The RCMP-led Criminal Intelligence Service Canada is sounding the alarm about organized crime groups across the country seeking to infiltrate police databases and corrupt civil servants.
The warning from the police group appears in a late-January report. Last week, Ontario’s top police watchdog ordered a provincewide review of the integrity of police data, prompted by the arrests of seven serving Toronto Police officers who are accused of corruption-related criminal offences.
"Canadian organized criminals continue to make attempts to access information housed by public institutions, often through attempts to either gain employment within these agencies, or by corrupting or exploiting their relationships with individuals that are employed within," states the 2025 annual report.
The report says that high-level gangsters in Canada routinely and repeatedly attempt to snoop inside information systems – including police-held data systems that contain the names and addresses of people interacting with authorities. “Much of this information can be used to identify, locate, and otherwise harm individual Canadians should it be compromised,” the report says.
CISC’s director-general writes in the report that many crime schemes lead to lost lives. “Organized crime remains the pre-eminent threat to public safety, contributing to thousands of deaths annually from overdoses due to illicit drugs, notably fentanyl, and gang violence,” Ken Lamontagne says.
Mr. Lamontagne, who is also the RCMP’s director of strategic intelligence, could not be reached for comment on Monday.
CISC is an interagency group based in Ottawa that shares intelligence among scores of police and law-enforcement agencies. It considers hundreds of crime groups to be threats within Canada and says that their overall membership comprises thousands of people.
While the vast majority of these gangs and people do not attempt to infiltrate police databases or corrupt public servants, the groups that police call their “high-level threats,” or HLTs, very often do. “Seventy-five per cent of national HLTs have been involved to some degree in public sector infiltration attempts,” the report says.
Six of eight Canadian crime groups considered as “entrenched national-level HLTs” attempt such corruption, the report says. CISC does not identify the groups further, but says six of the eight groups are centred in Western Canada and two in Central Canada.
In early February, police in Ontario announced they had laid charges against 27 people, including seven Toronto officers. Known as Project South, the corruption probe began in mid-2025 after an alleged plot to kill an Ontario corrections officer.
Court documents allege that some police officers leaked information to organized crime figures in Toronto while accepting payoffs and protecting drug-trafficking networks.
“This is a deeply disappointing and sad day for policing,” York Regional Police Chief Jim MacSween said when he announced charges this month. He said the investigation “shows the insidious and corrosive nature of organized crime.”
The charges have not been proven in court. An Ontario police watchdog, Inspector-General Ryan Teschner, last week told reporters that he would appoint an independent official to report on the integrity of police data systems and recommend how police in the province can “prevent, detect, respond to and fortify their organizations against corruption.”
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The CISC report says gangsters in Canada are opportunists: Some try to infiltrate motor vehicle bureaus for information useful in auto theft rackets while others may seek to make moles out of jail guards, border officials or port security workers to better protect drug rackets.
While this is happening across Canada, the most harmful infiltrations are attempts “directly seeking employment within public sector positions that have decision making authority, or by corrupting those that are in similar positions,” the report says.
CISC says it is worrying that high-level crime figures are using proxies to try to tap into privileged police databases, which contain addresses and allegations the wider public is by law banned from seeing.
The data can reveal “what law enforcement may know about them,” the CISC report says. “Furthermore, the identification and location of rival group members may be used ... to exert targeted violence.”
Crime groups are also increasingly exploiting the private sector, according to the report, saying more than half of the criminal organizations assessed last year are linked to businesses that can help them move illegal goods, launder money and conceal criminal operations.
In its 2024 report released a year ago, CISC said more organized crime groups are producing fentanyl and other synthetic drugs within Canada and that some products are destined for export.
That report was later cited by U.S. President Donald Trump as a grounds for justifying tariffs. Police leaders have since clarified that fentanyl made by Canadian crime gangs is almost entirely consumed within Canada, and what little is left over almost never goes to the United States.
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Last month’s 2025 CISC report stresses there has been “limited movement” of fentanyl from Canada to the U.S.
Commercial trucking continues to be the main route through which drugs linked to Mexico enter Canada. The report says heightened security could push gangs to turn to rail.
“The merger of the Canadian Pacific Railway with Kansas City Southern to form the Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) created the first rail network to extend from Mexico to Canada, a route likely to be more heavily exploited in the near future.”
Patrick Waldron, a spokesperson for Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd., said the company works with North American law enforcement to prevent the illegal transport of controlled substances through its network.
