QUESTION PERIOD — Public Safety
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Drones
December 3, 2025
Government leader, at our National Security and Defence Committee here in the Senate, we revealed that 79% of the RCMP drones are Chinese-made. Each is deemed a high security risk due to data-handling vulnerabilities, supply chain concerns and potential foreign access.
These drones support evidence gathering, monitoring and tactical operations, yet they come from the same adversarial regime now openly attempting to intimidate Canadians on our soil. This week, for example, candidate Joe Tay testified that Chinese Communist Party agents stalked his campaign, threatened volunteers, monitored his home and circulated mock wanted posters, while the Prime Minister initially dismissed a Liberal MP’s public amplification of a bounty on Tay’s head as harmless.
Leader, how did your government allow Canada’s national policy to rely on nearly a thousand risky Chinese drones while failing to confront Beijing’s escalating interference in —
Thank you, Senator Housakos.
The Chinese drones you are referring to are not used in sensitive operations by the RCMP. My understanding is that when those drones are used, they are used for rescue operations, which are not sensitive operations. The RCMP is provided with many other drones that are used whenever there is a public safety issue, and that is the reality.
The idea of the government is to make sure that the RCMP is well equipped, and when you have a rescue operation, I can tell you that those people who need to be rescued don’t bother about the origin of the drone. They want to have the equipment, the proper equipment, used in order to save their life.
You’re absolutely right. The RCMP don’t use the drones for VIP operations. They don’t use them for intelligence gathering. They hardly use them for anything when it comes to our defence situation, and, by the way, 80% of the RCMP drones are these particular drones, so the only thing they’re using them for is maybe birdwatching.
Senator Moreau, this is the nation of engineers where the Prime Minister admires while Canadians get the security risks and traffic, and in the meantime, China gets all the contracts. Is this what we’re going to be expecting from a Mark Carney government?
Birdwatching is better done when you are on the ground, not when you’re flying a drone overhead.
The main idea is that those drones are not used for security purposes whenever there is a security risk to Canada, and they are quite useful when they’re for rescue operations.
