Former RCMP Officer Exposes Canada’s Crime and China Crisis | Blendr Report EP150
Garry Clement explains how Canada became a safe haven for organized crime, money laundering, and foreign influence.
*Paid subscribers can find the extended, ad-free version of the episode at the bottom of this article.*
A former senior RCMP officer, Garry Clement, joined The Blendr Report to discuss how Canada became a global hotspot for organized crime, money laundering, and foreign interference. What he outlines is not a story of isolated failures but a nation in disarray.
Clement’s career spans decades on the front lines, including undercover narcotics work, major organized crime investigations, and senior roles targeting financial crime. That perspective matters. He watched, firsthand, as criminal networks became transnational, technologically sophisticated, and deeply embedded in financial systems, while Canada’s enforcement, prosecution, and political leadership failed to keep pace.
One of the core themes of our conversation is how Canada’s legal framework—particularly Charter jurisprudence and court rulings like Jordan and Stinchcombe—has unintentionally crippled the state’s ability to prosecute complex cases. Disclosure requirements designed for simpler crimes now overwhelm investigations involving thousands of documents, shell companies, offshore accounts, and international actors. The result is collapsing cases, stayed charges, and criminals quickly learning that Canada offers extraordinarily low risk compared to jurisdictions like the United States.
That legal weakness helps explain why organized crime has exploded. Canada went from an estimated 800 organized crime groups in 2011 to roughly 4,000 today. These groups are no longer siloed by ethnicity or geography. They cooperate. They specialize. And they exploit Canada’s open economy, weak enforcement, and permissive financial environment. Money laundering alone is now estimated—by the federal government’s own figures—to potentially exceed $100 billion, placing it among Canada’s largest “industries.”
Garry also exposes foreign state involvement, particularly the role of the Chinese Communist Party. Clement draws on his time as RCMP liaison in Hong Kong and his involvement in intelligence reporting that fed into the now-infamous Sidewinder report. That report warned, decades ago, that Canada’s immigration, investment, and trade policies were being exploited by organized crime networks tied to foreign state interests. Rather than confront those warnings publicly, political leadership buried them.
What makes this issue more dangerous than conventional crime is the overlap between criminal networks and state power. Clement describes how money laundering, drug trafficking, political influence operations, and kompromat tactics function together. Organized crime provides muscle, logistics, and deniability; the state provides protection, leverage, and strategic direction. Canada, in his view, has been especially vulnerable because it lacks both a serious foreign agent registry and meaningful whistleblower protections.
These failures were laid bare again during the Cullen Commission, which examined money laundering in British Columbia. While the commission confirmed the scale of the problem, Clement argues it was structurally limited from the start. Key issues fell outside provincial jurisdiction, federal authorities declined to participate meaningfully, and some of the commission’s procedural decisions undermined witness confidence. The result was exposure without accountability.
The most troubling takeaway from this episode is not that corruption exists—every country deals with that—but that Canada seems unwilling to treat it as a national security issue. Clement warns that this passivity carries real consequences: weakened Five Eyes intelligence relationships, deteriorating trust with allies, and growing influence by hostile foreign actors inside Canadian political and economic life.
Clement is blunt that Canada still has the talent, knowledge, and institutional memory to respond—but only if political leadership is willing to confront uncomfortable truths and rebuild enforcement capacity at the federal level.
For paid subscribers, the conversation goes deeper into proposed reforms to the RCMP, the case for a dedicated federal enforcement body, and how land acquisitions and financial flows are being used to entrench long-term influence in Canada.
If you want to understand how Canada reached this point—and what the costs of continued denial may be—our interview with Garry Clement is a must listen.
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