Corruption allegations announced this week against seven Toronto police officers and a retired officer left their chief sombre and pledging to restore public trust, but they didn’t surprise Jim Lowry.
The retired internal affairs investigator with the Toronto Police Service watched the news conference Thursday and was reminded of his similar probe more than 20 years ago into corruption among the department’s drug squad.
That case, which wound through the courts for more than a decade, involved five members of the Central Field Command drug unit. Until the announcement Thursday, it was believed to have been Canada’s largest corruption investigation into a single police agency.
“The rules are there – they’re being circumvented,” said Mr. Lowry, who spent 33 years with the Toronto force before leaving in 2009 to get his law degree.
He argued his former force has not improved its culture enough to properly detect and discipline officers when they first start breaking rules.
Several Toronto police officers charged in organized crime and corruption probe
The country’s history is riddled with cases involving police flipping cash or contraband stolen from suspects or selling organized criminals bits of prized personal information held in vast intelligence databases.
But the allegations levelled against Toronto officers this week combine facets of both.
Mr. Lowry said the five officers he helped investigate were convicted in 2012 of perjury and attempting to obstruct justice after they covered up a warrantless search of a small-time heroin dealer’s home in Scarborough in 1998.
The group was acquitted by a jury of many other serious charges including theft, assault and extortion.
In 2013, they were all spared jail and given a sentence of 45 days under house arrest. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected their bid for an appeal, ending a legal saga funded by their police union that lasted a decade-and-a-half and cost the authorities about $22-million, according to Mr. Lowry.
In a phone interview from his home in Winnipeg on Thursday, he said at least one of those officers beat drug charges on a technicality after Mr. Lowry executed a search warrant for the officer’s home north of Brampton and found the garage stuffed with cocaine, ecstasy and illicit cannabis.
Seven Toronto police officers and one retired officer were charged as part of a complex investigation into organized crime and corruption.
Mr. Lowry, now a defence lawyer, said that sometimes officers can become corrupt when they begin believing that cutting corners in their investigations is justified if they get suspects charged and convicted.
“That’s okay because you’re appealing to a greater good, you’re protecting society,” Mr. Lowry said.
But a review of some of the more infamous cases of police corruption in Canada shows officers often become involved because of their easy access to information highly valuable to organized crime.
The RCMP conducted an internal investigation into corruption in its ranks, canvassing incidents and allegations from 1995 to 2005, and found that 204 Mounties had been involved in known incidents of corruption.
The most common type of this behaviour was disclosing police information, representing nearly a fifth of the total of 322 incidents over that span, according to the final report published in 2007. That was followed by incidents of fraud, abusing their status as an officer and then theft and interfering with the judicial process.
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In 2014, former Montreal police officer Benoît Roberge was sentenced to eight years in prison for selling sensitive intel to the Hells Angels in that city after spending years working organized crime cases.
In 2022, a long-running investigation into criminality in Ontario’s towing industry netted charges against six members of the provincial police force, three from Ottawa police and a single Toronto officer.
More recently, former civilian RCMP intelligence official Cameron Ortis was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2024 after being found guilty of breaching Canada’s Security of Information Act, as well as breach of trust and unauthorized use of a computer. He is appealing the conviction.
Mr. Ortis maintained his innocence and testified in his own defence during his criminal trial, which heard he communicated with police targets, including Vincent Ramos, who owned a B.C.-based company that produced encrypted cellphones used by organized crime.
The Crown told the court that classified information shared with the police targets could have allowed them to evade law enforcement.
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Given the shadowy nature of corruption, it is difficult to quantify how big a problem it is in Canadian policing.
Still, corruption among public servants in general in the country is believed to be relatively rare. Canada tied with Germany for the 15th best spot in the most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, which non-profit Transparency International publishes each year, based on a survey of experts and businesspeople gauging perceived levels of public sector corruption across 180 countries.
Toronto Police Service Chief Myron Demkiw said at Thursday’s press conference that the current Toronto case is the “most concerning and most significant” corruption probe he has seen since he joined the force more than 35 years ago.
He said he had no answers as to why the officers allegedly did what they did, but has asked the provincial Inspector General of Policing to investigate the matter with a focus on how officers are allowed to access internal databases.
“These events underscore the need of constant vigilance and modern oversight,” Chief Demkiw said.