Montreal Chinese school visited by CSIS, director says
CBC
Agents of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have attempted to speak to the director of a Chinese language school located at Dawson College in Montreal on three different occasions, Meng Rong told CBC Montreal in an exclusive interview.
"We told them very clearly, (the school) has nothing to do with politics or spying," said Rong, who heads the Confucius Institute in Quebec.
Dawson College signed an agreement with the Chinese government and Université de Sherbrooke to house the Confucius school in 2007.
Rong said CSIS agents first interrogated her on the day of the opening ceremony itself, attended by Jean Charest who was the Quebec premier at the time.
She said they didn't stop there.
"They came to my home, which is not right," she said. Rong was shown a list of names, and asked if she could identify anybody.
She said — besides obvious ones, like Canada's ambassador to China — no names stood out.
In 2008, she said CSIS visited her again, but left her alone after she threatened to file a human rights complaint.
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WATCHED BY CSIS
The language schools are partly funded by the Chinese government and typically set up on campus grounds at universities which sign agreements.
The institutes are mentioned in at least two reports by CSIS in the last eight years.
And the agency, along with Western counterparts, suspects Confucius Institutes are used as spy satellite offices by China, according to a veteran Canadian operative.
Former CSIS Asia-Pacific Bureau Chief Michel-Juneau Katsuya said Beijing would have many reasons to spy on Canada.
"We are sitting at all the major tables, like NORAD, G20, G8, NATO. We have our secrets, we have our friends' secrets as well," he said.
Juneau-Katsuya said the location of Confucius schools on university property gets them close to important research centres in the west.
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