Crown attorneys are asking for a maximum sentence for Cameron Ortis, the former senior RCMP officer convicted of leaking secrets to targets of police investigations.
If the judge agrees, that would mean multiple decades behind bars for Ortis — once a rising star in the national police force who was arrested in 2019.
Ortis’ trial was unprecedented, both because of the nature of the charges and for what it showed about the RCMP’s intelligence gathering operations.
As a senior civilian official with a RCMP intelligence unit, he was privy to some of the most sensitive intelligence collected both by Canadian spy agencies and top secret information shared by close security partners in the Five Eyes alliance — including the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
Crown prosecutors argued that he attempted to sell some of that information to known criminals, including subjects of ongoing investigations by Canadian law enforcement.
Ortis’ defence lawyers argued that he was running a one-man operation — at the behest of an unnamed foreign partner — attempting to lure those figures onto an allegedly compromised encrypted email service. If successful, those targets would have used an email platform that allowed allied intelligence agencies to access their messages.
Ortis’ defence contended that he was working to counter a “clear and grave” threat to Canadian national security, although secrecy laws meant that the nature of that threat could not be shared in public court proceedings.
On Nov. 22, after a month-long trial and three days of deliberation, a jury found Ortis guilty of four counts of breaching Canada’s official secrets law — the Security of Information Act — one count of breaching trust and one count of misusing a computer system.
Ortis’ bail was revoked immediately after the decision. He’s been in custody awaiting a decision on his sentence from Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger.
Crown prosecutor Judy Kliewer previously told the court that they would be seeking a sentence of 20 or more years, given the severity of the charges.
Defence lawyer Mark Ertel told reporters after the verdict that he was “shocked and disappointed” with the jury’s decision, and expected to appeal.