MLI Senior Fellow and National Security Project Lead Alex Dalziel recently sat down with Calvin Chrustie, a retired RCMP officer with more than 30 years of experience in law enforcement. He is now a senior partner with the private security consultancy, Critical Risk Team. Chrustie discussed how transnational threats are affecting Canada and where reforms to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and other government intelligence and law enforcement agencies are needed to deal with these threats.
The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Dalziel: You’ve mentioned the need for a disruptive conversation around law enforcement in Canada in relation to how transnational threats need to be dealt with. When you say disruptive, what do you have in mind?
Chrustie: What I sense from the review of current literature out there, from experiencing it in the operational settings that I’ve worked in globally, is a disconnect between many of the solutions versus the complexities of the reality. The tendency has been to oversimplify – or to analyze in linear boxes – the different problems and issues, without looking holistically at the systemic challenges to countering many of the foreign threats to Canada.
We’ve done it in this box over here, in terms of electoral interference. We’ve done it in this one in terms of cartel influence in Canada. We’ve done this in terrorism. [But you need to] look at it holistically in terms of not only the threat activities, [but] the threat actors, looking at the threat vectors and the threat streams, and then look at things from a systems and structure perspective, in terms of how our government is set up to work.
What’s been missing so far has been accepting that we probably haven’t really defined the problem and the challenges. [We] have rushed to solutions before we’ve really understood the complexity of it. I think that’s why we’re in the situation that we’re in.
It requires a significant degree of humility to [ask], do all these leaders really understand what the problem is and why we’re having these macro issues of national security, transnational organized crime, and foreign threats in Canada?
That’s the disruptive conversation we need to have, because this is a wicked problem, not a simple, linear problem, and wicked problems need wicked analysis and wicked solutions.
What are some of the interconnections that we need to consider to break out of those boxes?
The way Canada is structured is not designed for these threats.
Let’s start with looking at the structure of the Canadian government. We have these separate silos. The military focuses on defensive issues abroad. CSIS collects intelligence that quite often can’t be used. Historically, it’s not designed to assist and support countering these threats. [It’s used] to report to government for policy and strategic purposes, not to actually come up with operationalizing them to mitigate the threat. That’s changed in the last couple of years. But we still have a long way to go, because we don’t have a foreign intelligence agency – another gap in the structure. Then you have the CBSA (the Canada Border Services Agency), in its own silo. There’s been a huge history of impediments in terms of sharing information between all these different agencies. You can add FINTRAC (the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada), you can add Global Affairs [Canada] – they have separate mandates. What I see and saw was ad hoc and random co-operation with Canadian entities. What I saw in the US – it’s more systemic in structures and strategies.
The threat actors don’t operate like that. China doesn’t operate like that. Russia doesn’t operate like that. Iran doesn’t operate like that. All their state agencies are interconnected, and somebody at the top says, “go north, go south, go west.”
Here, we have a whole bunch of fiefdoms going in different directions. In the absence of having some integrated structures – whether it’s governing entities or whether it’s having national strategies that clearly articulate the priorities for everybody – then these structures are going to be haphazard and ad hoc.
Our structures have to change and integrate, including having a shared strategy to work together, so that we work in the same direction.
There’s an old saying in the money laundering world: the movement of dirty money is going to be like water over pavement, and it’s going to find its way into the cracks. It’s the same with all these other foreign activities. Whether it’s espionage, transnational organized crime, or electoral interference, the threat actors and their activities are going to look for the cracks and the vulnerabilities.
Talking in terms of the context and globalization, Canada and its adversaries, and the interconnectivity of all these activities, I think that the threats are much more acute than most Canadians would probably accept. They seem to be escalating in intensity and seriousness. That includes moving from the realm of purely public safety threats and social harms to the acute public safety and national security realm.
A lot of threat activities are being weaponized by foreign states against us. We have to be thinking more like the threat actors and less like bureaucracies. The threat actors seem to be outflanking us. We’re focusing our strategic priorities on yesterday’s problems, rather than empowering the structures to respond more flexibly.
What challenges does the national police force face? What changes are needed?
In my own analysis, we’re probably 10 years overdue for a separate federal police agency. The environment’s changed, so the structures must change. The processes have to change to catch up to many things, and one is the sophistication of the threat actors.
We have a national police force, the RCMP, but I don’t know if we have a federal police force. I think what we’re missing is a federal police force that is strictly designed for it. They’ve tried to take the RCMP and make it more federally orientated, but what they have missed is the people factor. And the people factor in policing is hugely important. The onus on contract policing complicates this, as it is about sending officers out to do local, municipal policing, right down to handing out traffic violations. You want to develop professionals that have not only the right knowledge and the skills, but the right relationships in this global community. You can’t just walk in and build those relationships in a day or a week, and then go, “Hey, I’m going to go to municipal policing, and then I will come back in 10 years, and everybody’s going to remember me, right?”
What would such a federal police service do? What culture would it need?
Number one, it has to be global in nature and be part of Team Five Eyes [Editor: the intelligence network comprising Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand], Team NATO, working under that larger strategic security blanket. It’s not Team Canada, it’s a bigger global team. Canada needs to accept who are our friends, who are our allies, and work as a team to create operational structures, systems, and strategies: not info-sharing only, and definitely not limited to “NHQ-based liaison roles” in Ottawa, but central to threat-stream activity in what I like to call “convergence zones” of foreign actors, like LA, Sydney, Vancouver – to give a pan-Pacific example.
Number two is accepting the legal framework that we have. I’ve been very vocal about the need for legal reform. And others have said, well, that’s not probably going to change. Okay, fair enough. Then our structures need to change.
If we’re not going to be able to disrupt and protect Canadians on our own turf, then, look at how foreign entities do it. Australia was leading-edge in this. They created outreach disruption mechanisms by forward-deploying federal police officers around the world to try to protect Australia from foreign threats … before the threat actually hits their soil.
In Canada’s case, knowing that Los Angeles is a convergence zone for the [Mexican drug] cartels and all the other networks supplying a vast majority of the cocaine and drugs up into Canada, why wouldn’t we have 20, 30, 40 people there to stop the flow before it hits Canada’s streets? Why aren’t we doing the same in Colombia? Why aren’t we doing the same in all these different threat streams, where the threat actors and the movement of illicit goods and commodities move? Why aren’t we mapping out the threat streams and creating hubs of our federal police with our foreign partners and investing in a different model that is focused more on disruption, rather than using the old school metrics?
Within the legal field, the political field, the academic field, the media, everybody’s obsessed with the metrics of prosecution and conviction. I don’t know if that’s the reality of the current system. The metrics and the expectations of the public do not meet the “realities” or the systems and the level of support that’s provided to the police. Thus, the measure of success needs to be global disruptions, accepting that if you want the current ineffective legal framework to remain in place, prosecution can no longer be the ultimate level of success.
That’s why a new federal police force, working with the FBI [US Federal Bureau of Investigation], working with HSI [US Homeland Security Investigations], working with the Australians and all our global partners, coming up with common strategies and common priorities, will have a much better impact on the threat activities and provide Canadians a much safer environment to live in.
Any final thoughts?
If we don’t consider this an urgent, imminent requirement to shift, the next generations are going to be paying severe consequences in terms of their freedom, their safety, their security for decades to come. It would be tragic in light of the work that has been done by our forefathers.
