The RCMP is poorly structured to meet the growing challenges to Canada’s safety and security, including interference from foreign adversaries – and therefore, Ottawa should consider whether an entirely new police force is needed, a new parliamentary report says.
The report was released to Parliament Tuesday by members of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP).
In it, the group of senators and MPs with high-level security clearances, found that the RCMP’s sprawling mandate is undermining one of the force’s key missions, namely the investigation of sophisticated networks of gangsters, hackers, terrorists, fraudsters and foreign spies.
Such probes are part of the Mounties’ federal policing mandate.
“We’ve got concerns about the ability right now of the RCMP to contend with that threat landscape,” said David McGuinty, a Liberal MP who has chaired NSICOP since it was created in 2018. “The risk is not just to national security, it’s to the safety of Canadians – and that’s a risk no government ought to take.”
But the committee report found that “it may be time for Canada to consider a stand-alone federal policing organization,” given how the RCMP’s focus is often diverted from its federal policing mandate and toward providing more routine policing services. Eight of 10 provinces and all three territories hire RCMP officers to work in local law enforcement.
A guide to foreign interference and China’s suspected influence in Canada
In an interview, Mr. McGuinty said that the RCMP’s federal policing wing has “lost 600 officers in the last nine years,” largely because of attrition.
He says it is now up to his caucus colleague, Liberal Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, to heed the committee’s recommendations, including that the minister use his legislated powers to order the force to fix its problems.
A spokesman for Mr. LeBlanc had no immediate comment on the report beyond saying the Liberal government is already reviewing aspects of the RCMP.
“The recommendations formulated by the NSICOP will help inform our work as we move forward,” said spokesman Jean-Sébastien Comeau.
The NSICOP report portrays the RCMP as a sprawling entity whose central leadership cannot see whether major investigations are running well in different corners of the country.
“The organization does not know, and cannot know, if federal policing resources are in fact being spent on federal policing priorities and activities within divisions,” the report says.
It adds that there has been a “steady decline in the number of federal policing personnel, particularly police officers, over the last eight years, and there is no information to suggest that this trend will change in the foreseeable future.”
Over the past six months, the RCMP’s leadership has publicly announced its federal investigators have embarked on several important investigations, such as probes of scores of foreign-interference rings potentially operating within Canada.
This fall, the RCMP also announced its federal-policing detectives would probe government and commercial dealings involving Ontario’s Greenbelt region.
NSICOP members are describing their 91-page report as the first in-depth look of its kind by government officials who are concerned about the state of RCMP federal policing.
After launching the probe in early 2021, NSICOP met with RCMP officials 10 times and has been provided with 25,000 pages of documents
With a $6-billion budget and 30,000 staff, the RCMP is one of the world’s largest police forces but only about one sixth of these resources are earmarked for federal policing.
RCMP spokeswoman Robin Percival said the force is trying to shore up its ability to crack down on complex crime.
“Federal policing is undergoing transformational changes that leverage and build upon past work to ensure it is a modern, sustainable and world-class policing entity,” she said.
The NSICOP report finds that within Canada, gangland slayings are growing, cities are becoming known havens for international money laundering, and the spreading of violent extremist ideologies are leading to more mass-casualty attacks.
“The role of federal policing is essential to Canada’s national security,” the NSICOP report says. “It is the only organization capable of conducting investigations of the most significant criminal threats across jurisdictions, both within Canada and abroad.”