Bill C-29, introduced by the Carney government in April 2026, could improve Canada’s oft-criticized approach to economic crime because it recognizes the need for a specialized workforce assisted by prosecutors to conduct strategic prosecutions with national and transnational implications.
If poorly implemented, however, the bill could further fragment Canada’s decentralized approach to policing. It could create yet another agency that will compete with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and be frustrated in moving from secret intelligence to public evidence that can be used in prosecutions.
In my new book, Red Alert: The Future of the RCMP, I argue that Canada needs more than a stand-alone Financial Crimes Agency. Instead, it needs something more like the United Kingdom’s multi-agency National Crime Agency, which also has customs and immigration powers. A larger, multidisciplinary and multi-agency body may be better at recruiting, retaining and educating highly specialized workers than the RCMP. The proposed Financial Crimes Agency may have similar advantages over the RCMP. Nevertheless, its focus on financial crime may not be ambitious enough.
A much larger agency would be better, in part, because the future of policing will increasingly require much more specialized and multidisciplinary workforces. This is especially true in federal policing, which is challenged by the blurring of national security, foreign interference, and organized and financial crime threats, as well as by rapidly changing technology such as cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.
Intelligence-to-Evidence Problems
Additionally, a larger agency would be a means to deal with Canada’s chronic intelligence-to-evidence problems. The Foreign Interference Commission warned in 2025 that these problems, which started in 1984 with the creation of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) as a civilian intelligence agency separate from the RCMP, were still not fixed even though they were pointed out by the Air India Commission in 2010.
Canada’s financial intelligence-to-evidence problems are less well known than its long-standing national security intelligence-to-evidence problems, but they should not be ignored. Bill C-29 stops short of including Canada’s financial intelligence body, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), within the new Financial Crimes Agency. FINTRAC is better at collecting millions of reports from the private sector than producing actionable intelligence for prosecutions. FINTRAC may be improving, but its most recent annual report reveals that in its best year, it still processed fewer than 3,000 disclosures. Most of these are related to fraud, and most were forwarded to the RCMP, compared to the more than 600,000 reports about suspicious transactions it received from the private sector.
The long-standing national security intelligence-to-evidence problems have recently resurfaced. The RCMP has backed away from 2024 claims that it and then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made about Indian government involvement in the murder of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar. That retreat may represent Canada’s chronic intelligence-to-evidence problems and not simply attempts by the Carney government to develop better economic ties with the world’s most populous country. One clue is recent comments by the RCMP that there is no “evidence” of involvement by the Government of India.
Admittedly, one big agency would not remove the conflicting goals of secrecy that may be necessary to obtain more intelligence and disclosure to achieve the transparent victories of prosecutions. It would, however, ensure that these interests are resolved under one roof on a case-by-case basis instead of being separated across different agencies, each focused on discharging their own separate statutory mandates as opposed to the overall goal of improving Canadian security.
At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that one big agency with a mandate ranging from national security to financial crime would raise concerns about privacy and oversight, and would inevitably require more resources for review bodies such as the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency.
The High Policing Mandate of the New Financial Crimes Agency
The mandate of the new agency proposed in Bill C-29 will be financial crime, including “laundering, trafficking or possession of proceeds of crime,” or crime that adversely affects the security or integrity of Canada’s financial system or markets.
One key to the agency’s success will be whether it successfully, as required by section 17 of the bill, develops criteria to better define its vague statutory mandate and focus its efforts strategically on “serious and complex financial crimes.” At the same time, its attempts to prevent and discover money laundering and terrorist financing should not duplicate or compete with provincial securities commissions or the enforcement of the many offences relating to failure to comply with Canada’s complex and onerous laws on reporting to FINTRAC.
The essence of specialized federal “high” policing should be to use limited enforcement resources strategically and avoid the low-hanging fruit. The useful concept of high policing — brought into the literature by the late Jean-Paul Brodeur, eminent Canadian criminologist — has its origins in France’s ancien regime, where the object was to punish only rarely but usefully.
In essence, Canadian law enforcement needs to be more strategic and focus on the most impactful crimes to prosecute leaders as opposed to soldiers in organized and financial crime.
A Potentially Fraught Relationship
The new Financial Crimes Agency, like FINTRAC, will report to the minister of finance. Its head, like the RCMP commissioner, will be a peace officer and a deputy head. The relation between the RCMP and the new agency will be critical — and hopefully good. Alas, it could also be competitive and fraught.
Section 15 of Bill C-29 contemplates that the head of the new agency and the RCMP commissioner, with the approval of the minister of public safety, “must enter into an arrangement for the use of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or any portion of it, with respect to the provision of services and assistance to the Agency,” with the loaned Mounties remaining in the employ of the RCMP. It is not difficult to imagine some challenges in making and administering such agreements. The RCMP officers, for example, will be represented by a different union than investigators and others employed by the new Financial Crimes Agency. It is also not clear how they relate to the Carney government’s commitment to increase funding for RCMP federal policing even while drastically cutting all other non-military spending.
Bill C-29 contemplates that the employees of the new agency may form a union, but the bill also gives the new agency’s leader powers to hire, fire, classify and pay employees, the last of which is to be done in “consultation” with the president of the Treasury Board. These are broader management powers than those of the RCMP commissioner. However, they are necessary if the agency is to be nimble and attract and retain a specialized labour force, many of whom may have options to use their skills in the private sector. It is unclear whether the new agency, like CSIS and the Canadian Securities Exchange, will have its own employer status, but this would be valuable in recruiting and retaining employees with specialized and in-demand skills. The RCMP’s management advisory board has recommended that federal policing within the RCMP requires its own employee status, given competition for employees with specialized skills ranging from forensic accounting to cryptocurrency to security and financial intelligence.
Bill C-29 will also allow the agency’s head to designate employees as either peace officers or enforcement officers. These can be valuable powers, but the peace officer designation will also require regulations with the agreement of the minister of public safety. This, like the contemplated agreement to loan Mounties to the new agency, might result in cooperation but could just as easily result in friction.
The stakes of federal policing have always been high, but they are particularly high now given our present troubled economic prospects and relations with the United States. The RCMP, which is dominated by the demands of local or low contract policing, has struggled with specialized high policing, and Bill C-29 recognizes this by creating a new and specialized agency.
Bill C-29 is a start, but only a small start, in modernizing federal policing as it responds to steeply increasing challenges in very difficult financial and political times. Hopefully, it will improve the investigation of financial crimes. If so, this bill should build confidence and provide a precedent for even more ambitious reforms, such as the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, that may still be required in the future. But if the new agency ends up fighting the RCMP and other agencies over an unclear mandate, it could make a much-criticized system worse.
