A former RCMP officer warns that only urgent restructuring of Canada’s security framework can halt the country’s accelerating decay.

By Garry Clement | The Bureau

From my earliest days in the RCMP through years embedded with global financial intelligence units, one reality has remained consistent—and it’s now accelerating: Canada is a soft target. – Former senior RCMP officer Garry Clement consults with corporations on anti-money laundering, contributed to the Canadian academic text Dirty Money, and wrote Undercover, In the Shady World of Organized Crime and the RCMP.

In Brief by Probe International

Canada’s vulnerability as a soft target for organized crime—from Triad-linked money laundering in real estate to narco-empires—has evolved into an existential crisis as transnational gangs merge with hostile states such as China, whose United Front Work Department (UFWD) co-opts criminal networks into hybrid warfare tools, exposing systemic failure to counter 21st-century threats.

Former senior RCMP officer, Gerry Clement, explores these vulnerabilities in his latest report for The Bureau news channel. According to Canada’s security watchdog (CSIS), the country is now host to 668 organized crime groups—including fentanyl “superlabs” and money laundering operations (estimated at $45–113 billion annually) via real estate, casinos, banks, and crypto. These factors in combination with systemic failures (underfunded RCMP, stalled reforms, reactive cyber units) allow gangs to weaponize crime geopolitically, destabilizing communities and economic integrity amid bureaucratic inertia, argues Clement.

Canada, he notes, also faces an “invisible siege” of foreign interference led by China—targeting elections, universities, and diaspora through coercion and institutional infiltration—alongside Russian cyber ops and Iranian proxies. CSIS and the Hogue Inquiry have confirmed that espionage threats exploit systemic vulnerabilities despite measures like Bill C-70 (the Countering Foreign Interference Act), which lag behind evolving hybrid warfare tactics.

Amid fiscal constraints, writes Clement, Canada risks surrendering sovereignty by underfunding security, including urgent investments in cyber units, a national anti-money laundering agency, and Five Eyes collaboration, which Clement argues is critical to counter hybrid threats. His other recommendations include empowering CSIS and FINTRAC (the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada) with prosecutorial pathways and treating foreign interference as a national security emergency rather than a “partisan hot potato.”

Read the original version of this commentary at the publisher’s website here.