Former RCMP Agent Accused of Espionage to Be First Tried Under Security of Information Act

Cameron Ortis, who was a senior intelligence official at the RCMP, leaves the courthouse in Ottawa on October 22, 2019. The Canadian Press/Justin Tang

The upcoming trial of a former RCMP intelligence director general accused of leaking top-secret information will be the first time a Canadian appears in court on charges brought under the Security of Information Act (SOIA).

Cameron Jay Ortis, the former director general of the RCMP’s National Intelligence Coordination Centre, was arrested in September 2019 for allegedly revealing secrets to an unnamed recipient and planning to give additional classified information to an unspecified foreign entity or terrorist group.

Mr. Ortis was bound to secrecy and had access to top-secret information from Canada’s security agencies and its allies in the Five Eyes intelligence group—the United States, U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. He faces six criminal charges, including four under SOIA Section 14.

The charges allege that Mr. Ortis communicated special operational information to four individuals “intentionally and without authority.” He also faces two additional criminal charges of fraudulently accessing a computer service and committing a breach of trust.

Mr. Ortis will plead not guilty to all the charges and intends to testify in his own defence.

Currently, no further details are available on the case and testimony heard at the bail hearing is still under a publication ban. Mr. Ortis had been in custody since the revocation of his bail in November 2019 but was released on bail in December 2022.

In September 2022, the trial was delayed for a year after a new defence lawyer took on Mr. Ortis’s case. At the time, he had been represented by Ian Carter who was appointed as an Ontario Superior Court judge effective January 2022.

RCMP Security Vulnerabilities 

The trial is also likely to bring up the RCMP’s previous failures around potential security vulnerabilities. An RCMP review in June 2020 created in response to the arrest of Mr. Ortis found that security awareness training was not mandatory in the force. Generally, security restrictions were viewed as obstacles that needed to be circumvented in order to complete tasks, said the resulting report.

The report also found a lack of standards around the management of information technology assets, including portable storage devices. The reviewers said employees seemed reluctant to report security incidents because they were fearful of the consequences for themselves and their colleagues.

Following the report’s release, the RCMP said it had introduced mandatory security awareness training for employees, which was one of several changes prompted by the investigation of Mr. Ortis. Mounties also said they had made it easier to report security vulnerabilities, highlighted the internal profile of departmental security operations, and developed a program to reduce personnel leaks.

The first time a Canadian faced charges under the SOIA was in 2013 when Sub-Lt. Jeffrey Delisle, a Halifax naval officer who sold secrets to Russia, was given a 20-year prison sentence. His guilty plea of one count of breach of trust and two charges of passing information to a foreign entity that could harm Canada’s interests meant the case did not proceed to trial. He was granted full parole in 2019.

Mr. Delisle served on the security unit HMCS Trinity, an intelligence facility at the naval dockyard in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he spied on top-secret NATO information for four years. Mr. Delisle gave the information to the Russians in exchange for 23 payments totalling $71,817 over nearly five years.