Police need better communication and training to shut down meth and fentanyl superlabs, experts say

Globe and Mail

21-05-2025

Canada needs to improve its policing of illicit methamphetamine and fentanyl labs by creating better communication between its various law-enforcement agencies and correcting the way RCMP officers are trained in evidence gathering, according to critics on both sides of the United States border.
A recent Globe and Mail investigation explored why only one man had been charged after separate raids of a stash house and then, three weeks later, a so-called 'superlab' drug production facility in southeastern British Columbia last fall. The Globe has been examining the toxic drug crisis and the impact it has had on the country as part of its Poisoned series on what law enforcement can – or can't – do about the flow of fentanyl and even more dangerous derivatives.
Mounties have complained they are hamstrung by Canadian legal precedents guiding evidence disclosure while critics have noted officers work in siloes or even at cross-purposes with investigators in other units of the federal force, or other police agencies. And, one legal expert contends, the RCMP could do better on these high-profile cases by updating the ways it gathers and documents evidence.
Ray Donovan, a former chief of operations with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said Canada could improve information sharing by setting up a national targeting centre.
A targeting centre, Mr. Donovan said, would be a central agency for criminal investigators from across Canada to co-ordinate intelligence and evidence to identify transnational organized crime networks and ensure different agencies aren't working at odds with one another.
'Sometimes it's very provincial in Canada: one province doesn't really work with another,' he said. 'But these [criminal] groups don't care.'
Camille Boily-Lavoie, a spokesperson at RCMP headquarters, said the force is open to considering new tools and strategies among its domestic and international partners to better detect and disrupt criminal activity.
She pointed to then-prime minister Justin Trudeau's investment earlier this year in a new border security plan that included the creation of a Joint Operational Intelligence Cell, which the government said would 'better leverage information sharing to target transnational organized crime, money laundering, drug trafficking and improve border security.'
Christian Leuprecht, a law professor at the Royal Military College and Queen's University, agreed with Mr. Donovan that a national targeting centre would help law-enforcement agencies across Canada confront the complex threat posed by transnational crime networks such as Mexican cartels.
He said a similar centre already exists in Canada, but it only deals with national-security intelligence and is housed within CSIS headquarters.
This Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre, he said, collects intelligence to build a shared vision of the biggest priorities, then briefs the federal government and passes on information to the RCMP's Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams, which are spread out across the country's largest cities.
Without a similar centre for crime, Dr. Leuprecht said, information is siloed between agencies and U.S. law enforcement is often at a loss as to how best to share intelligence on organized crime.
'Half the time the complaint from the Americans is, 'Okay, we have an issue, who do we call?' ' he said. ''Do we call the Mounties, do we call the CBSA, do we call FinTrac [the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada]?'
Once the RCMP gains the intelligence and evidence to pursue criminal charges against these sophisticated organized crime networks, Mounties then face major hurdles from two landmark judgments by the Supreme Court of Canada, The Globe was told by Corporal Arash Seyed, a spokesperson for the federal unit that raided the superlab last fall.
These rulings force investigators to share nearly all their evidence – and swiftly – after the first person is charged, in the process often tipping off accomplices to what officers know about their wider operation and how they know it.
Since the 1991 R. v. Stinchcombe decision, Crown prosecutors have been required to disclose all evidence relating to the charges in their criminal cases. This disclosure requirement was complicated in 2016 when the R. v. Jordan ruling imposed standardized deadlines on criminal proceedings to enshrine people's Charter right 'to be tried within a reasonable time.'
Emma Cunliffe, a law professor at the University of British Columbia who also served as the director of research and policy for the public inquiry into the 2020 Nova Scotia mass shooting, acknowledged the RCMP are handling increasingly vast and complex quantities of digital information. One confiscated cellphone may hold hundreds of gigabytes of evidence relevant to a case once all its text messages, photographs and other files are downloaded.
But the Mounties often do an uneven job of cataloguing and managing large volumes of digital evidence, Dr. Cunliffe said.
She argues the inquiry clearly found the RCMP does not have good information management systems and does not train its front-line staff well enough, which in turn leads to the delays and complications in disclosure of evidence that have cratered some high-profile cases before they got to trial.
'To those people who say, 'Jordan and Stinchcombe is creating the problem,' honestly, my answer would be: 'it's the RCMP's failure to resource this properly, to focus on investing in information systems that will help them manage evidence and focus on training their people to do this work well,' ' she said.
Dr. Cunliffe said the inquiry, which uncovered a series of RCMP failures that led to Canada's deadliest civilian mass shooting, obtained internal documents from the force showing too few hours were devoted to good notetaking, evidence gathering and documentation during the basic training given to new recruits at its national academy in Saskatchewan.
And, she noted, new graduates only get these standards reinforced if their supervisors at their first postings make exercising these policing skills a priority, which is as likely to be the case as not. (The RCMP did not respond to her particular criticism late last week.)
'We found there's too little emphasis on it in basic training and too little time given to it in detachments,' Dr. Cunliffe said.