From the right: Royal Canadian Mounted Policecommissioner Michael Duheme, RCMP assistant commissioner Brigitte Gauvin, and RCMP deputy commissioner Mark Flynn arrive to testify at the Foreign Interference Commission in Ottawa on Oct. 3.PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press
The RCMP is struggling to address the threat of foreign interference from countries such as China, India, Iran and Russia because the force is contending with insufficient funding, a lack of trained employees and a muddled mandate, according to internal records.
A document tabled last week during appearances by senior RCMP commanders at the public inquiry into foreign interference say the RCMP has an investigative patchwork across Canada for complex national-security files.
The Mounties have “an unstable resourcing base to conduct investigations” and are confronting “a need to stop and start investigations when newer more urgent files come in,” says a strategic 2023 RCMP document tabled at the public inquiry.
The RCMP refers to foreign interference in the document as foreign-actor interference, or FAI. “Operational personnel lack formalized awareness of the tactics and modus operandi leveraged by FAI actors, including an in-depth understanding of the variety of ways a foreign state conducts intelligence operations,” the document says.
“Inconsistent investigative practises are being used across the divisions which has resulted in an ad hoc approach to conducting FAI investigations.”
The public inquiry, headed by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, is probing Canada’s response to foreign meddling in a number of areas, from elections to intimidation of diaspora communities.
RCMP Deputy Commissioner Mark Flynn testified last week that the 2023 document, Federal Policing: Foreign Actor Interference Strategy, is more than a year old and predates several RCMP initiatives to fight foreign interference.
“At this time there has been additional efforts under way,” he said, adding that Mounties have “significantly increased the knowledge and awareness of this topic.”
The deputy commissioner outlined several task forces and training initiatives that have since been launched. The federal government has also announced $48.9-million over three years in extra funding directed to the RCMP to improve its response to foreign interference.
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The 2023 document says that Mounties have problems sharing information with each other because of restrictions in the force on sharing some forms of intelligence. The internal report says many Mounties also lack tools to translate foreign-language data.
Within the RCMP divisions, “there is inconsistent capacity to collect and analyze FAI-focused intelligence,” the document says. It adds that Mounties in some provinces “lack the capacity, resources, and awareness of the threat environment to proactively develop intelligence.”
Beyond this, there is the chronic RCMP problem of how to ramp up some investigative bureaus without depleting others. “There are evident and urgent gaps in the resources available for the RCMP to counter FAI. Divisions face resource constraints,” the document says.
Last fall, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) released a report that said the 20,000-officer RCMP may need to be split up because years of promised reforms have failed to overcome the internal contradictions of the force. The Mounties’ local law-enforcement wing, or its contract branch, demands the most resources, but this can starve the RCMP’s smaller federal-policing branch.
“It may be time for Canada to consider a stand-alone federal policing organization,” the November, 2023, NSICOP report said. One of the unaddressed problems, it said, is that “the threat to Canada from foreign interference has increased.”
Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said in a June letter he hopes to spur the RCMP toward “an end-state for federal policing that is separate and distinct from the RCMP’s contract policing mandate.”