Canada’s New National Security Plan: Will Ottawa Confront the Real Threat?

By Garry Clement

OTTAWA — Canada has finally acknowledged that national security extends beyond military preparedness, border protection and diplomacy. But recognizing a threat and possessing the institutional courage to confront it are two different things.

The federal government’s newly released The Plan for a Stronger Canada: National Security for Canadians recognizes that hostile states, organized crime, cyber threats and financial exploitation threaten our sovereignty. After more than two decades without a new national security policy, that acknowledgment is welcome.

But why are we still proposing plans for threats that have been undermining this country for years?

Having spent more than five decades investigating organized crime, money laundering and the relationship between criminal networks and hostile state interests, I have repeatedly warned that some of Canada’s greatest vulnerabilities lie within our institutions, financial systems and political processes.

That is where this strategy must be judged.

Intelligence agencies, investigative commissions and police have identified these threats for years. Our failure has been translating that knowledge into coordinated investigations, prosecutions, asset seizures and institutional reform.

The document promises stronger intelligence capabilities, modernized enforcement tools and better coordination. Yet it repeatedly says the government “will produce a plan.” Canadians are entitled to ask when planning will give way to action.

One persistent weakness is our tendency to treat organized crime, foreign interference, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion and cybercrime as separate problems. Our adversaries exploit the connections.

Criminal enterprises use professional facilitators, underground banking, digital assets and legitimate businesses to move money, conceal ownership and acquire influence. Hostile states can exploit the same infrastructure.

Consider the links between drug trafficking, underground banking and trade-based money laundering. Channels that move criminal proceeds can also facilitate corruption, sanctions evasion and clandestine financial activity.

Not every criminal network serves a foreign government. But where crime intersects with state-directed influence or intelligence collection, investigators need the authority and expertise to pursue the whole enterprise. Isolated arrests will not dismantle the infrastructure sustaining it.

The strategy acknowledges these threats individually. What remains less apparent is how agencies will identify and dismantle the enterprises connecting them. An investigation must be able to follow the money, ownership and facilitators across jurisdictions without losing momentum at every institutional boundary.

The strategy’s recognition of economic sovereignty and strategic industrial capabilities is overdue. Payments, settlement and investment systems deserve protection, but that protection must include preventing their exploitation by illicit finance.

This requires treating illicit finance as a strategic threat. Money laundering supports the fentanyl trade, conceals criminal ownership, enables corruption and creates opportunities for foreign influence.

The strategy promises new RCMP capacity and a Financial Crimes Agency. Both could help, provided Ottawa addresses the barriers that have frustrated financial investigations.

FINTRAC, the RCMP, CSIS, border authorities, tax investigators, provincial police and securities regulators already hold important pieces of the intelligence picture. Criminal enterprises exploit the divisions between them, inconsistent ownership transparency and the difficulty of converting financial intelligence into courtroom evidence.

The Financial Action Task Force’s September 2026 evaluation offers a reality check. Despite improvements in Canada’s anti-money-laundering framework, it identified persistent challenges involving professional money laundering, supervision, beneficial ownership and asset recovery.

A new agency needs a clear mandate, specialist investigators and effective intelligence-sharing authorities. Its relationship with police, intelligence agencies and prosecutors must be settled from the outset. Otherwise, Ottawa risks adding another boundary to a system already burdened by too many.

Professional facilitators warrant particular attention. Networks depend on people who can move funds, obscure control and make criminal wealth appear legitimate. Investigations that leave those services intact allow the underlying enterprise to survive the loss of individual participants.

Measure its success by enterprises dismantled, assets recovered and facilitators prosecuted. Hiring analysts and opening investigations will mean little if the same networks continue operating.

Foreign interference also demands a broader response than protecting elections. Influence operations can involve political relationships, universities, commercial enterprises, strategic property acquisitions and intimidation of diaspora communities.

The Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department deserves scrutiny. But allegations involving Canadian individuals or organizations must rest on evidence, never assumptions based on ethnicity, religion or legitimate connections with China.

In Canada Under Siege: How Prince Edward Island Became a Forward Operating Base for the PRC, my co-authors and I examined concerns about foreign influence, land ownership, institutional relationships and government accountability. Those questions illustrate why national security cannot remain exclusively a federal responsibility.

Provincial regulators, municipalities and educational institutions may encounter suspicious activity without the intelligence or expertise to recognize its significance. Promising better coordination does not tell a municipal official where to report a concern, who will assess it or what happens next.

Canada needs clear reporting pathways, protected whistleblower mechanisms, transparent beneficial ownership and reliable coordination with provincial authorities. Legitimate investment and cultural activity must remain protected while credible evidence of concealed foreign-state interference receives serious investigation.

The same practical scrutiny must apply to federal policing. More resources will not, by themselves, repair institutional weaknesses.

Throughout my career, and in Undercover: 50 Years of Dirty Money, Organized Crime and the RCMP, I have argued that our policing structure must be assessed against the sophistication of its adversaries.

Complex investigations require financial expertise, technological capabilities, international partnerships and continuity of leadership. They also require an organizational culture that rewards initiative, professional judgment and results.

Canada should independently examine whether its federal policing model remains fit for purpose, including whether a dedicated federal investigative service would better sustain expertise in national security and organized crime. Before creating institutions, we must understand why existing ones have struggled.

That review should examine the RCMP’s federal mandate, organizational structure and operational effectiveness. The question is whether investigators can build and sustain complex cases, with consistent leadership and access to the expertise their targets already employ.

That examination must account for threats operating below the threshold of armed conflict. Cyber intrusion, economic coercion, espionage, corruption and covert influence can weaken sovereignty without a foreign soldier crossing our border.

A hostile state may seek to influence political decisions, acquire sensitive technology or intimidate people living here. When criminal facilitators and illicit money support those objectives, police and intelligence agencies need a common understanding of the threat and a coordinated response.

The strategy discusses hybrid warfare principally through defence, cyber operations and military preparedness. Its domestic dimensions deserve equal attention. Strategic supply chains, local institutions and commercial relationships can become points of vulnerability long before a threat looks like a conventional security crisis.

The strategy’s promises of a national security review, legislative modernization proposals within its first year and updated strategies every four years offer a starting point. Canadians should not have to wait four years to learn whether implementation is working.

Ministers and agency leaders need explicit responsibilities, deadlines and measurable objectives. Independent evaluation should test whether Canada is improving its ability to detect interference, prosecute complex laundering, recover assets and disrupt criminal networks.

The government should also report on how it is addressing deficiencies identified by the Hogue Commission, FATF and other reviews. Some operational details must remain classified. Secrecy cannot excuse a failure to demonstrate progress.

Public reporting must distinguish increased activity from improved security. Canadians need to know which weaknesses have been corrected, which remain unresolved and who is responsible for addressing them. Otherwise, successive reviews risk documenting the same failures.

Ottawa’s immediate task is to connect intelligence and financial investigations around shared targets, strengthen ownership transparency, pursue professional facilitators and give local authorities a workable route into the national security system. Federal policing reform and independent oversight must support that work.

These changes will challenge institutional interests. That is precisely why they require political leadership.

Will Ottawa pursue sophisticated criminal enterprises regardless of their political, commercial or international connections? Will it confront credible foreign interference while protecting the freedoms that define Canadian democracy?

After fifty years of watching criminal organizations adapt faster than the institutions mandated to stop them, I have learned that our adversaries do not wait for governments to finish their next strategy.

Canada has capable investigators, intelligence professionals and financial crime specialists. Too often, they have lacked the political backing and institutional arrangements needed to work together effectively.

The new plan offers an opportunity to change that. Its value will depend on whether Ottawa gives those people the authority, expertise and sustained support to follow evidence wherever it leads.

Our sovereignty will be secured by what the government is finally prepared to confront.

Garry W.G. Clement, CAMS, CFCS, CFE, is a former senior RCMP officer and anti-money-laundering consultant. He contributed to the Canadian academic text Dirty Money, co-authored Canada Under Siege, and is the author of Undercover.