Canada’s Charter Must Protect the Innocent—Not Narco Cartels

Former Mountie argues Canada’s outdated justice system has let sophisticated criminal networks weaponize disclosure burdens—leaving public at mercy of networks like Sinaloa Cartel/Ryan Wedding.

By Garry Clement

OTTAWA — Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is one of the country’s proudest achievements. It enshrines fairness, transparency, and protection from state overreach—values that define our national identity. Yet four decades after its adoption, a fundamental question remains largely unexamined: notwithstanding the Charter’s essential protections for the accused, does the state not also have an obligation to protect its citizens and ensure that victims receive fairness and justice?

Years of examining Canada’s exposure to foreign influence, organized crime, and illicit finance—work that has underscored how transnational criminal organizations exploit institutional weakness—make one conclusion unavoidable: if Canada is serious about a robust justice system, structural change is needed now. Modernizing our courts is as urgent as reforming the Royal Canadian Mounted Police itself, because without an efficient federal investigative body and a justice system capable of processing complexity, constitutional ideals risk becoming a liability rather than a safeguard.

Two Supreme Court decisions—R. v. Stinchcombe and R. v. Jordan—illustrate how well-intentioned Charter rights have collided with the realities of 21st-century crime. The result is a justice system increasingly unable to prosecute the very actors who pose the greatest threat to public safety, while offering little meaningful constitutional consideration to the interests of victims or the public at large.

When the Supreme Court released Stinchcombe in 1991, it was rightly celebrated as a victory for fairness. The Crown’s obligation to disclose all relevant information to the defence was rooted in the Charter’s guarantee of full answer and defence. At the time, disclosure meant banker’s boxes of paper.

Today, it means terabytes of data: encrypted phone extractions, cloud storage, international banking records, social-media archives, digital surveillance, and wiretaps. A single organized-crime investigation can now generate more information than entire prosecutorial offices handled in the pre-digital era.

The principle remains sound. The practical reality is crushing.

Transnational criminal organizations understand this intimately. They deliberately design their operations to generate volume and complexity—multiple devices, layered communications, shell companies, offshore accounts, and encrypted platforms—knowing that every byte becomes a disclosure obligation. Defence teams, often backed by immense financial resources, then challenge the organization, timing, or completeness of disclosure, turning a constitutional safeguard into a procedural weapon.

The Charter did not create this imbalance. Canada’s failure to modernize its justice system did.

A Constitutional Clock That Favors Complexity

If Stinchcombe created the burden, Jordan created the deadline.

In 2016, the Supreme Court imposed strict ceilings on the time between charge and trial—18 months in provincial court and 30 months in superior court—under the Charter’s protection against unreasonable delay. The objective was laudable: force governments to confront chronic delay and restore confidence in the justice system.

But Jordan did not meaningfully distinguish between a simple assault and a multi-year, multinational conspiracy. The same constitutional clock applies to both.

Predictably, the cases most likely to collapse under Jordan are the most complex: homicide prosecutions involving multiple accused, large-scale drug-trafficking conspiracies built on wiretaps and undercover operations, sexual-assault cases with extensive digital evidence, and financial-crime prosecutions spanning jurisdictions and continents.

The consequences are no longer theoretical. Canadian courts have stayed proceedings in murder cases, including gang-related homicides. Major drug-trafficking prosecutions, some involving international supply chains and millions of dollars, have been terminated despite substantial evidence. Serious sexual-assault cases, including those involving vulnerable complainants, have been dismissed before a jury ever heard the facts.

These cases were not lost because the evidence was weak. They were lost because the system could not process complexity within constitutionally imposed timelines.

When that happens, the harm does not end with the accused’s release. It is transferred—to victims, to families, and to the public. A justice system that repeatedly collapses under its own procedural weight does not merely fail administratively; it fails in its most basic obligation to protect.

Canada now offers a combination of features that sophisticated criminal organizations find uniquely advantageous:

• Predictable procedural pressure points: expansive disclosure obligations paired with rigid delay ceilings.

• A reduced likelihood of successful prosecution in cases involving encrypted communications, international evidence, or complex financial tracing.

• Severe resource asymmetry: the Crown cannot match the legal firepower of well-funded criminal enterprises.

• A growing reputation for softness: law-enforcement leaders and investigative journalists have repeatedly warned that Canada is viewed internationally as a low-risk jurisdiction for complex crime.

None of this is the Charter’s fault. The Charter raised the bar. Canada simply never built the infrastructure to meet it.

Canada’s justice architecture remains anchored in a pre-digital era. Courts lack the technological capacity to manage massive disclosure efficiently. International evidence moves at the speed of diplomacy, not crime. Digital-forensics units are under-resourced. Crown offices are chronically stretched. And Canada has no specialized courts designed to manage the scale and complexity of modern organized-crime prosecutions.

The Charter demands fairness. But fairness without capacity becomes fragility.

A system that rigorously protects the rights of the accused while routinely failing victims and the public has created an imbalance that neither courts nor legislators have been willing to confront.

If Canada intends to remain a rule-of-law nation rather than a procedural safe haven for global crime, it must act decisively:

• Create specialized organized-crime courts with judges and counsel trained for complexity.

• Modernize disclosure through secure digital platforms, AI-assisted triage, and standardized formats.

• Accelerate international evidence collection through dedicated cross-border prosecution teams.

• Invest heavily in digital forensics and Crown capacity to match the sophistication of transnational criminal organizations.

• Revisit Jordan ceilings for mega-cases, not to weaken rights, but to recognize that complexity cannot be compressed into timelines designed for simple offences.

The Charter remains one of Canada’s greatest achievements. But its interpretation has outpaced the system’s ability to deliver justice in an era of globalized crime. A Charter that protects individuals from the state while leaving the state unable to protect the public is not a failure of rights—it is a failure of governance.

Unless Canada modernizes its justice infrastructure, it will continue to offer transnational criminal organizations something they find irresistible: rights without readiness, protections without capacity, and a justice system that collapses under the weight of its own ideals.

Garry Clement is the author of Undercover, which he has revisited and expanded in a second edition retitled 50 Years of Dirty Money, Organized Crime and the RCMP. He also assisted in the writing of Canada Under Siege: How PEI Became a Forward Operating Base for the PRC.