U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas says American officials discussed the possibility of Canada establishing a foreign agent registry during his official visit to Ottawa on Friday.
Mayorkas told CBC News chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton the U.S. is sharing some of its expertise on establishing such a registry.
“We shared some of the practices and laws that we have in place to see if they would be of utility to our partners in Canada,” he said in an interview airing Sunday on Rosemary Barton Live.
Mayorkas didn’t go into detail about what was shared with Canadian officials but acknowledged that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke at length about a foreign agent registry while in Ottawa. Both Mayorkas and Garland were in the nation’s capital on Friday participating in the 2023 Canada-United States Cross-Border Crime Forum.
In March, the Canadian government began public consultations on creating a foreign influence transparency registry to prevent other countries from meddling in Canada’s affairs.
Under such a registry, people who act on behalf of a foreign state to advance its goals would have to disclose their ties to the government employing them.
The consultations, which include a virtual portal on the Department of Public Safety’s website, run until May 9.
The U.S. Foreign Agent Registry Act has been in place since 1938 and was most recently used to shut down what authorities called a Chinese police station in lower Manhattan.
Two American citizens were charged with failing to register their work on behalf of the People’s Republic of China.
The RCMP says it has investigated similar police stations in Canada — facilities human rights groups have said are used to intimidate diaspora communities — but have had to do so without the use of a foreign registry.
RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme told a parliamentary committee in March — when he was still deputy commissioner in charge of federal policing — that the RCMP has “taken overt actions” that ended operations at four alleged Chinese police stations.
U.S. aims to rapidly assess threats posed by Beijing
Mayorkas recently launched a “90-day sprint” in his department to evaluate the potential threats the People’s Republic of China (PRC) poses to the U.S.
Mayorkas told Barton that the review will look at cybersecurity threats, intellectual property theft and the spread of disinformation.
“What we want to do is identify all of the means and instrumentalities that they employ in each domain and really ensure that we are taking collective action to address them,” he said.
A recent federal report on election interference cited the Chinese government as a particular source of concern. That report points to an article that circulated on WeChat — a Chinese-owned messaging app — during the 2021 election campaign that falsely claimed a bill introduced by former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu would unfairly target the Chinese community.
The bill in question would have established a foreign agent registry, similar to the one the government is now exploring.
Mayorkas cautioned that Canada and the U.S. shouldn’t focus solely on Beijing as a source of foreign interference.
“It’s not exclusive by any means to the PRC,” he said.
“It is something that we have to be quite alert to from other nation states, such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, for example.”