQRS in the Montreal area.

“We are carrying out police actions aimed at detecting and disrupting these foreign state-backed criminal activities, which may threaten the safety of persons living in Canada,” said the RCMP in a statement at the time.

The statement also said the RCMP recognized that “Canadians of Chinese origin have been victims of the possible activities conducted by these centres,” and that any activities in the form of “intimidation, harassment or harmful targeting of diaspora communities or individuals in Canada will not be tolerated.”

‘Persuasion to Return’

SFCGM and CSQRS, which have been open for decades, are overseen by Xixi Li, who is also a Brossard city councillor.

The two centres denied any wrongdoing. On March 6, 2024, Li filed a $4.9 million defamation lawsuit against the RCMP, accusing the force of improperly disclosing its investigation to the public.

“Being targeted as Chinese ‘police stations’ by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police condemned the plaintiffs in the court of public opinion and found them ‘guilty’ before formal charges were even laid,” says the statement of claim filed with Quebec Superior Court at the time.

The organizations said they had suffered a $3.2 million loss as a result, which included cuts to government grants. They had received federal funding of more than $400,000 combined between 2010 and 2022 for programs to support seniors and job opportunities for youth.

Days later, Duheme, who had been appointed RCMP Commissioner in mid-March a year earlier following the previous commissioner’s retirement, said during an interview with Radio-Canada that the force’s investigation into the two Chinese organizations was based on “credible” information—“credible enough for us to launch an investigation.” An earlier statement by the RCMP, on March 13, 2023, noted that the force had received at least “15 serious tips” related to “the presumed Chinese police stations in Montreal and Brossard.”

In a press release on Jan. 15, 2025, Carole Cheung, president of SFCGM, said the RCMP’s allegations “only stigmatize and reinforce stereotypes and prejudices against a historically marginalized group,” while noting the impacts the investigation have had on the two centres.

The Epoch Times reached out to Cheung and CSQRS for comment but did not hear back by publication time.

Safeguard Defenders, the Spanish NGO that first brought the issue of overseas Chinese police stations to public attention in 2022, began its investigation after it saw the Chinese regime touting how the stations contributed to the success of a Beijing campaign aimed at fighting fraud and telecommunication fraud committed by Chinese nationals living abroad.

The NGO warned that the illicit stations were part of the Chinese Communist Party’s “long-arm policing and transnational repression” campaigns that contributed to the forcible repatriation of 230,000 overseas Chinese between April 2021 and July 2022 through the use of a “persuasion to return” method.

In the United States, the FBI arrested two Chinese men in April 2023 on charges of operating a secret police station in New York City at the behest of the Party and conducting transnational repression schemes in coordination with the regime’s Ministry of Public Security.

Andrew Thornebrooke and Eva Fu contributed to this report.