Thank you for inviting a journalist to address lawmakers on a subject of extraordinary national importance. Tens of thousands of lives, our livelihoods and our sovereignty are at stake.
I offer my remarks and recommendations with humility. I'm still learning every day. I speak regularly with numerous law enforcement and security professionals in both the United States and Canada.
For over a decade, I've focused professionally on the threats that transnational crime poses to Canada's borders, institutions and people, alongside deep reporting on our financial and legal vulnerabilities to threat networks that often include ties to hostile state activity.
Canada's recent terror designation of the India-based Bishnoi gang is important, but that particular action recognizes just one facet of the many-sided transnational threats regarding fentanyl, human trafficking, Chinese-supplied chemical precursors, weapons trafficking, terror and extremism, which I will discuss today.
Across hundreds of interviews with Canadian and U.S. experts, I've come to a conclusion: Many Canadians, including citizens, lawmakers and judges, don't yet fully understand the scope and nature of the problem and also seem defensive in engaging it, and if we don't understand it, we can't solve it.
In these politically divisive times, I hope I can add some value by relaying, clearly and fairly, what professionals on both sides of the border are saying about the cultural, legal and political differences that have impeded co-operation between the United States and Canada. My reporting has emphasized Canadian enforcement challenges, not to be unduly critical of my homeland, but because I think we should focus first on the levers we control here in Canada and the reforms that we should have already tackled decades ago.
This isn't my opinion only. As you know, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police president Thomas Carrique recently warned the police are being asked to confront a new wave of lethal transnational threats with “outdated and inadequate” laws “never designed to address today's criminal landscape”. He added that Canada would have been far better positioned to “disrupt” organized crime had Ottawa acted on reforms first recommended in the early 2000s.
RCMP assistant commissioner David Teboul said this year, after the discovery of major fentanyl labs in British Columbia notable for their commercial-grade chemistry and scientific expertise, that there's a “need for legislative reform” around how such equipment and precursor chemicals can be obtained in Canada. More border regulations and technology could and will help, but they won't be sufficient absent foundational legal change.
It has long been my experience in discussions with senior U.S. enforcement experts that American and Australian police can collaborate effectively because the two nations are able to authorize wiretaps on dangerous and well-known transnational suspects in each of those countries within days, and in co-operative ways. In Canada, that speed is impossible. As former RCMP investigator Calvin Chrustie testified before British Columbia's Cullen commission several years ago, due to judicial blockages arising from Charter of Rights rulings, it had become practically impossible to obtain timely wiretaps on Sinaloa cartel targets residing in Vancouver.
In recent years, such delays in sensitive investigations have undermined co-operation between the RCMP and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in major cases of fentanyl trafficking and money laundering. In 2017, I was personally alerted to these long-standing concerns about the breakdown in RCMP-DEA co-operation by a U.S. State Department official, who reached out to me when I was in Vancouver.
These impeded investigations involve the upper echelons of Chinese triads, which maintain deep global leadership in Canada and are aligned with Chinese state interference networks, as well as senior Iranian- and Hezbollah-linked networks operating here in Canada. Both networks are engaged in fentanyl trafficking and money laundering in collaboration with Mexican cartels active in Canada.
My first recommendation is this: There is no low-hanging fruit. I have not spoken to a single knowledgeable Canadian officer, current or former, who believes that simply spending more on personnel, equipment, training or border staffing will solve this. What I hear is that, from 10 to 20 years ago, before the evolution of charter-driven disclosure and delay jurisprudence rulings in Canada, our nations enjoyed a much closer enforcement relationship.
Experts point above all to two Supreme Court rulings, Stinchcombe and Jordan, as the core legal obstacles. Very simply, our Stinchcombe disclosure standards and Jordan time restrictions—
