Canada’s fight against organized crime is being hampered by long-standing challenges in how intelligence agencies can support law enforcement, a retired senior federal intelligence official with nearly four decades in government has told a security conference in Vancouver.
Lisa Ducharme, whose career included leadership roles with the Privy Council Office’s Intelligence Assessment Secretariat, the Department of National Defence, Public Safety Canada and the RCMP, said she welcomed Canada’s recent measures to tackle fentanyl and organized crime. These include appointing a fentanyl czar, establishing new intelligence partnerships and giving the Canada Border Services Agency new enforcement tools.
“But while we’re at a crossroads, I think it’s important to also reflect upon the current infrastructure that we operate in Canada to look at what is not working, what we’ve had challenges with, before we load all of these wonderful new initiatives on top,” she said at the second annual Vancouver International Security Summit, which was held on Oct. 16 and 17.
On the fight against fentanyl, Ms. Ducharme, who now works as a consultant and instructor specializing in intelligence and leadership training, noted that there is always a foreign end in transnational organized crime. She asked the crowd of roughly 225 security, policing and intelligence professionals to consider if it was time to revisit Canada’s lack of a foreign human intelligence service.
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While Canada does collect information through various programs, it is not done so through a law enforcement lens, she said, adding that Canada is the only member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network without a spy service.
“Canada is a net importer of intelligence, meaning that we get what our allies give us, and we don’t have an ability to control their assets or direct them,” she said. “So we’re basically benefitting from their priorities. We don’t have an opportunity to direct assets to fulfill Canada’s needs.”
Ms. Ducharme also spoke of the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1991 R. v. Stinchcombe ruling, whose implications she called “the thorniest issue that is facing Canadian intelligence today.”
The consequential ruling established the Crown’s obligation to share all relevant information with the defence, regardless of whether the Crown planned to call that evidence at trial. It improved trial fairness by enabling the accused to prepare an adequate defence, but also placed heavy demands on the Crown to review, manage and disclose massive amounts of sensitive information, particularly in complex cases.
Ms. Ducharme said the decision made it extremely challenging to introduce in criminal proceedings information that was gathered through classified or covert intelligence. It also created a risk-averse culture around intelligence sharing because agencies worry that classified material could taint future prosecutions if disclosed.
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That reluctance, she added, prevents information from being passed down to local police, leaving officers to operate in “blind spots.”
“We cannot pretend that our current legal framework, as we’re moving forward in the fight against fentanyl, that it’s fit for purpose,” she said.
Necessary safeguards around investigative information also hinder broader information-sharing and intelligence-led policing, she said, raising the question of how Canada can better balance the two.
Ms. Ducharme sat on a panel with Ray Donovan, who, until September, 2024, served as the chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and Vancouver Police Superintendent Dale Weidman, with the force’s Investigative Services Division. It was moderated by Kash Heed, a Richmond city councillor, who formerly served as the provincial minister of public safety and solicitor general and West Vancouver police chief.
Mr. Donovan told the conference that in a previous position co-ordinating global investigations, his team gave “everything that we possibly could” to Canadian law enforcement agencies to advance local criminal investigations that originated in Mexico or the U.S.
However, those agencies could not share that information with policing partners because of Stinchcombe, he said – “and so it came to the point where we would grow frustrated.”
Supt. Weidman said he and others found the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2016 R. v. Jordan decision to have an even bigger impact on policing than Stinchcombe. That ruling, which sought to address unreasonable delays, established that superior court prosecutors have 30 months to complete their cases, and provincial court prosecutors 18 months.
The limits mean that any number of delays, including those caused by court backlogs, can result in charges being stayed.