Canada-China Relations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good evening to all honourable members of this committee. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify on behalf of Safeguard Defenders. I also want to apologize to the francophone members of the committee, because I will be speaking in English. However, I will be happy to try to answer questions in French.

Canada-China Relations committee  Thank you. I don't know how much time I have to respond.

Canada-China Relations committee  Okay.

Canada-China Relations committee  Thank you. Thank you for those questions. Regarding the number of deportations and the persuasion to return operations that we've been able to link directly to some of these stations, that number is 83. That is the anecdotal evidence that we found linked to three of the jurisdictions.

Canada-China Relations committee  Thank you for the question. Again, everything is open source and online, and can be verified. We call them “police stations”, in the first place, because the PRC authorities that set them up do. These are, specifically, four public security authorities from four local jurisdictions in China.

Canada-China Relations committee  They're in all of them. This includes all G7 countries. Europe is very heavily targeted, which is not surprising, but we've seen this all over the world. I would say democracies are definitely bearing the brunt of the presence of these stations.

Canada-China Relations committee  Transnational repression is definitely being used by all authoritarian regimes, and to a growing extent, which is another reason why we believe it's important to be very clear that this will not be accepted. We see countries learning from each other. Smaller authoritarian countries are starting to learn from those efforts and copying.

Canada-China Relations committee  Probably.

Canada-China Relations committee  I think, unfortunately, that you are right. None of this is new. This has been going on for decades. We've definitely seen an increase when it comes to transnational oppression since Xi Jinping came to power. This has been going on for a long time and will only keep growing. Why is there this attention now?

Canada-China Relations committee  Some more countries have announced investigations. Not all of them are very open on the extent to which they are doing that.

Canada-China Relations committee  I would have to go back. There are some others that gave an order to close—for example the Czech Republic. To be honest, we don't believe this is a full response. Ireland, for example, has not officially announced investigations, whereas the Netherlands has. That's one reason why I said that we do commend the response so far by the RCMP on the issue of the police stations.

Canada-China Relations committee  Those police officers in Italy were part of the joint police patrols. That was an agreement that Italy made with the Ministry of Public Security. It's an agreement that is still in place, although the execution of it is suspended because of COVID—not because of the police stations.

Canada-China Relations committee  It's our impression so far from all over the world that the vast majority of these people are regular residents in the country where these stations are operated. Again, the United Front link is important. One reason they've been getting away with this with such impunity is that these people have been engaged in influence operations for a long time.

Canada-China Relations committee  I guess we would support that. Do I think that is a solution to the issue? No. It might be a start. Let's be honest: These people are not going to register as foreign agents.

Canada-China Relations committee  Yes, of course.