RCMP ‘cannot function’ effectively on national security threats: committee

Canada’s national police force cannot effectively counter serious extremist and criminal threats and urgently needs a major overhaul according to a new report from an all-party national security committee.

The starkly-worded report, released by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP), stated the RCMP cannot operate as “effectively as it must” to protect Canadians from serious national security and criminal threats.

The core of the issue is the balance between federal policing operations – things like national security and transnational crime investigations – and the RCMP’s responsibilities for what’s known as “contract policing” in provinces and territories.

The Mounties’ “long focus” on contract policing has led to a situation where the force “cannot function as effectively as it must” to counter “the most significant national security and criminal threats” to Canadians, the committee’s two-year probe found.

“It is time for the Government of Canada to act,” David McGuinty, the Liberal MP who chairs the all-party committee of MPs and senators, said in an interview with Global News.

“The nature of the threat landscape is evolving very quickly, becoming more serious, more sophisticated, better-funded. The capacity to deal with it, just in terms of human resources within (the RCMP) is problematic.”

McGuinty said that “time is of the essence” for the Liberal government and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc to address the issue, given the evolving threat of issues like foreign interference, organized crime and cyber threats.

There are few easy fixes.

A rebalancing of RCMP resources away from contract policing to federal investigations would require discussions with the provinces, where many communities depend on the Mounties for day-to-day policing.

And the Liberal government’s stated desire to pare back federal spending means that shoveling more money to the RCMP to bolster federal policing may be unlikely to happen, even if the government thought that would help.

The review included roughly 25,000 pages of documents from the RCMP and 10 in-person interviews with senior Mounties, running from January 2021 to June 2023.

It provides a rare window into the challenges the Mounties face in investigating and laying charges in some of the most serious crimes, including violent extremism and money laundering.

“The key threats investigated by Federal Policing are violent extremism, transnational and serious organized crime, financial crime, foreign interference, espionage, and cyber crime. These threats are not mutually exclusive,” the censored version of the committee’s report reads.

NSICOP is mandated to submit their reports to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who can order redactions on national security grounds, before releasing their findings to the public.

The committee also noted that extremist and criminal organizations have attempted to infiltrate Canadian law enforcement and security agencies – and suggests some of those attempts have been successful.

According to the RCMP-led Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada, there were more than 3,000 organized crime groups in Canada in 2022, including 647 that were assessed by the service. The NSICOP report found that the RCMP considered 14 of these groups to be “high-level threats.”

“These 14 groups commit a range of serious crimes, use violence as an integral part of their strategy, maintain associations with other organized crime groups, infiltrate police and security agencies, and work across provincial or national borders.”

Efforts by extremist groups to infiltrate law enforcement have been well documented in the United States, but comparatively little attention has been paid to the phenomenon in Canada.

NSICOP could not immediately elaborate on the issue when contacted by Global News Tuesday. But the report did suggest that criminal and extremist groups are working together to cover their tracks.

“Their associations with each other make them more complex, and thereby harder to investigate, than if their criminal operations were done by a single group from beginning to end,” the report stated.

The committee also found little evidence that RCMP top brass communicated regularly with the public safety minister, who provides political oversight into the force’s operations.

That needs to change, McGuinty said, even if both sides are concerned about maintaining RCMP independence from the government of the day.

“It’s clear that we saw from both sides of this … a reluctance to cross a line. And fair enough, in a democratic country you don’t want the executive branch of government telling law enforcement what to do,” McGuinty said.

“But we also saw there’s a lot of grey. And both parties to this indicated an interest in seeing less grey and more black and white, more certainty about what police independence was.”

The committee’s report recommended a change to the RCMP’s legislation that would lay out exactly what police independence means, similar to provisions in the laws governing Canada’s spy agency.

“Regular reporting, regular instructions, regular direction is what’s called for,” McGuinty added.

The committee also recommended that the government recognize that the RCMP does not have the resources to fulfil its federal policing mandate and to address that. While the overall RCMP budget is expected to be $6 billion in 2022-23 with a staff of 30,000, federal policing is expected to receive $860 million with a staff of approximately 5,000.